Transcription
You know, a frequent question I get asked is, "What about if you're launching a brand now with no history?" Or, "What do new brands do when they have no heritage?" Or, you know, without history, how can you manage to sell luxury? A brand with a great history will sell luxury very well, right?
I mean, of course, you can sell luxury without her. Think about what actually happens when someone buys what we call a heritage brand. Let's say Hermes as an example. So Hermes were founded in 1837 as a harness workshop. They made horse harnesses. And I'd be very surprised if one buyer in a hundred could even tell you that. Nobody in the queue outside an Hermes boutique is there for a history lesson. And almost no consumer has read the company history. I'd put money on that. So, whatever is persuading them isn't just heritage.
You know, anybody can put uncompromising quality on a website or a brochure or whatever. It costs nothing to write it. So, therefore, it tells you nothing. And let's be honest, the date you were founded simply means that you've lasted longer than the competition and that enough people have chosen you over everyone else year after year to keep you in business. I think once you start to see it as a signal, the mystique falls away because what a founding date actually measures is nothing more than survival. It's nothing grander than that. It isn't a quality that the old luxury houses were born with or created with.
You know, that's also why it's relative rather than absolute. You know, a company from the 1970s looks very well established standing next to one from 2013, but they look like a newcomer standing next to Chanel or Dior or Louis Vuitton or Hermes. And you also have to remember there's no particular year in which a brand crosses a line and turns into a heritage brand.
The reason a buyer wants that reassurance of heritage is that a luxury purchase is a terrifying endeavor in many ways, you know, and we call that perceived risk. So, at £200, the question is whether the thing that you're buying actually works. At £4,000, the question is whether you've been taken for a fool. And nobody seriously thinks that if you're going to buy a handbag for £4,000 that it's going to fall apart. The fear is spending serious money on something that people who know better or should know better would win. And heritage settles that fear very well because a great many people have already made the same choice over a hundred years or 200 years and they haven't regretted it.
You know, people always point to Dyson or the tech world as examples of this. The brands are at the very top of their categories where heritage is pretty much impossible because the products that they're selling didn't actually exist 20 years ago. And that doesn't give the game away, does it? They're all selling very well. Whole categories command top prices with no heritage at all. And if heritage were the active ingredient in luxury, then these companies wouldn't be able to charge what they charge.
You don't have to look at tech for it either. You know, Joe Malone was blending scented candles in her own kitchen in 1994 with no lineage whatsoever behind her and then 5 years later she sold that company to Estee Lauder. Christian Louboutin opened his first shop in Paris in 1991. You know, the handbag, the leather company, Strathberry, who, you know, the Edinburgh handbag company, they make fabulous stuff and actually their bags turn up on a great many enviable arms right now. I mean, but they're barely a decade old. Not one of these companies had a founding heritage story to stand on. And all of them ended up being as respected, sometimes even more than the older heritage houses. So, whether it can be done isn't really the question, is it? How you do it is probably a better question.
Now I will say, just as an aside, there is one corner of the market where heritage genuinely is the product, and it's the very old money corner of the market. So, you know, bespoke gun makers like Purdey, for example, who've been building guns to order since the 1800s, or Savile Row tailors, or, you know, the German shirt makers, and I'm not talking about the new ones. I'm talking about very old ones. What sells there is continuity because the same families have been dressed by the same tailor for generations. So it's very old money. It's very establishment, very aristocracy. And a new customer buying into that is what they're buying into. That's what the customer is buying into that heritage.
But even there, though, you know, it's not a locked door. There are tailors on Savile Row who are brand new with no history at all, and they're all doing extremely well because they've got the cut and, you know, the room and the service right. And if heritage can't keep newcomers out of that heartland, it was never quite the wall that it's made out to be. Don't you think so? Step outside that corner and, you know, of the old world money, and you'll find that heritage is not as important as some experts would have you believe. We bang on about heritage all the time like it's some sort of holy grail. It isn't.
And anyway, plenty of it is invented. In fact, there's even a phrase for this in psychology and behavioral science called "invented tradition." It's a trick of dressing up something fairly recent as an ancient custom. So Creed, the fragrance house, is a prime example of this. It tells the world that it was founded in London in 1760, and the tailoring part of Creed was founded in 1760, but it was closed in the 1960s. And then another branch of the family came along and reinstituted it. The half perfume, half half that say that they sold perfume to half the crowned heads of Europe is relative nonsense. The difficulty is that the paper trail only begins for the perfume business in the 1970s. So, a journalist called Gabe Oppenheim went through the records and found that this idea of a 250-year-old perfume dynasty didn't stand up. I mean, the tailoring business of Creed stands up, just not the perfume business. But it hasn't dented sales in the slightest. People love their perfumes and buy them regardless. But it shows you that heritage is not a driver. If a marketing department can write the story, then the thing they're writing about was never the thing holding the price up in the first place.
The practical question, of course, is if you're launching now, is what else can carry that sort of reassurance. And you know what? There's quite a lot that can. Yes, you might have no history, but almost everything around you does have a history. You know, you've trained somewhere. You know, somebody taught you. Your materials come from somewhere, and your suppliers, I'm sure, were not founded last month. So, you might, for example, say something like, you know, "I spent 10 years in a workshop in Antwerp before opening my own store, before starting myself," or "The cloth from this comes from a mill that's been weaving in Yorkshire since 1790," or whatever. Provenance of that kind does the same job as heritage of a company because it is heritage. It's just borrowed heritage from the people and places that you've built on. And buyers accept that inheritance without questioning it. The rule, though, and it's a very important rule, is that every claim has to be checkable. If a single one of the claims you make turns out to be decoration or made up, then all of your claims die together.
But then, of course, there are the signals that you can generate in the present tense. These are the ones that a buyer sees for themselves instead of just taking you at your word and on trust. So, a guarantee that would ruin you if the work were bad, you know, like a lifetime repair service from a workshop that's maybe two years old, is a much bolder statement about quality than any paragraph about tradition because a maker who doubted their work simply couldn't afford to offer that sort of guarantee. You can also use scarcity, but you have to make sure that it's scarcity that's real. Meaning the run of 40 that you make is actually a run of 40, and a waiting list that you have is actually a waiting list that exists. But then, of course, there's refusal, turning down the client that isn't a good fit. But you do it with a recommendation of somebody who might be a good fit. And if you've watched my videos before, you'll recognize these. They're what's called costly signals, things that would ruin a company if they tried to fake them, which is exactly why a buyer believes them. And a new brand can produce every one of these things from day one.
There is one thing heritage hands you for nothing, I suppose. Now, I'm not dissing heritage. It does have its advantages. One of them is that people recognize you or your product immediately. The thing is though, you can manufacture that as well. Take Louboutin's red sole or Strathberry's bar clasp. They weren't handed down through generations by anyone. They were decisions that somebody made and then they were repeated without a single exception until their ideal client was able to pick them out at a glance. Now, an older luxury business or luxury company gets that recognition for free. You simply buy it with discipline by choosing one mark and holding it more rigidly than your competition or than a less serious company could be bothered to do. It's very much about consistency.
And also, don't forget you hold an incredible advantage that the heritage companies would kill for, which is that you're alive and in the room. Nobody buying from a heritage house today gets Gabrielle Chanel or Christian Dior. And at the very top end of the market, that's really important. And that absence is felt. So your client gets the workshop, the conversation, the interaction, the object made by someone whose phone number is literally in their phone. You know, remember a client who comes to you in year one or two or whatever owns part of the beginning. And if you've ever talked to a collector, then you'll know what being early is worth. It's worth a fortune.
But what you must never do is dress up as your own grandmother. Right? So, a brand founded a few months ago describing itself as, I don't know, the heir to a timeless artisanal tradition and then puts a crest and a Latin logo. It fools nobody. Luxury consumers with real money have spent their lives around the genuine article, and they can clock it at 20 paces. What's worse though than the copy is what it actually reveals, which is that you believe you're missing something. So, a new company that behaves impeccably, prices without flinching, and never discounts comes across as incredibly confident in their product and in their ability. The same company who puts on a costume and, you know, dresses up in fancy dress comes across as highly insecure. And insecurity is the thing luxury just cannot survive. It's just a death knell. So anyway, there you go. I hope that answers your question. That long, rambling response was: yes, you can set up and be successful as a luxury business without any sort of heritage.