Louis Vuitton hires former Apple executive as digital director

LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, a French luxury fashion conglomerate was reported to have hired a new chief digital officer from Apple, reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The new staff is Ian Rogers, founder of Apple's online radio and has been working with Apple for few years. Among his duty at Apple is to help with the development of Beats 1, Apple's online radio station which can be access in 100 countries. His task there includes recruiting and preparing the content for the radio station.

The computer science graduate from Indiana had an impressive portfolio under his name. He joined Apple in 2013 after Apple decided to change their music business after the acquisition of Beats by Dr. Dre.

He also had worked with many big companies before that which includes Yahoo inc. and even work as the CEO for Topspin Media. In both companies, Rogers works within the music scope and he is known for creating a great business model to help the company with their online album sale.

LVMH's chairman and chief executive, Bernard Arnault said the hiring was done as a strategy for LVMH to move into online business. According to him, Rogers will "build on the foundation laid by Thomas Romieu, takes the Houses to the next level and explore new opportunities for the group digital sphere".

Online sale is the latest frenzy in luxury fashion as most fashion company is losing 5 percent in offline sale every year but an increase in online sale of up to 30 percent annually Reuters said.

A report by Bain & Co. said that right now there are only 60 percent of luxury brand that are selling their product online. Besides LVMH, L'Oreal had also hired Lubomira Rochet from the company's cosmetics executive committee to become their Chief Digital Officer.  

Previously, Apple has been recruiting lots of their executive from the fashion industry as they are planning to increase their online presence and strengthening their fashion brand during the production of Apple Watch. Among them are executive from Yves Saint Lauren, Burberry, and Tag Heuer. 

The move is considered as a retaliation move by some people after the company have been losing their executive to Apple for the past years. The news has been confirmed by Apple and that last week was Rogers last week in Apple and the company do not have any replacement for him just yet as told by AppleInsider.

Ian Rogers will be the company head of digital product and will start working in October.