A director at a training session I ran last month asked if we could build their entire sales approach around Myers-Briggs types. She wanted every salesperson to know instantly whether they were dealing with an INTJ or an ENFP and adjust accordingly.

I felt rather like a vet being asked to examine a unicorn. You don’t want to be cruel, but at some point you do have to mention that the animal isn’t real.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was developed by a mother and daughter, neither of whom were psychologists, based on their reading of Jung, who himself would probably have found the whole thing rather reductive.

The fundamental problem isn’t that it’s badly designed, though it is, it’s that it doesn’t measure stable traits. Take it twice, a few weeks apart, and somewhere between 39% and 76% of people get a different type.

In psychology, if your measuring instrument gives you a different answer every time you use it, that’s no different to a mood ring.

But the reason MBTI feels so uncannily accurate is itself quite beautiful psychology. It’s called the Barnum effect, and it describes our tendency to accept vague, flattering personality descriptions as deeply personal when we believe they’ve been tailored to us.

So your profile tells you that you value deep thinking but also enjoy meaningful connections, and you think good lord, that’s exactly me, when in fact it’s exactly everyone. It’s the same mechanism that makes horoscopes work, and I realise that comparison will irritate the devotees, but the architecture is identical.

When have you ever had an MBTI test come back and say actually you’re a bit of an asshole? Never I would wager.

This woman had reorganised her team’s seating plan based on MBTI compatibility. She’d moved people’s desks. When I undiplomatically pointed out that the evidence base was thin, she looked at me the way my mother looks at me when she thinks I’m trying to be amusing. Pity and exasperation in case you’re wondering.

Once you’ve adopted a type as part of who you are, evidence against it feels like a personal attack.

It’s not that people can’t process the data, it’s that processing it would mean dismantling something they’ve built their identity around, and that’s a much bigger ask.

The whole appeal of MBTI in the corporate world is the shortcut, a way of sorting clients into boxes so you don’t have to do the harder work of actually paying attention.

but in luxury, paying attention is rather the entire point. 🤷‍♂️

See you next week

Paul

Luxury Training

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A friend of mine who sells rather beautiful handbags redesigned her Knightsbridge store last year, she changed nothing about the staff or the stock, but instead simply rearranged the order clients encountered pieces when they walked in.

Higher-margin sales went up about twenty percent.

She told me about it over lunch as though she'd personally invented retail. "Paul, I literally just moved things around." Yes darling, that's decision architecture, Thaler and Sunstein built an entire field around the observation that the way options are arranged changes what people choose, while the person choosing almost never notices it's happening.

She'd put the expensive bags where clients saw them first, which meant everything afterwards got evaluated relative to those. It's called anchoring, and it works whether you're standing in Knightsbridge or browsing on your phone at midnight in your PJ's.

Most luxury brands understand this instinctively in a physical space. A good showroom puts the hero piece where you can't miss it, controls the sequence, lets the environment do half the selling before the salesperson has even opened their mouth.

But online they abandon every single one of those principles and instead present forty-seven variations of the same bag in a configurator that lets you customise the leather, the hardware, the lining, and the monogramming, as though giving someone more decisions is the same thing as giving them a better experience.

It isn't BTW. To me that has always felt like just too much hard work.

The entire promise of luxury is that someone has already done the thinking for you, that's rather the point of paying what you're paying.

The brands that understand this online do something quite simple, they pre-select. They show you a considered starting point, the version they'd recommend, and let you adjust from there.

It's called the default effect, and the research on it is genuinely robust. A thoughtfully chosen default says "we know what we're doing and we think this is the one."

Forty-seven options in a dropdown says "we haven't the faintest idea, you sort it out."

One of those is a showroom. The other is nothing more than a stockroom.

Chat to you next week

Paul

Luxury Training:

https://www.luxuryacademy.co.uk/

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“Scammers always end their prices in a 7.”

And the thing is, they’re not entirely wrong. Not about the number itself, obviously, the number 7 hasn’t committed any crimes. But the feeling we have about the number is very real. The involuntary little wince when you see £997 on a landing page next to a photo of someone leaning against a lambo they almost certainly don’t own.

The wince here is quite interesting.

Because the 7 ending didn’t start as a scam. It started as a split test in the late seventies, run by a direct response copywriter called Ted Nicholas who tested everything, envelope colours, headlines, price points, the lot. He found, or at least told people at his seminars, that he found that prices ending in 7 converted better than 5 or 9. Gary Halbert and Dan Kennedy, two direct mail supremos both ran with it, and within a decade the entire direct response world was pricing in 7 like it was one of the ten commandments of sales.

The convention migrated into the online course world, where it was adopted with wild abandon by people selling courses, usually on how to sell courses, which I’m pretty sure if you looked closely enough you’ll find these course sellers mentioned in Dante. And once the lowest-quality, highest-pressure end of the market makes something their own, something is rotten in the state of Denmark to borrow from Shakespeare.

It’s called evaluative conditioning. You pair a stimulus with a context enough times and the emotional response transfers to the stimulus itself. The number didn’t change but what we associated it with absolutely did.

What makes it genuinely problematic is that you can’t reason someone out of it. You can explain that the number is arbitrary, that it has nothing to do with fraud, and they’ll nod and still feel the distrust. The aversion was never rational, so rational argument doesn’t touch it.

There’s a second layer too. The moment someone recognises that a pricing technique is being used on them, they stop evaluating the offer and start evaluating you. Instead of “is this worth it” they’re thinking “why has this person priced it at £997 instead of a thousand, and what does that tell me about them.” The price becomes evidence about the seller rather than the product.

Which is precisely why luxury has always used round numbers. Round numbers, or prestige pricing as it’s called, are cognitively fluent, your brain processes them without friction. A .97 ending creates a tiny moment of disfluency, which triggers analytical thinking. In mass-market contexts that can actually help you, because the price may hold up under scrutiny. In luxury, scrutiny is the last thing you want. The moment a client starts dissecting your pricing structure, you’ve pulled them out of the emotional frame the entire purchase depends on.

You’d never see Claridge’s list a suite at £897 a night. The disfluency alone would undo everything else they’ve built.

Any persuasion technique, no matter how clever it once was, eventually becomes a signal of the type of person who uses it. The tactic becomes the tell and once your audience can read the tell, you’re not influencing anyone.

There’s a word luxury brands have been using for so long it’s become essentially invisible. Aspiration.

The whole industry runs on it, or thinks it does. Buy this and you’ll be seen as the kind of person who owns expensive things.

But something’s shifted with younger affluent clients, particularly the Gen-Z lot spending serious money. The social engine has gone rather quiet. They’re not buying things to be seen. They’re barely even mentioning other people when they describe why they bought something.

What you hear instead is language that’s entirely internal. “I just needed something beautiful.” “It made me feel calm.” “I wanted something that felt mine.”

It’s called hedonic self-regulation, using consumption to modulate your own emotional state rather than to communicate anything to anyone else. The audience for the purchase has moved from external to entirely internal.

If your buyer isn’t trying to signal anything to anyone, then all the language of exclusivity and “joining an elite world” is rather missing the point.

See you next week

Paul

Luxury Academy Website

Luxury Academy Online Courses

Every few weeks another brand announces a “limited edition” with the breathless excitement of someone who’s just discovered fire.

Three hundred pieces. Exclusively numbered. Available to a select few, by which they mean anyone with a functioning credit card.

A friend who runs a rather good watch brand tried exactly this last month. Same playbook that had worked splendidly three years earlier. The response from his best clients was a collective shrug so violent I’m surprised it didn’t register on seismographs.

He couldn’t work out why. His clients could. They’d seen the identical trick from six other brands that quarter.

The thing most companies get wrong about scarcity is assuming the mechanism is universal. For a mass market buyer it works through urgency, a genuine fear of missing out, and that’s a perfectly sound tactic.

But someone who’s been buying expensive things for decades isn’t remotely worried about missing out. Something else will come along, or they’ll find it through someone they know, or they’ll just buy something different and never think about it again.

What affluent buyers respond to is scarcity that confirms something about them. A two-year wait because a workshop in the Jura mountains makes forty pieces a year tells you something utterly different from a two-year wait because someone in marketing thought it would build anticipation.

It’s called identity-congruent desire, a fundamentally different animal from loss aversion. You’re not afraid of losing the opportunity. You’re drawn to what owning it says about your taste.

The fly in the custard is that brands keep manufacturing the second kind using the tools of the first. Countdown timers on products sitting in warehouses. Engineered waiting lists for things nobody needed to wait for.

And affluent consumers spot this instantly, because decades of sophisticated selling gives you rather a refined nose for the mechanics of persuasion.

Friestad and Wright called it persuasion knowledge, and when that nose twitches you don’t get indifference, you get reactance, the pushback that happens when someone feels their autonomy is being toyed with.

In luxury that’s devastating. The whole promise is you’re being treated as a discerning individual. Manufactured scarcity says the opposite: we think this will work on you.

The brands that talk most about exclusivity almost always have the least genuine constraint on supply.

The ones that never mention it are the ones where scarcity actually works.

See you in the next one

Paul

Online Luxury Training

Luxury Academy

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Which is strange, because unlike furniture or inventory, clients aren’t inert. They don’t just sit there being profitable. They influence tone and they shape pace. They also have a habit of messing with your internal language in ways you don’t notice at first, until you catch yourself saying things like “let’s just be careful” about what should have been a perfectly routine email.

And of course, by that point, nobody’s talking about the actual client anymore. They’re talking about the ‘weather’ around the client. So staff hesitate more, decisions take longer to make and confidence drains like the heat through a window in a stately. And the odd thing is, you’ll still find someone, maybe even yourself, insisting, “Yes, but they spend a lot and they pay on time.”

As though this compensates for emotional extortion, which make no mistake, this is what it is.

Now, demanding clients are fine. Expected, even. Especially in luxury. But there’s a difference between being pushed and being undermined. One improves the work and the other erodes it.

But this is where it tends to get interesting: the client will usually be perfectly polite to the owner or the manager or whomever is in charge. Because they know exactly where the power sits, but they save the petty tyranny for your assistant, your coordinator, the junior who’s just joined.

And if you allow it, what you’re really saying, no matter how many times you mention “our people are our greatest asset” at a town hall or in your LinkedIn posts, is that being a bit of a dick is perfectly acceptable, provided you give us money.

That’s the message you’re sending, and I’d imagine it’s not the one you want.

See you in the next one

Paul

Luxury Online Courses

I got asked this recently by someone who genuinely thought they were losing clients because of the way they speak. Not because they were unclear or inarticulate and not even because they mumbled or had no vocabulary. Simply because they had a Brummie accent.

And it’s not the first time I’ve heard it. Foreign accents, regional accents, second-language English speakers, again and again, people ask if they should take elocution lessons to “sound more professional.”

Which is usually code for: “Should I try to sound posh?”

Now, if the goal is to speak more clearly, with better diction, I’m all for it. That’s just good communication.

But if the goal is to sound less like ‘you’, to erase your background, your story, the rhythm and tone of where you come from, then no. Absolutely not.

I get where they’re coming from, because a lot of the time we don’t just hear an accent. We hear a shortcut, we hear competence, status, warmth, arrogance, trust, intellect, friendliness, and almost none of it is accurate.

But that doesn’t stop us using these heuristic shortcuts. We’re deeply classist about how people speak in this country. You move a team from Birmingham to London and suddenly the same voices are heard differently. The accent didn’t change but the context did.

We’ve all sat through meetings where someone with a regional or foreign accent says something brilliant and gets ignored, while someone else says something meaningless in RP and gets a round of applause. I get it, it happens, and it’s deeply frustrating.

But trying to change your accent to compensate for other people’s biases doesn’t work. Because the moment you get emotional or animated or, heaven forbid, tipsy, the real accent comes roaring back.

And now people don’t just judge your accent. They judge your “authenticity”. I hate this word with an almost feral intensity.

The real issue isn’t the accent. It’s the voice in your head that says, “I need to sound like someone else to be taken seriously.”

The reality though? People will judge you either way. That’s not something you fix with vowels. You fix it by deciding that clarity matters more than conformity, and by stopping yourself from starting every sentence with “Sorry for my accent…”

Especially if you speak three languages and the other person can’t even order lunch in one of them.

See you next week

Paul

PS. My skincare company that I mention is called Piotis Naturals

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You look at the numbers, you look at the calendar, you look at the numbers again, you do that face, and suddenly it’s: “QUICK! SLASH THE PRICES! EVERYTHING MUST GO! EVEN THE THINGS THAT JUST ARRIVED!”

You’ve gone from Fortnum & Mason to Del Boy in about three days.

And the panic is incredibly polite, we wouldn’t dream of calling it panic. Oh no, panic is for the high street, we absolutely DO NOT PANIC in luxury. Instead we call it a “Festive Appreciation Offer.” or “December Exclusives.” We label it as strategy but it looks and smells suspiciously like desperation.

The thing is though, clients know, they can feel it. Because in luxury, the price isn’t just a number, it’s a promise. It’s saying: “Yes, this costs a small fortune, but that’s because we’ve convinced ourselves, and hopefully you, that it’s worth it.”

And now suddenly it’s 20% off.

“Well hang on a minute!” the client says. “It was special yesterday! Now it’s cheaper! Is it still special? Is it just for Christmas? Am I being tricked?!”

You’ve created a crisis. A little festive existential crisis.

And then, next year, the client doesn’t buy in November. Oh no. Instead they think. “Oh I’ll just wait for the Christmas panic. Last year they called it ‘December Exclusives’ So yes, we’ll just wait for the December Exclusives.”

That’s your fault, yes you, the business own sweating uncontrollably in the corner. You’ve trained them to think like this.

You’ve conditioned them to believe the price is made up depending on your mood or your cash flow.

So if you’re panicking in December, DO NOT DISCOUNT! Reframe, bundle something, create a limited window, hide behind the word “curated” if you absolutely must. Whisper “exclusive access” in a deep voice. Add a bloody ribbon and sexy wrapping. Do anything but drop the price.

Because in luxury, once you flinch, you’re done for.

See you next week!

Paul

Perhaps the trick with luxury fatigue is to stop treating it as an economic mystery and start seeing it as a very ordinary human response, the sort you notice every time a train company believes the answer to delays is more announcements. There’s a point where information becomes noise, noise becomes irritation, and irritation becomes avoidance.

You could argue luxury fatigue isn’t about taste changing at all, it’s simply the moment when the consumer’s cognitive bandwidth throws up its hands and says, “for the love of Cher, no more”. The industry has spent years behaving like someone repeatedly nudging you on the shoulder to remind you how exclusive they are.

Psychologically, that’s not a great cue for desire, but it does tend to be a fabulous cue for disengagement. Humans aren’t wired to process constant novelty with equal enthusiasm.

Novelty floods the reward system early on, but the dopamine arc collapses rapidly when the stimulus becomes predictable. Which is exactly what happens when every brand releases a “rare” collection every other Tuesday.

If anything, the only brands that dodge fatigue are the ones that behave as though they’ve never heard of marketing calendars at all. They operate on an entirely different rhythm, a sort of slow luxury circadian cycle.

And this triggers something quite powerful, because waiting engages anticipatory reward, a system the brain finds suspiciously pleasurable. Scarcity isn’t just a commercial tactic, it’s a psychological one. Remove it and the whole structure slumps.

The amusing thing is that luxury fatigue has been blamed on consumers, as though they’ve become fickle or ungrateful.

In reality they’re responding exactly as psychology predicts. When signals become inconsistent, when cues of rarity are over-broadcast, when brands demand too much attention too often, people step back.

Not usually out of rebellion but more out of conservation, it’s about saving cognitive effort in a similar manner that we save our best biscuits or best Scotch for company. Well some people do, I’ve never been a huge advocate for denying myself.

It becomes even more absurd when you notice how many brands treat attention as a kind of KPI of existential importance.

Visibility has to everywhere and all the time.

Yet behavioural economics has been gently pointing out for years that attention is not the same as persuasion. It’s sometimes the opposite. Make something too visible and you strip it of its mystique. It’s the luxury equivalent of placing a velvet rope around a packet of custard creams. People notice, yes, but they don’t necessarily respect it.

Luxury fatigue is, in many ways, the market’s behavioural correction. A nudge back toward brands that know how to hold their nerve, avoid the temptation to shout, and trust that desire grows in the gaps rather than the floodlights.

And if the sector insists on treating desire as a volume game, customers will continue doing the one thing luxury marketers always forget they can do. They’ll look away.

See you next week

Paul

Visit the Luxury Academy website

What always interests me is how familiar all the techniques look once you strip the branding off. A bit of mirroring, a bit of perspective-shifting, a bit of persuasion, all glued together and sold as if someone has reinvented psychology.

Mirroring becomes a “rapport strategy.” Changing perspective becomes “reframing.” Interrupting someone becomes “pattern interruption.” The renaming does most of the heavy lifting. The behaviour itself is nothing new.

And then there’s the habit of borrowing language from real behavioural science. Terms like anchoring, calibration, modelling.

All of them have established meanings. NLP uses them as camouflage, because familiarity creates the illusion of credibility. Remove the stolen vocabulary and the whole structure falls apart.

My personal favourite is the eye-movement claim. The idea that you can diagnose someone’s internal state by watching which direction they glance. If that were true, we’d replace behavioural experts with CCTV cameras and call it a day.

People don’t defend NLP because the method is strong. They defend it because the experience feels good. Someone pays attention to them. Someone sounds certain. There’s novelty in the room.

Their nervous system perks up and they credit the tool instead of the atmosphere. Expectancy is a powerful thing. Hope always creates a temporary lift, even when the mechanism underneath is hollow.

If you want to know whether something is worth taking seriously, test what happens when you examine it closely. Anything real gets stronger. NLP doesn’t.

You can afford the things you once admired, yet you catch yourself wondering if you’ve bought the ‘right’ things. The right watch, the right brand of whisky or the right kind of caviar. That’s prestige anxiety, the quiet panic of getting success ‘wrong’.

Luxury, after all, isn’t about owning. It’s about what it says about you. Every choice, every texture, every silence in a room says something. Economists call it signalling, psychologists call it status maintenance but either way, it can get pretty exhausting. You’re buying confirmation and belonging.

The harsh truth is that luxury was never meant to soothe. It was meant to separate, to create the calm of being recognised as belonging.

And when that recognition falters, the unease begins.

So the purchases grow subtler, the taste more careful, the laughter softer. You stop showing wealth and start disguising it, hoping that those who matter can still see it.

Prestige anxiety isn’t insecurity in the traditional sense. It’s actually a form of vigilance. The constant monitoring of self-presentation within a tribe that insists no one is watching. It’s what keeps luxury alive, and what keeps so many of its buyers quietly restless.

The irony, of course, is that the only cure for prestige anxiety is the one thing money can’t buy: indifference.

True luxury isn’t the cashmere, or the car, or the art. It’s the ability to stop caring whether or not you belong.

Until then, prestige anxiety remains the private tax of success.

See you need week.

Paul

Click here for Luxury Academy Training Programmes

We’ve accidentally or otherwise, turned luxury consumption into a form of self-medication. The handbag isn’t just leather and stitching; it’s emotional anaesthetic. The expensive perfume is liquid reassurance, and the credit card statement? Well, that’s the hangover.

What fascinates me is how elegantly the industry has learned to dress therapy up as retail. “Because you’re worth it,” says L’Oréal, as if they’re your counsellor rather than your skincare expert. “Self-esteem starts with DOve,” purrs Dove, offering absolution with shower. We’ve taken the vocabulary of healing and replaced reflection with transaction.

It’s not manipulation, of course, just well-informed empathy. The shopper feels low, the brand says “we see you,” and voilà: oxytocin you can buy with your Amex. It’s classical conditioning really.

I think the thing is though, the dopamine isn’t in the thing. It’s in the chase and the anticipation, even in the parcel tracking. The little jolt when the DPD driver is only 8 stops away. The brain doesn’t crave the product, it craves the pursuit, which is why unboxing videos have become the modern equivalent of Babylon.

Digital shopping has made this beautifully efficient. Once upon a time you had to get dressed, drive somewhere, and look a salesperson in the eye before performing your emotional exorcism. Now the cure for existential dread is one click away, and the algorithm remembers your triggers better than your therapist ever could.

And yet, it works. For a while anyway. Because what luxury really sells isn’t reward, it’s regulation. Control. A fleeting sense that everything’s fine now. Until, of course, it isn’t.

So the next time someone claims luxury is about craftsmanship or heritage, smile politely. Those matter, yes, but they’re the respectable face of a far older trade: selling comfort to the anxious.

If we’re honest, luxury isn’t therapy, it’s a live theatre performance. And the standing ovation lasts right up until the statement arrives.

Chat to you next week.

Paul

—

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In reality, what most brands call loyalty is just cognitive inertia. People stay because leaving means effort. When I worked in hotels, we used to bang on about “guest loyalty” as though visitors were emotionally bound to us for life.

They weren’t, we were simply familiar.

We mistake familiarity for affection because predictability feels like love. It isn’t.

I once asked a client why he’d used the same private jet company for a decade. He said, “Because I have their number saved in my phone.” Ten years of loyalty, because of a saved contact.

The industry, of course, spins this as “relationship depth” and “brand affinity.” But most of it is admin avoidance.

True loyalty only exists when it costs you something. The client who waits three months for their tailor rather than going elsewhere, that’s loyalty.

Hermès built an empire on this psychological quirk. By the time your name finally crawls up their waiting list, you’ve invested so much effort that you’d defend the brand with your life. Effort justifies emotion. It isn’t devotion, it’s the IKEA effect but with a Birkin bag rather than a bookcase.

The problem is, brands start mistaking habit for affection and then they stop trying. Just like marriages where one day someone runs off with the Amazon delivery man because he remembered their birthday.

Loyalty isn’t a possession. It’s a lease, and it expires the moment someone else makes your client feel more interesting than you do.

See you next week

Paul

Colour doesn’t cause behaviour; it carries meaning. And those meanings aren’t universal, they’re cultural, historical, accidental. Red in Britain says danger and double-decker buses; red in China says weddings and prosperity. Same pigment, opposite emotion.

The mistake is believing the pigment does the heavy lifting. It doesn’t. Story does. Louboutin’s red soles say glamour because of everything wrapped around them, price, scarcity, audacity, not because the paint itself has mystical powers. Hermès orange began as a wartime compromise, not a branding epiphany. Tiffany blue was chosen because turquoise jewellery happened to be fashionable in the 1840s. Stick with anything long enough, tell the right story, and it becomes sacred.

That’s why consistency matters more than cleverness. The brands we think of as “owning” a colour didn’t arrive there through focus groups and mood boards; they just never flinched. Meanwhile, somewhere out there is a start-up agonising over Pantone swatches while their service barely functions.

Colour is a flag, nothing more. Fly it long enough and win a few battles under it, and people will salute it. But there’s no magic paint that makes you luxurious. If there were, Dulux would be running the luxury industry.

See you need week

Paul

Click here to check out Luxury Academy training here.

They’d been a gift from one of his breathtakingly wealthy American friends. The sort who summered in the Hamptons and believed Labradors in bow ties were the height of sophistication.

My mother took one look, declared that money couldn’t buy taste, and was promptly accused of being out of touch and snobbish. So naturally, she gave the paintings pride of place and every time my father walked past, his eye twitched like he was developing a tic. They stayed up for months. Out of spite.

This, incidentally, is how most charming art businesses go astray. They start strong, quirky oils, eccentric subjects, a cult following. But then they sniff the scent of “luxury” and panic. Out go the strange, brilliant originals. In come foxes in cravats, hedgehogs on bicycles and wallpaper for nihilists.

The thing you must never lose is authorship. That unmistakable stamp of “this could only have come from you.” Luxury collectors don’t need to like the work. If your work could plausibly be churned out by a mildly depressed intern in Shenzhen, you’re finished. People don’t buy luxury because it’s perfect. They buy it because it’s you.

You can fix pricing. You can fix marketing. But once people think you’ve lost your hand, that you’re producing for the market, not from the mind, it’s over.

My mother was right. You can’t buy taste. But you can hang bad taste in the right place and make it a statement.

That, too, is authorship

See you next week

Paul

—

Browse the Luxury Academy online courses.

The primary problem is that too many think luxury is packaging. Shiny logo, gold font, some Puccini on the website. But luxury isn’t just the frosting, it’s the things you don’t see, like plumbing in a house. It’s the invoice, the email address, the hold music. (Because nothing says “timeless craftsmanship” like tinny Ed Sheeran!)

If you have to tell me you’re luxury, you’re not. Chanel doesn’t say “luxury handbag shop.”

It’s also staff who can say with a straight face, “We don’t have any bags,” while literally standing in front of them.

That’s branding. And maybe a little bit of arrogance as well.

Don’t fake heritage, don’t panic-discount, don’t call yourself “Luxury Whatever.” It’s better to be an honest Greggs than a dishonest Gucci.

See you next week

Paul

Visit the Luxury Academy website

Which is why selling to the ultra-wealthy is less about pitching to the “principal” than it is about navigating an ecosystem of gatekeepers.

One client told me their assistant once binned a sales proposal because they disliked the salesperson’s tone. The principal never saw it.

Another jeweller thought they’d sold a necklace worth the GDP of a small republic, only to have the deal scuppered by the daughter’s whispered veto: “vulgar.”

And, in one of my favourites, a chauffeur’s opinion over coffee made the difference between closing a contract and walking away empty-handed. Thirty years of loyalty trump a PowerPoint deck every time.

The mistake most people make is thinking it’s an either/or problem. Do I charm the patriarch, or the PA?

The answer, of course, is both, and everyone else who happens to orbit the fortune. Because families with money are less like monarchies and more like Greek myths: pawns become queens, cousins become CFOs, the king is asleep in the corner. The cast reshuffles daily.

Which is why the smartest salespeople don’t just sell to an individual. They sell to the system.

They watch the glances, the silences, the corridor chats after the meeting. Because the meeting room is theatre; the real decision is made in the car on the way home.

And if you forget that, you might just find your proposal quietly strangled, not by the principal, but by the person you thought didn’t matter.

She was on the train in a chalk-stripe suit when a woman stopped her, full of admiration, only to ask the inevitable question: “So what do you do?” Nathalie explained she was a tailor.

The woman beamed and said, “What a nice hobby.” Can you imagine! Something to fill the weekends between Pilates and Waitrose 🤣

The stereotypes cling on. People still imagine Savile Row as a line of ancient men with pins in their mouths and measuring tapes draped like clerical stoles, murmuring about fabric weight.

They don't imagine Nathalie, or the growing number of women shaping a trade once thought the preserve of tweedy grandfathers.

Clients bring those same assumptions. They come expecting their grandfather’s tailor, and what truly catches them off guard is when the experience does not match the sepia image in their heads.

Luxury often lives in that gap between reverence and disruption. A chalk-stripe suit has all the gravitas of tradition, yet in the hands of someone like Nathalie it suddenly feels fresh, relevant, modern.

The lesson for luxury is obvious. You needn’t discard heritage, but you must know how to play with the story people believe they already know.

Every lazy assumption is an invitation. Handle it well and what begins as a patronising “nice hobby” becomes the opening scene of a very different conversation.

Enjoy the interview and if you want to contact Nathalie, you'll find her on LinkedIn at: Nathalie May - LinkedIn

I heard it again last week. Except this time, it wasn’t a joke. It was a 21-year-old on TikTok, pausing mid-Birkin shuffle to inform her followers of her afternoon plans, as casually as you or I might mention popping to Fortnum’s for biscuits.

This is Richtok, it’s what happens when money forgets it’s supposed to behave.

They’re not trying to impress anyone. It’s Through the Keyhole, Gen Z edition. Who lives in a house like this?

This is loud luxury, but not the Versace-shirt, nightclub-rope version. It’s a Dior fridge, a Moncler coat for the dog, and a driver named Philippe.

And the odd part of it all is that people are obsessed. They're watching, not because of admiration I’d hazard, but because it’s like watching a nature documentary. You don’t relate, but you’re fascinated nonetheless. The Ferrari collection. The Dior walk-in fridge. The casual disposal of objects worth more than a house.

What’s changed isn’t the money. It’s the performance. The previous generation of wealth hid it, because hiding it was the signal. Subtlety was currency. Their parents whispered, “never let them see the watch.” Their children livestream the unboxing. It’s not just showmanship, it’s social proof, and in this circle, conspicuous nonchalance is the new gold leaf.

Luxury brands spent a decade fetishising craftsmanship, teaching staff to recite the stitching process like a Gregorian chant. Meanwhile, their clients were quietly rewiring. Thanks to social media, visibility became the signal. Not the detail, the display. Not the provenance, the proof. And now, the girl with the black Amex wants it in pink, tomorrow, and monogrammed for the plane.

Loud luxury is making a comeback. And it's not just loud, it's bloody deafening.