Business Analysis : Global Luxury Brands

This expansion demonstrates how the luxury industry is now run by massive corporations whose focus is only on growth, visibility, brand awareness, advertising, and most importantly, PROFITS! With growth and expansion, has come a decrease in quality and rarity. The luxury garments produced are mostly not handmade but are even outsourced to large factories in places such as China and Turkey. Also, to meet quarterly turnover projections, “designers churn(ed) out increasingly trendy collections of clothes, handbags, and shoes.” (Thomas, Pg. 246) With hundreds of new stores around the globe the surplus of designer labeled merchandise is immense hence, the proliferation of outlet malls.

The author who inspired the topic of this thesis is Dana Thomas. As a fashion writer, Dana Thomas, has analyzed the changes in luxury fashion business. Thomas has been writing about fashion for the past twenty-five years in various journals such as Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Financial Times, and more. Dana Thomas’ two books, Deluxe and Gods and Kings, are the inspiration for this thesis. Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Lustre goes into great detail the secrets of the leading luxury industry brands, namely Prada, Gucci and Burberry, to showcase the “New Luxury” of today and how “luxury lost its luster” by featuring the manufacturing and logistical processes. Thomas exposes that many luxury brands use the same Asian factories that mass-market retailers employ, which raises questions concerning quality and craftsmanship for luxury brands.

An increasing economic interdependence of national economies across the world experiences a rapid cross-border movement of goods, service, technology and capital. Luxury goods industry, serve as one of the most competitive industry, emerging and developing rapidly all the time. To a great extent, globalization promotes the development of luxury goods industry significantly in spite of the big shock hit by several times of economic crisis.

In the luxury goods industry, the rapid development has brought the market more brands and the latest design products. Industry matures has caused the accelerated development of a wide range of luxury goods (Chiari, 2009). However, one thing was constant, no matter how much increased production costs, the large luxury brand of origin will not be transfer. Long cultural history is an integral part of the luxury brand, and the origin of products have also brought a certain cultural value for luxury goods (Heine, 2012).Especially for Asian consumers, it seems that in the far west, craft superb tailoring and rich cultural history of the western area are the pursue of Chinese consumers (Sombart, 2001).Louis Vuitton 's president has said that (2013), “when customers buy our products, they expect Western quality. The mystery of the origin of our brand is closely linked with our brand”. Although with the close of trade, many luxury goods in the production and sales process will cooperation with other country’s companies, the final product definitely launch in the country of origin. Gucci is a legendary brand in Florence (Italy), and it will also strictly control the production done in Tuscany (Italy), to ensure pure and high-quality products (Gucci, 2015). Therefore, a regional feature has brought an intangible value and more local cultural characteristics to the luxury goods.

Our concept is to provide an ultra luxury product and service to the market for consumption.

In nowadays, buying luxury brands is not only showing a sign of wealth, but also a kind of rewards for people’s hard working. Luxury products sell high market prices because of their designs, brand names, and the qualities. People want to buy luxury products because their quality is better than target brands. For example, the brand like Bottega Veneta is known for its traditional design of leather goods; their handbags are handmade in Italy. Comparing to Bottega Veneta to target brands, Bottega Veneta’s design will not easily out of style, but target brands will easily out of styles because their designs are relatively ordinary. However, in the recent year, some luxury brands’ reputation has gone done because those brands were shifting their factories to other countries and then shipping back to Italy just for the label. Technically, the phrase “Made in Italy” is not really manufacture in Italy anymore, sometimes this product 's qualities are not as good as before. There is a rising concern of whether these luxury goods really match with the expensive price tags.

Degree of Rivalry: The degree of rivalry is moderate in the global personal luxury goods industry. The industry is very concentrated and occupied by few large players. These companies do not need compete with price; however, they have high overlap of products’ category. Most of companies have several common characteristics. They have long history and start business in Europe areas; they all provide exclusive products and services backed by their brands; and they all served few amount of wealthiest customers over the world.

Maintenance of the brand image is always the fore most important factor for the luxury brands in order to sustain in the market. is very critical. Therefore, of all the criteria mentioned above, we have determined the brand image is the most important criterion on which we will base our recommendation.

Although currently the global economy seems are fluctuation or even is experiencing a noticeable recession (??The Euro Area,?? 2008; Webster, 2008), request for luxury goods worldwide is enhancing and swiftly increasing, with over 200 billion dollars of annual sales on average every year. (Mcferran et al., 2014). Luxury items represent abundant consumer goods sales all over the world; worldwide selling of accessories, top grade apparel, beauty, jewellery and watches, and many other products (Roberts, 2010). For luxury industry major market segments are not limited into some developed western countries any more, the expansion of markets also reach to emerging markets like some Eastern developing countries or areas such as China (Sherman, 2009). Over and above the traditional developed segments of market new luxury market segments are developing rapidly. For example, performance by graduates of university with decent job as well as pretty high discretionary income, acted as the top twenty five percentage of the U.S. consumers who are called as Generation Xers, spend 1/3 more on personal luxury goods such as ornaments, high-end apparel, beauty as well as home luxury goods rather than those who are called as Baby Boomers (Park and Reisinger, 2009).

The overall sales of luxury goods in the year 2009 is expected to be more than US$150 billion and Asia contributes 10% to it. The concept of luxury is now not confined to only to Europe and US, the Asian subcontinent contributes majorly to it, with India and China as the newly emerging markets. Professor James Twitchell (2002) comments on the democratization of luxury and the changing consumer psychology These new customers for luxury are younger than clients of the old luxe used to be, they are far more numerous, they make their money far sooner, and they are far more flexible in financing and fickle in choice. They do not

The global luxury goods’ marketplace in the past decade has experienced nothing short of a complete evolution and transformation. This industry has endured global economic downturns in advanced economies such as the United States requiring them to branch out of their comfort zones and expand into emerging markets specifically the BRIC countries. These Asian nations possess high GDP rates that are anticipated to increase significantly in the upcoming years. Luxury goods were once a possession of strictly the wealthy, brand conscious consumer with a high disposable income. Within these developing economies reside a “new breed of young entrepreneurs and noveau riche consumers”, offering large potential within the

Coach Inc. operates in the luxury goods industry where it sells high quality leather handbags, accessories, and other leather products. The scopes of the products within this market are rated high in their “quality, style, and value” (Gamble, 2015, C-71). These qualities of the luxury goods are rare, desirable, hard to replicate, and have strong brand reputation. Firms within this market choose to compete geographically in countries North America, Europe, and more recently Asia. Within the luxury goods market there are three sub-categories: haute couture, traditional luxury, and accessible luxury. When Krakoff joined Coach in 1996 he implemented a successful strategy to focus in the “accessible luxury” segment. By 2000, Coach was dominating the sub-category market over its competitors DKNY, Dolce & Gabanna, Giorgio Armani, and etc. The luxury goods industry had a direct bearing on Coach’s profit potential. This effect can be explained by looking at the environmental layers in detail, moving from Coach’s general environment to its task environment.

On the first meeting at the board room, we announced our brand identity as luxury represented on our flagship model TX7. Although it was the most expensive and luxury model among us and other competitors, we found a success in the market with market share growth from 1% to 2.5% as shown in Figure 1. Most successful business takes time to build a reputation in the market, even more for the luxury market (Luxury brand management, 2008). TX7

The objective of this study is to verify the positioning of the new luxury brands in relation to traditional luxury brands and middle range brands, and to draw implications for both academics and practitioners. In other words, to show that in terms of perceived prestige new luxury brands are substantially closer to traditional prestige brands than middle-range brands. In terms of price, however, they are substantially closer to middle-range brands than traditional luxury brands.

It is hard to give a single universal definition for a luxury hotel for the simple reason that it is even harder to first explain what exactly is entailed in the word luxury (Danziger, 2005). Kapferer (1997) presented the semiotics of the word “luxury” as “ Luxury defines beauty; it is art applied to functional items,” which emphasise that luxury products as an art form brings more psychological satisfaction, like esteem on the owner, than functional utility.