Dandelion Chandelier recently conducted an analysis of 120 luxury brands, 40 each in the fashion, beauty and watch & jewelry categories. We wanted to understand how these brands are showing up online, and which ones are truly market leaders in this space. Here’s what we found.
Pamela Thomas-Graham
It’s not headline news that the most venerable luxury brands across nearly every segment have been, to put it politely, fashionably late to the e-commerce party. The $1 trillion-plus global luxury sector has been slow to embrace online sales, and not without some good reasons.
Now that we’ve gotten to know each other a bit, I’m going to share a secret with you. But let’s keep it between you and me.
It may be the ultimate in old-school publishing and fashion, and the last gasp of the media business as we have known it, but for me the arrival of the September issues of the big fashion magazines is still a thrilling moment. I still feel a jolt of excitement when I see them on the newsstand, as if a bell has just been rung and something wonderful is about to commence. Arriving long before the kids are actually back in school, and well before leather jacket weather, the September issues are one of my favorite harbingers of autumn.
The brick-and-mortar world of luxury is a truly delightful place – gorgeous stores and showrooms, discreet and informed sales people, and highly attentive service. Retail locations and their front windows are the best possible advertisements for these brands.
Fashion and lifestyle magazines are also brilliant showcases for luxury brands. Their ads are part of the editorial for publications like Vogue, Elle and Town & Country, and readers actually look forward to seeing them because they’re so compelling.
I will never forget the first time someone asked me the question (it was circa 1990). My husband and I had just arrived on Martha’s Vineyard, and we ran into a fellow Harvard Law School grad. After the usual air kisses and humble brags about work, she asked when we had arrived on the island. And where we were staying. Then came “The Question”: Do you rent or own?
Prognosis: negative.
I have been mourning the loss of one of the great luxury brands in my closet: Michael Kors. It used to be one of my go-to ready-to-wear brands: I loved the mash-up of classic Americana and jet-set European sensibilities, the use of color and texture, and those shrugs! I loved those cute little fine-gauge knit shrugs. I still have approximately fifteen of them in multiple colors, and they have saved me many times from the horror of exposing my upper arms. We adore you, Michelle Obama, but you have raised the upper-arm bar so high that when we consider going to the gym to pump iron, it seems futile, so we just shrug and put on a shrug instead.
Everyone has their favorite technology: Amazon’s Echo, Snapchat, HTC’s Vive headset.
Mine remains my smartphone. Specifically, the features on my Apple that save me time and aggravation.
Ah, the art of the tease. The first glimpse, just a flash of something amazing, with the promise of more to come. But not just yet. Wonders to be imagined and dreamed of, perhaps someday to become real. Anticipation can be delicious, in luxury purchasing as well as in love.
With Asia forecast to have 1 billion affluent consumers within the next decade, it’s a rather pressing issue to understand the nuances of what passes for luxury there. In the first quarter of this year, LVMH reported that 37% of its global revenue came from Asia.
The region is huge and its cultures varied, so it’s foolhardy to make broad statements about the nature of Asian luxury.
That said, taking a look at Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, and Shanghai versus New York, London, Paris and Milan, some interesting themes emerge. Here are a few things I’ve observed in my travels:
In the midst of the usual Monday doom and gloom news reports, as we yawned from staying up too late to watch the Olympics, one headline in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal caught our attention here at Dandelion Chandelier. According to the consultants at Wealth-X, who are experts on people with net worth of $30 million or more, there are officially 2,473 billionaires in the world. That’s up by 6.4% from the prior year. In the world of luxury, that counts as important breaking news.
Like any great relationship, our feelings about our favorite luxury brands usually start out in a blaze of passion, excitement and positive feelings. The first time I could afford a pair of Manolo Blanik shoes, I was almost as giddy as I was the day I met my best friend in college. The shoes were black patent leather high-heeled pumps, and they were so much fun, and so chic, that they made me feel that I was my best “me” whenever I put them on.
Yes, shoe love can run deep.
Our friends in Silicon Valley have given us a glimpse of the future of luxury, with the advent of “smart.” There is a smart version of almost everything on the market right now: watches, bikes, desks, suitcases – and, of course, cars.
Unless you have been hiding underground or you’re on an extended beach vacation, surely by now you know that Pokémon Go is the new viral sensation sweeping the globe. Now available in most countries around the globe (with the exception of Saudi Arabia where it has been banned) the game, a mash-up of AR and Pokémon, has captured the imaginations of legions of users, and had some very interesting second-and third-order effects even in its first week post-launch. Players are clearly having great fun, but they’ve also been robbed, accused of trespassing, and scolded for making noise in the middle of the night.
The received wisdom du jour in the marketing community is the power of story-telling. I’ve been to numerous conferences, seen TED talks, and been repeatedly reminded over the past year that a brand must have an authentic story, that there must be a narrative arc, and that without a story, a brand is doomed.
It’s not uncommon to hear people who are not all that engaged in the topic state that luxury brands are basically all the same – meaning that they’re expensive, elite, and exclusive.
Another blog . . . seriously? Is this what the world needs right now?
I know what you’re thinking. We’re all drowning in information. It comes at us like water from a fire hose, unrelentingly, dawn to dusk and then some. We’re soaking wet and our shoes are ruined. Not to mention our hair.
Well, think of me as your Frette towel in this deluge. Or, if you like, your Hermes umbrella. (Umbrella – still one of the best Rihanna songs EVER. But I digress.)
There are thousands of ways in which tech is having a significant impact on the luxury industry and on its consumers.
As we mine this territory on Dandelion Chandelier, I’m going to organize our conversations around four significant ways in which the tech world has already changed the luxury business, and how it is likely to continue to do so.