How luxury lost its soft power
Odds of success are stacked toward brands with hybrid business models. These hybrid models mix luxury strategy (investing in desirability, scarcity, status-signaling) and fast retail (trend, availability, price) in a way that capitalizes on the strengths of both.
Ana Andjelic • Brand Starter Kit
This is what I call the luxury trap. It’s a fatal mistake many brands make. Defining a luxury brand by its functional aspects and high prices cannot replace the value a brand creates.
Daniel Langer • The Luxury Trap: Why it’s a Mistake to Define Luxury By Price
Under pressure for newness, brands struggle to actually create new stuff, but by curating the old, they give it renewed meaning and purpose in consumers’ eyes.
Ana Andjelic • Creativity Is Dead, Long Live Curation | Highsnobiety
To avoid it, luxury companies have to maintain and grow their distinction as they scale.
The new luxury strategy
Throughout the history of human civilization, luxury was premised on being expensive, meaning it resulted from investing an unreasonable amount of work, material or other scarce resources into the making of a thing.
But today’s rich [...] wear $500 cotton t-shirts with inscrutable references and visual motifs pulled from a smörgås-moodboard that mak
... See moreDesirability of something is today decoupled from its price, and its access is decoupled from wealth. Instead, it’s coupled with social capital, environmental creds, cultural savviness, a story, belonging, and its transformative potential to make us better humans.