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Their primary customers are upper-income women between thirty and fifty years sold.
The average markup on a handbag is ten to twelve times production cost.
Perfume has, for more than seventy years, served as an introduction to a luxury brand.
The message was clear: buy our brand and you too, will live a luxury life.
The contradiction between personal indulgence and conspicuous consumption is the crux of the luxury business today: the convergence of its history with its current reality.
Today, luxury brand items are collected like baseball cards, displayed like artwork, brandished like iconography.
The tycoons have shifted the focus from what the product is to what is represents.
Perfume has a mystical, magical quality. It catches your attention, enchants you. It complements and enhances your personality. it stirs emotion, within you and others around you. Perfume was a link between gods and mortals. It was a way to contact the gods, Hermes's Jean-Claude Ellena told me. Now it is a profane link: it's between you and me.
Contentment is natural wealth. Luxury is artificial poverty. Socrates
More than anything else today, the handbag tells the story of a woman: her reality, her dreams.
Oscar Wilde said elegance is power.
If it would abolish avarice, you must abolish its mother, luxury. Cicero
People don't believe there is a difference between real and fake anymore. Bernard Arnault's marketing plan had worked: consumers don't buy luxury branded items for what they are, but for what they represent.
Luxury is the ease of a T-shirt in a very expensive dress. If you don't have it, you are not a person used to luxury. You are just a rich person who can buy staff. Karl Lagerfeld
Luxury is exclusivity, it is made for you and no one else has it. At a minimum, it must be impeccable. Maximum, unique.
If you do luxury, Louboutin explained, you have to treat people in a human way and you have to be elegant. You can't ask poor people in bad conditions to make beautiful things.
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