By the time I got on the phone with Gilt City president Nathan Richardson, the first day of Gilt City Seattle offers were sold out.

The new-to-town e-tailer is in soft launch land—meaning that for now, only those Seattleites who were already signed up with Gilt to receive national offers were enticed by a chef’s tasting at RN74, a spa party at Hotel 1000, and deal on hairstyling at Seven. The offers were up at 7, and gone by 10. Not a record in Gilt’s books, just more or less par for the course.

And they are called offers on Gilt—not deals. They are mostly experiential; you’re not offered discounted DVF wraps and designer handbags as you are on the main Gilt site. It’s not, on average, the spend X get XX thing. Gilt City emails are about what Richardson calls a curated lifestyle. Chef’s tastings, access to private wine events, secret handshakes that get you the most pampering spa treatments.

We heard this story when Rue La La came to town, remember? It’s about doing something new, not buying something new.

Seattle is the seventh metropolitan area that Gilt has cruised into. I was told that a complex set of metrics involving the depth of restaurants, number of spas, critical mass of affluent, educated 25- to 50-year-olds made us appealing to them. Gilt doesn’t plan to be in every city, rather, as Richardson put it, just the great cities of the world. Seattle, because of your tendency to spend tech industry dollars on top chefs, because your UW-schooled brain needs a brand-name haircut to top it off, because you want access to exclusive places and ideas, because you’re into escape, discovery, and indulgences (the GC president’s terms), you’re one of the top cities in the world and you can sign up to get experiential opportunities (which are, sometimes, deals on goods and services) in your inbox every Tuesday and Thursday, beginning in the first week of August.

With Rue, Amazon, Groupon, and now Gilt massaging special offers at bars, restaurants, and spa, health, and beauty providers all over town, will the climate of the city change? (Richardson makes no bones about the fact that their offers typically go for about twice as much as some of the competitions, by the way.) Will top hair colorists become taxed and unfriendly? Will hostesses and reservationists get crankier? Will consumers cease making reservations if there’s no printed waiver getting them something cheap or extra in exchange?

For their part, Richardson says the native 206 local team leader they hired ensures that Gilt’s lifestyle offers are Seattleite-friendly. "What works in New York doesn’t work in Seattle," he said, admitting that things can get tense and weird when a hungry legion of money savers is regularly set free in the general population.

A private concert and party on August 2 at Neumos featuring Best Coast closes out the exclusivity of the existing-members-only soft launch; at that time, anyone and everyone can sign up for the Gilt City emails, and the entire city can see, through the eyes of Gilt, what works for Seattle.