Some of the most compelling luxury product at the moment is being designed with a much clearer understanding of how people live.
And it understands that the customer has a life to get on with. She works, travels, walks, carries too much, gets caught in British weather and, perhaps more than a few years ago, thinks harder before spending a substantial amount on another bag, coat or pair of shoes.
Which really changes what good design looks like. A work bag can still have presence, but it also needs to hold what somebody takes to work without becoming cumbersome. A beautiful coat becomes far more desirable when the fabric, weight, pockets and fastening have been considered for the person who will wear it beyond the campaign image.
I’m always slightly wary when function appears to have been added at the end of the design process, almost as a list of selling points for the product page. You can usually tell.
The better pieces feel as though somebody has lived with the idea before it reached the customer. The pocket is where your hand expects it to be. The bag still looks good once there is a laptop and half a day’s life inside it. The shoe assumes its owner may walk further than the distance between a car and a restaurant.
For luxury, I think this is commercially interesting territory. When customers are buying more selectively, usefulness gives them another reason to keep choosing a piece long after the first rush of wanting it.
There is also something rather luxurious about feeling that a designer understood how you live, without asking you to compromise on how you want to look.
From Notes on Brand & Growth, my continuing series on luxury, retail and commercial direction.
Apply to work with me on your marketing, brand, partnerships or retail ambitions: https://lnkd.in/exSjfrFP
Hannah Alley
Premium marketing, brand, retail and partnership strategy
Formerly Selfridges’ Marketing Manager of Fashion, Jewellery, Watches, Shoes, Bags & Accessories
www.hannahalley.co.uk
#fashiondesign #productinnovation #luxuryfashion #fashionbrandfounder
I keep hearing the phrase ‘commercial coherence’ in luxury and I’m never quite convinced everyone using it means the same thing.
For me, it’s fairly practical. Does the brand still make sense when you look at everything together, rather than one department at a time?
A beautiful campaign can say one thing, while the retailer mix says something else. The product team can launch into a category because there’s a good commercial case for it, while the customer is left wondering what on earth that category has to do with the brand. Sales can introduce an offer that helps this quarter’s number, but chips away at a position that took years to build.
I saw versions of this a lot working in luxury corporate and retail. You could have very good people making perfectly sensible decisions in isolation and still end up with a brand that felt slightly confused when you stood back and looked at the whole thing.
That’s probably the part of brand strategy I enjoy most, because I’m interested in the bits that sit underneath the campaign as much as the campaign itself.
I want to know what the retailer list looks like. I want to understand the pricing architecture, where the volume is coming from, which products are expected to do the heavy lifting, what partnerships are being pursued and whether the customer being spoken to in marketing is the same customer the commercial plan is built around.
You can tell me a brand is exclusive for example, but if it’s turning up everywhere six months later, I’m going to believe the distribution strategy rather than the brand deck.
Equally, widening access can be a very smart move. Plenty of luxury brands need broader entry points. I just think those decisions have to feel like they belong to the same world as the rest of the business, otherwise you start trading long-term clarity for short-term opportunity.
When I’m looking at a brand, I often ask whether the idea it says it owns survives contact with the range, the pricing, the retailer list and the revenue model.
If it doesn’t, I’m usually less interested in rewriting the messaging than in working out where the business itself has started contradicting it.
That, to me, is commercial coherence.
From Notes on Brand & Growth, my continuing series on luxury, retail and commercial direction.
Apply to work with me on your marketing, brand, partnerships or retail ambitions: https://lnkd.in/exSjfrFP
Hannah Alley
Premium marketing, brand, retail and partnership strategy
Formerly Selfridges’ Marketing Manager of Fashion, Jewellery, Watches, Shoes, Bags & Accessories
www.hannahalley.co.uk
#commercialstrategy #luxurybrandstrategy #brandgrowth
A collection can contain no weak products and still give the customer too little reason to remember it.
I saw this with a founder who had given each piece comparable space, investment and narrative weight. The range felt generous, but I would say it also lacked a centre of gravity.
The founder understood the emotional and creative role of every item. But of course a new customer arrived without that history. She needed an entrance into the collection and a reason to recognise the brand again several days later.
We examined which product carried the strongest brand codes, which offered the most persuasive commercial entry point and which could introduce the rest of the range without reducing its complexity.
The result was that the product became the lead and the wider collection did not become secondary in quality, it gained a more intelligible structure.
Campaign decisions have grown easier for the brand now because the imagery has a focal point. The retail proposition became more memorable and supporting products can perform their role rather than competing for the same attention.
Founders can resist hero-product strategy because it appears to privilege one creative decision over the others. But the way I like to look of it is as an act of generosity towards the customer.
A brand should offer somewhere for recognition to gather.
Icons emerge when design distinction, repetition, commercial commitment and cultural context are sustained for long enough that the market begins to associate the item with one name.
From Notes on Brand & Growth, my continuing series on luxury, retail and commercial direction.
Apply to work with with me on your marketing, brand, partnerships or retail ambitions: https://lnkd.in/exSjfrFP
Hannah Alley
Premium marketing, brand, retail and partnership strategy
Formerly Selfridges’ Marketing Manager of Fashion, Jewellery, Watches, Shoes, Bags & Accessories
www.hannahalley.co.uk
#productstrategy #fashion #fashionbusiness #luxurybrandstrategy
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I was featured in The Independent this weekend, sharing my view on what comes next for Harvey Nichols under Frasers Group ownership.
The Independent’s Features Writer Lydia Spencer-Elliott got in touch following Frasers Group’s roughly £40m acquisition of Harvey Nichols to ask for my view on where the brand goes from here. I spent several years at Selfridges head office as well as working with most top retailers for years prior, so this is a category I know from inside as well as from the strategy side. The piece also includes Lynne Franks, who worked with Harvey Nichols for three decades, which made it a rather lovely conversation to be part of.
My view is that Harvey Nichols’ smaller scale can be an advantage. It has permission to be more edited and more opinionated than a retailer trying to win on sheer breadth, at a time when customers can find almost anything online anyway.
As I told Lydia: “I wouldn’t try to win an arms race on breadth; I’d make the confidence of the edit the point.”
There is still a lot of affection around the Harvey Nichols name and so the commercial challenge is how that affection becomes consumer behaviour again. A brand can remain famous for years while slipping out of people’s weekly or monthly habits and the work now is to make the version of Harvey Nichols being built under new ownership visible enough that public perception starts to catch up.
Over the years I’ve seen first-hand how much department store success depends on more than the brands you stock. The edit, the experience, the cultural relevance, the world, the social piece and the reasons people choose to come back all have to work together.
Thank you to The Independent for inviting me to contribute to the feature.
🔗 You can read the full article here:
https://lnkd.in/ep6grS9F
And I write more on luxury retail, brands and the business of luxury in The Luxury Briefing on Substack:
https://lnkd.in/e-CYkX5x
Hannah Alley Consulting
#fashion #luxury #retail #harveynichols
Craftsmanship is one of luxury’s most repeated claims and one of its least well-explained forms of value.
Images of hands, tools and workshops create atmosphere, but they don’t automatically help a customer distinguish exceptional work from competent production.
The richer subject is judgement. What tolerance would the maker reject? Which material looked appealing and behaved poorly over time? Where was ornament removed because it interfered with proportion or wear? What has been constructed differently in a place the customer may never see? These decisions give the audience a way to recognise expertise.
They also move craftsmanship away from the hours-spent equation. Time can indicate labour but it says less about whether the time produced a more accomplished object.
For jewellery, watches and leather goods, the communication should connect method to ownership. How will the setting affect security? How does the finish age? Why does the construction alter balance, comfort or longevity?
The customer just needs enough access to the maker’s standards to understand what she is paying to receive.
Craftsmanship content becomes persuasive when it teaches discernment. The tools are visually appealing. The brand’s authority lies in the decisions made with them.
From Notes on Brand & Growth, my continuing series on luxury, retail and commercial direction.
You can apply to work with with me on your marketing, brand, partnerships or retail ambitions: https://lnkd.in/exSjfrFP
Hannah Alley
Premium marketing, brand, retail and partnership strategy
Formerly Selfridges’ Marketing Manager of Fashion, Jewellery, Watches, Shoes, Bags & Accessories
www.hannahalley.co.uk
#luxurycraftsmanship #jewellerybusiness #productquality #luxury
