Dive Brief:

• British fashion house Burberry is shaking things up in fashion, combining its mens and women’s fashion shows and making them shoppable online and in stores immediately after those shows. The company plans the shake-up for its fall shows in September.

• The move is a departure from high fashion tradition, which keeps the catwalk and mass orders separate in most cases.

• Burberry creative and chief executive officer Christopher Bailey, who replaced Angela Ahrendts upon her departure to Apple, also recently consolidated the retailer’s various fashion lines—Burberry Prorsum, Burberry Brit, and Burberry London—under one label, another move he called a “huge change.”

Dive Insight:

Upscale brands have not waded much into e-commerce, but more are doing so as their customers have demanded it—and that poses some logistical challenges peculiar to that space, according to a report last year from consulting firm McKinsey & Co. 

Web sales have grown from 2% of overall luxury sales in 2009 to 6% in 2014, and could make up to 18% of luxury sales by 2025, according to the report. 

Luxury retailers are behind in technology and have security concerns when it comes to shipping because of the high-dollar value of their goods. They also often have much less inventory of any one release, and that small amount are often eventually scattered at stores or warehouses worldwide. 

While high fashion retailers have largely avoided making much of a segue from their catwalk shows to commerce, that appears to be changing, with this move by Burberry in the forefront.

Designer Thakoon’s company announced in December that it also will employ a “show-and-sell model,” reports Bloomberg, and other upscale brands have also experimented with it, though with smaller collections.