Does your company need a heritage story to sell luxury?
Probably not.
The question I get asked more than any other by founders of new luxury brands is some version of "we have no heritage, so how can we sell luxury?" And buried in that question is an assumption, that heritage is the active ingredient and everyone without it is selling a substitute.
Hermรจs was founded in 1837 and I'd be surprised if one buyer in a hundred could tell you that. Nobody in the queue is there for a history lesson. What heritage actually does is settle a very specific fear. At ยฃ200 the question is whether the thing works, and at ยฃ4,000 the question is whether you've been a fool. A century of other people making the same choice without regret calms that fear nicely. But it's one way of calming it, and far from the only one.
Jo Malone was blending scent in her own kitchen in 1994 and sold to Estรฉe Lauder five years later. Louboutin opened his first shop in 1991. Strathberry is barely a decade old. None of them had a founding story to stand on, and all of them sit comfortably alongside the old houses now.
And some of the heritage we do revere is invented anyway. Creed tells the world it was founded in 1760 and scented the crowned heads of Europe. The paper trail begins around 1970. Sales haven't suffered in the slightest, which rather gives the game away. If a marketing department can write the story, the story was never what held the price up.
In this week's newsletter I go through what a new brand can actually use instead, borrowed provenance, costly signals, manufactured recognition, and the one thing you must never do, which is dress up as your own grandmother.
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Simple answer?
No.
Rolex didnโt start out in Switzerland. :P
Simple answerโฆ luxury requires story just like everything else. The โwealthiest peopleโ in the world are sometimes the easiest to sell to.
Jordan Belfort conned the smartest and wealthiest people in the mid-Atlantic convincing them of a false narrative.
Madoff did exactly the same thing. He bagged the Rothchildโs โ doesnโt get any better than that.
Again, these were people of the highest means, with access to as much information as they could possibly wantโฆ
And they decided to look another way, make another decision (at times obviously incongruent with their objectives), and buy weak products and services because of their expectations about value.