“I am literally numb from the boredom and disappointment."

But I’m putting on a fake smile to get through the appointment.”

I do this all the time in luxury. So do many HNW and UHNW customers.

I spend much of my life inside ultra-luxury boutiques, hotels, residences and showrooms, as both buyer and adviser. The lapses in judgment, design, and execution at six- and seven-figure price points are something more serious: they expose how little of a brand’s celebrated discernment makes it to the guest.

Here is my dirty [baker’s] dozen of what continues to astonish me:

1. The compulsory brand lesson. I did not make an appointment to be lectured. Tell me something that changes what I can see, feel or choose.

2. The tour of your priorities. If you cannot tell what interests me, walking me past everything you are proud of is institutional vanity.

3. The interchangeable drinks. The same commonplace beverages, the same tired presentation, and a colleague who cannot speak intelligently about what is being served.

4. The hospitality I can see but cannot access. If another guest is enjoying something in plain sight and nobody offers it to me, I notice. Was that the intention?

5. The appointment treated as a calendar slot. A private meeting involving a potential six- or seven-figure purchase deserves preparation and gravity. Both should be evident before I ask.

6. Manufactured intimacy. My first name from a stranger. Casualness offered as a substitute for rapport. Neither earns familiarity.

7. The collapse of manners. Etiquette is the ability to read context, distance and what another person has or has not invited.

8. Privacy at either extreme. Careless handling of personal information or security so conspicuous the guest becomes part of its performance.

9. A story with no place for me in it. The colleague knows the brand narrative but cannot adapt it to my knowledge, style or taste.

10. Gimmicks promoted to experiences. An activity can occupy ten minutes without changing how I understand the brand or whether I want to return.

11. Gifts with no judgment behind them. Expensive, forgettable objects chosen because they are easy to give.

12. People who could represent any brand. When colleagues do not embody the house’s particular standards, the identity ends at the merchandise.

13. Best practices borrowed into sameness. Luxury brands copy one another’s rituals and then wonder why their experiences feel interchangeable.

Taken together, these are an X-ray of an organization: what it rehearses, what it leaves to chance, and what it has learned to excuse.

I’d like to pretend this list is exhaustive. It isn’t even close.

The good news is most of these failures are fixable.

A house that brings the same rigor to the guest experience - as it does to its craft- could make luxury feel astonishing again.