Emperia’s CEO on changing the way we experience luxury online

Olga’s brand of leadership is unabashed and certainly shy of any limiting disbeliefs. “I genuinely believe women can do what they want to do,” she says. “I’ve been fortunate enough to have never felt that, because I’m a woman, I can’t do something. Physically it’s different, yes. But mentally, it’s the same. That’s my approach to it. If you’re a great leader, you’re a great leader.”

Her parents, both artists, are in advertising and property development. She speaks of her father’s dream of building a successful business so that he could eventually retire and paint, and her mother who runs a property agency developing luxury houses outside of Moscow. “When my mum was my age, she wanted to be a housewife,” tells Olga. “Then, a little while after she had me, she got bored, went to work, and ended up starting her company. She never set out to run a business, but she had no issues with making it happen.” It makes sense that her outlook on leadership has known no barriers relating to gender; she never saw any.

She learnt very early on, from working at her dad’s printing company as a teenager, that she would be much more fulfilled by designing her own vision as opposed to following someone else’s. “As with other jobs I had when I was younger, I would see things I wanted to change and do better, but I wouldn’t be heard,” she recalls. After studying fashion management at university and working in the fashion industry in wholesale and retail, she became almost unfazed by it. “Shopping gets boring,” she says. She foresaw the e-commerce shift and decided to pursue it.

“I worked on a project with Microsoft in 2017 where I tried on a VR headset for the first time. It was fairly basic; lots of cables, very heavy, not the most enjoyable experience. But I thought, ‘Wow, this is going to change everything. This is going to change the way we shop’. You can take this beautiful, luxurious experience that you’d usually only have in store and bring it home, without having to go through the crowds of Oxford Street – let alone the hassle of a pandemic.”

With little to no technical skills, she posted a job ad, not knowing entirely who, or what, she was looking to hire, and met her now co-founder and CTO, Simonas. She jests not being able to guide him due to her lack of technical skills and recalls months of “not eating or sleeping” during the summer of 2019, while they got the business off the ground (even her honeymoon in the Maldives was rescheduled). A year and a half later, they’ve thrived in the face of a global pandemic and now have a growing international team with 40 clients across various sectors, including art, fashion, home and beauty.

When asked about her accomplishments so far, Olga says that she doesn’t like to put too much pressure on milestones. “I don’t want to be someone who gets past a certain point in their journey and feels like they’ve achieved everything they wanted to achieve; I don’t want to stop growing.”

On her vision for Emperia, she explains: “We ultimately want to change the way people interact with luxury online and close the gap created by a lack of connection with the brand. We work with brands where the story is paramount to the buyer journey and in justifying the price point of a product.

“You think of a Dior store and you think jasmine and rose tea and pink macaroons – you’re immersed in this pretty thing that you want to be a part of. People are happy to pay for the experience, not just the end product. And that is the core essence of luxury – the experience.”

Emperia’s virtual showrooms compensate for lack of a sensory aspect, but even more importantly, they boast the sustainability factor. Not only are people gravitating more towards shopping online – be it due to the pandemic or the element of convenience – but they are becoming more mindful of which brands they give their money to. VR software developers can stitch together entire collections in 3D before displaying them via a virtual showroom, so that the brand only has to produce what they’ve sold, avoiding waste. Customers can be assured that brands adopting VR are environmentally conscious and ethical as well as being committed to providing the most magical customer experience possible.

“I think people are seeing that, even when stores have reopened, the footfall has been surprisingly low, and that virtual and augmented reality is the future,” says Olga. “Brands are realising that [with technology] every part of the fashion cycle can be streamlined; from design to sales.”

We talk about what she’s learned from starting her own business, and what the most important take-home has been. “When you’re starting out, try to do as many things as possible by your-self. You don’t need to hire a huge team and spend a ton of money to build things.