11 Tech Gurus Changing The Luxury Game

What's luxury to you? Is it a couture Chanel gown? A shiny car with a roaring engine? Perhaps, it's a night of organic wine, artisanal pizza, and a bottomless well of on-demand British sitcoms. However specific you want to get, we always define luxury as exquisite, effortless, and tailored to you. But a decade or so ago, few of those qualities applied to the online experience — it was clunky, complicated, cluttered, and about as personalized as an insurance form.

Now, though, the best e-commerce sites are graceful, digital boutiques, with beautiful photography, custom-curated shopping lists, and style direction from esteemed print editors. The finer vacation booking platforms look like glossy travel magazines, and your favorite fashion blogs are seamlessly shoppable (hi, there). Even the very nature of a photography is changing to match this new landscape (more on that later). What we have now is an inspiring, pixelated marketplace that's not only transformed how we shop, but the very DNA of the storied luxury brands within it, as well.

What happened? Well, a clutch of driven, digital architects saw and capitalized on opportunities that even some of the top technologists and Fortune 500 companies didn't. They looked at the online packaging, marketing, and selling of luxury and saw how it could be as custom-tailored as any couture product. Programmers, artists, entrepreneurs, and editors, these are the people logged on and changing the game.