The Homogenization of Luxury Retail

At dinner last night, a VVIP client reduced billions of dollars of luxury retail investment to eight words:

“The Salon is rare. The experience is anywhere.”

Touché. I wanted to high-five him.

If your luxury brand has private appointment spaces, this applies to you. Every luxury retailer we begin working with delivers some version of very nice, very ordinary luxury they have convinced themselves is special. The brands convinced they are even more exceptional are not exempt. I know, because I benchmark those “exceptional” experiences every day.

I do not care how good your coffee, champagne, Scotch, manners, conversation, product presentation or “delight” gift may be. These things are so common. They do not differentiate your brand, deepen the relationship or give an influential client anything worth repeating. Your clients have better at home. I can take your brand off the door and sub in any other luxury brand in the world.

I am personally leading a project reimaging the private quarters for an ultra-luxury jewelry brand. The spaces are sumptuous and rare. Their top-tier clients spend significantly more than a million dollars annually. The ambition is to more than double the number of clients in this tier over the next 5 years. This is not soft CX. It is portfolio economics.

Yet the experience inside these extraordinary spaces is ordinary by comparison. The brand has invested immensely in where the relationship happens without applying the same rigor to what happens there.

Across the globe, the architecture says, “Only here.” The experience says, “Anywhere.”

That is a commercial contradiction. You cannot create more million-dollar relationships using hospitality that UHNW clients encounter everywhere or generate consequential referral by giving them nothing distinctive to describe. The product, the brand story and the exclusivity of the room cannot carry an experience with no point of view of its own. Don't turn your brand stories into brand narcissism.

The answer is not theater. UHNW clients detect contrivance instantly. The work is more exacting: defining what only this brand can understand and make possible; designing progression across a year, not polishing one appointment; and creating reasons to return that could not belong to another house. Only you, only here.

This is why clients call us: to design the experiences that turns rare access into more valuable relationships.

Luxury has overinvested in beautiful places and under designed what happens inside them. If the experience remains common to an UHNW client, the private salon is not a competitive advantage.

It is a multimillion-dollar frame around a commodity.