Interview: Josh Pullan, managing director of the Global Luxury Division at Sotheby’s

Interview: Josh Pullan, managing director of the Global Luxury Division at Sotheby’s

When a 277-year-old-auction house decides that it wants to be something more, revealing an existentially different model, several questions are thrown into a vortex, especially: 'What', 'How' and 'Why now'. Josh Pullan, managing director of the Global Luxury Division at Sotheby's, has the answers. In December, the American auction house introduced an online platform called Buy Now, that sidesteps its typical bidding process, and instead offers items for instant purchase. "We offer over 5,000 items that are available for instant purchase. The reason that we wanted to create this platform was to meet the needs of our clients 24×7, as opposed to episodic auctions which is an event-based business," says Pullan. The platform, which went live in the US at the end of last year, began shipping to 75 countries in the first quarter of 2021. But at an auction house that can command hundreds of millions of dollars in a year through its tried-and-tested model, introducing a polar opposite business such as Buy Now requires strong justification. As Pullan explains, 70 per cent of the buyers on the platform are new clients to Sotheby's, allowing its digital net - Pullan was previously the head of e-commerce for Sotheby's -