What Luxury Shoppers Actually Want Now: Emotional Connection Over Heritage

Luxury brands must stop relying on craftsmanship and heritage as selling points—customers now expect those as table stakes and want emotional connection instead.

Summary of Luxury’s New Reality. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:00:50 — Research surveyed over 2,000 luxury shoppers across the U.S. and China alongside industry executives to identify major shifts in what motivates luxury purchases.
• 00:01:45 — Luxury fatigue from repeated price increases without product improvement, combined with rising living costs and fuller closets, has made customers more selective about purchases.
• 00:02:46 — Quality and craftsmanship have become baseline expectations rather than differentiators—brands emphasizing these attributes no longer stand out because everyone showcases them.
• 00:03:58 — Customers want frictionless purchasing experiences and immediate access to products rather than artificial scarcity; long store queues and waiting lists now deter rather than attract buyers.
• 00:11:05 — Emotional connection means different things by market: in China, consumers seek self-expression and external recognition, while U.S. shoppers prioritize personal taste and brand values alignment.
• 00:13:23 — Chinese consumers have matured significantly with more established buyers who are visually sophisticated and critical of quality issues, moving away from obvious logos toward understated luxury.
• 00:16:44 — Resale platforms and AI research tools are no longer niche concerns but essential channels brands must engage with; ignoring them means ceding control of the shopping narrative.
• 00:19:12 — Luxury brands are struggling to return to normal growth rates after the pandemic boom, with healthy targets now considered high single-digit or low double-digit growth rather than triple-digit increases.
• 00:24:17 — New creative direction can increase perceived value without actual price cuts or quality changes by making craftsmanship more visible and appealing to customers evaluating price-per-wear.

In depth

Why emotional connection beat craftsmanship as the top purchase driver

The report’s headline finding — that emotional connection has overtaken heritage, craftsmanship and logo recognition as the leading driver of luxury purchases — sounds like a marketing platitude, but Mimosa Spencer’s explanation for it is more structural than sentimental. Her argument is that three years of price hikes without corresponding product improvements have produced genuine fatigue among shoppers 00:01:45, compounded by a cost-of-living squeeze that’s pulling discretionary spending toward travel and experiences, and by the simple fact that many wealthy consumers already have closets full of luxury goods 00:01:58. In that environment, she argues, people have effectively hit pause and become more deliberate about what actually justifies a purchase 00:02:13.

The more interesting twist, raised by Sheena Butler-Young and confirmed by Spencer, is that craftsmanship hasn’t become irrelevant — it’s become table stakes 00:02:21. Every brand now foregrounds its ateliers, its heritage techniques, its ethical sourcing; the result is that these claims have stopped functioning as differentiators because everyone is making them simultaneously 00:02:52. Quality is now assumed rather than proven, which is precisely why buyers are searching for something extra — an emotional hook — to tip them into a purchase they no longer feel obligated to make on craftsmanship alone.

Butler-Young pushed this further by asking whether brands have overinvested in mythmaking storytelling while neglecting basic execution, citing the now-common complaint about long, tedious queues outside flagship stores. Spencer’s answer reframes queuing not as evidence of desirability but as friction that actively repels today’s shopper, who wants immediate gratification once interest is piqued rather than an obstacle course to prove devotion 00:03:58. This is a real reversal of luxury orthodoxy, where scarcity and inconvenience were historically treated as signals of exclusivity rather than deterrents — and neither speaker suggested the industry has fully absorbed this shift yet.

The VIC problem: did luxury’s pivot to the wealthy alienate everyone else?

Robert Williams traces much of the current slowdown to a strategic overcorrection: as post-pandemic momentum faded and entry-level shoppers pulled back, brands responded by doubling down on their wealthiest clients — expanding private shopping spaces, pushing up product quality and price points to cater to that top bracket 00:07:38. The unintended consequence, in his telling, was to further alienate the aspirational customer who had been priced and psychologically pushed out of the conversation 00:07:44. This is a notable admission because it implicates deliberate strategy, not just macroeconomic headwinds, in the industry’s growth problems.

Williams is careful to note that the wealthy segment remains the more resilient growth engine right now — jewelry sales, for instance, are thriving precisely because that customer base weathers instability better 00:08:47 — but he argues brands of Chanel’s scale can’t rely on that cohort alone if they want anything resembling their previous growth trajectory 00:09:07. Bringing aspirational shoppers back, he suggests, will require far more effort than it did a few years ago, since those customers are now diverting spending elsewhere and need real convincing rather than just brand cachet 00:08:34.

Spencer complicates this binary by pointing to a third path some brands have found: rather than chasing the same ultra-wealthy “compulsive buyer,” they’re re-engineering the perception of value itself, particularly through price-per-wear logic 00:09:38. She cites Cartier’s Love bracelet and Rolex’s core watches as products whose expense is absorbed by an implicit promise of near-daily use, appealing to high earners in their 30s to 50s who treat luxury as an occasional, carefully weighed indulgence rather than an identity purchase 00:09:56. Crucially, she notes brands have done this without cutting prices at all — repositioning the offer rather than discounting it, which is a subtler and arguably more sustainable fix than simply reintroducing cheaper entry products.

China versus the US: what “emotional connection” actually means in each market

One of the report’s more counterintuitive findings is that the same top-line statistic — emotional connection as the primary purchase driver — conceals two quite different consumer psychologies. In China, Spencer explains, the emotional pull is tied to self-expression that’s still fundamentally social: even “quiet luxury” purchases function as signals legible to an in-group, so the connection is ultimately about how a purchase positions the buyer externally 00:11:49. In the US, by contrast, the emotional driver is more inward-facing — personal taste and alignment with a brand’s values matter more than status signaling to others 00:12:24.

Williams adds important texture and a partial complication to this China narrative. He argues the Chinese luxury market has matured rapidly, producing a base of experienced repeat buyers who are visually literate through years of social media and fashion media exposure, and who are notably less tolerant of quality shortcuts than the stereotype of conspicuous, logo-driven consumption would suggest 00:13:23. He cites viral scandals over garments not actually being made end-to-end in Italy as stories that traveled widely in China and forced brands to defend their credibility rather than lean on flashy branding 00:14:21.

But Williams then undercuts the clean “China wants logos, the US wants meaning” framing by pointing out that supposedly “discreet” designs — Bottega Veneta’s intrecciato weave, the silhouette of a Row bag — function as logos in all but name, instantly recognizable to anyone fluent in fashion 00:15:16. This leaves an unresolved tension in the data itself: is the Chinese shopper buying quiet luxury because they’ve moved past status signaling, or because status signaling has simply evolved a new visual vocabulary? Williams explicitly declines to resolve this, calling it a genuinely nuanced question that likely admits of both answers depending on the buyer 00:15:33.

AI and resale: threats brands ignored, now becoming tools they can’t avoid

Spencer describes a shift in how consumers relate to the resale market that undercuts the conventional narrative that secondhand shopping is purely about price sensitivity. The report found that resale enthusiasm correlates with shopper wealth in the US — it’s often the more affluent buyers, not budget-constrained ones, who enjoy the hunt for rare or discontinued pieces, treating resale as a form of engaged collecting rather than bargain-hunting 00:16:59. This matters because it reframes resale platforms not as a threat to be contained but as another channel through which desirability gets built and reinforced.

Alongside this, the report found that for technically complex products like watches, buyers are increasingly turning to AI tools for information before purchasing 00:17:13. Spencer’s argument is that both resale and AI have historically been treated by luxury brands as adjacent, faintly threatening phenomena to be kept at arm’s length, when in fact they’ve become central to how purchase decisions actually get made 00:17:27. The strategic implication she draws is that brands who refuse to engage with these channels are simply ceding the narrative to third parties — resellers, review aggregators, AI chatbots — rather than shaping how their own products are discussed and valued 00:17:33.

Neither speaker offers a detailed roadmap for how a brand should actually engage with AI-driven research behavior, beyond the general point that abstention is itself a strategic choice with costs. It’s notable that this thread is treated as settled and uncontroversial by both hosts in a way most of the episode’s other claims aren’t — there’s no pushback, hedge, or counterexample offered, which leaves it as more of an emerging observation from the data than a fully reasoned strategic argument.

Chanel’s Bruno Pavlovsky: modest growth, quiet shade, and the fans-versus-clients divide

Williams’ one-on-one interview with Chanel’s Bruno Pavlovsky supplies the episode’s most concrete case study, and it starts with a claim that cuts against growth-obsessed industry rhetoric: Pavlovsky described Chanel’s return to roughly 2% growth last year as “solid” rather than disappointing, and stated the brand isn’t chasing outsized growth at all 00:18:53. Williams generally credits this, arguing that a private company like Chanel can afford to define healthy growth as something in the high-single to low-double digits — enough to fund new stores or product categories without the boom-bust dynamics that have hammered rivals like Gucci after their hype-driven surge collapsed 00:21:58.

Pavlovsky also made the striking claim that queues outside boutiques are actually a bad sign, and that the phase after queuing is always the absence of queuing 00:20:28. Williams calls this a bit flippant, pointing out that most executives would love the problem of excess demand, but grants there’s a real strategic logic underneath it: a brand trying to be an enduring institution rather than a hype cycle has to interrogate why demand is suddenly spiking, and whether that excitement is anchored in something durable or merely momentary 00:21:20.

On pricing and quality, Pavlovsky insisted nothing had changed on Chanel’s production side — same ateliers, same processes — and that rising interest under new creative director Matthieu Blazy reflects improved brand perception rather than any actual change in value delivered 00:24:00. Williams is more skeptical here, layering in his own analysis: Blazy’s aesthetic leans into visibly tactile, textured craftsmanship — braiding, crochet — that reads as luxurious to the eye and hand in a way the previous era’s smooth, refined minimalism didn’t, even though the actual quality level, he argues, hasn’t shifted 00:25:36. Finally, Butler-Young flags what she reads as pointed shade in Pavlovsky’s distinction between loyal, purchasing clients and online “fans” who critique the brand without buying 00:26:49. Williams partially validates this, agreeing there’s a real gap between spectatorship and clienthood, but pushes back on the idea that Chanel dismisses the fan discourse — noting the brand has deliberately courted shopping influencers and VICs to narrow exactly that gap, a tactic he says would have seemed distasteful for Chanel only a few years ago 00:28:59.

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.