Perhaps the idea is long overdue. Manufacturers and retailers of luxury goods have been finding it increasingly difficult to reach potential customers due to the decline of print media, such as newspapers and magazines. Enter Private Shoppes, LLC, a Birmingham-based direct marketing firm. They have developed the first-ever catalog and online direct marketing site exclusively targeting customers of private jet charters.
Business executives, world-class athletes, Hollywood celebrities, foreign dignitaries, and the like are the intended audience for this customized catalog and associated website. With departments like Premium Cigars, Upscale Gift Baskets, Luxury Health and Wellness, and Designer Luggage, Private Shoppes is clearly designed to appeal to the upscale private jet charter customer.
The catalog hopes to reach some of the most affluent – and most elusive – consumers on the planet. Although information about the company is limited, and we have no word yet on when the catalog will actually appear on private jet charter flights, in general aviation airports, or fixed base operators, its website claims to have “the only luxury e-commerce site and in-flight catalog developed for the corporate and general aviation flyer.”
The result of a joint collaboration between David Bannister, former publisher of Stratos Magazine and Deedee Morrison, founder of the now-defunct Private Air Magazine, the new direct marketing tool is likely to hit its mark. With so many years of experience publishing magazines to the same target audience, Morrison and Bannister should have no trouble getting their catalog in front of the elite consumers they’re after.
“Our ultimate goal at Private Shoppes, after all, is to free up the time that you would ordinarily spend bouncing from store to website so you can spend more of it with friends and loved-ones exploring the passions that make the private flying lifestyle so worthwhile,” the company website announces.
Private Shoppes professes to have compiled for its readers their “own little Amazon, with wings.”
While the idea is that jet-setters and corporate VIPs need online and catalog shopping venues for added convenience, the jury’s still out on whether the venture will be successful or not. After all, we’re talking about people with nearly unlimited resources, plenty of staff and assistants, not to mention personal shoppers, any of whom could probably take care of the boss’s vital shopping needs. Outside of the most tedious of shopping errands, most affluent consumers would most likely be prone to do their shopping in person rather than online or by mail-order catalog.
