Connected luxury

Abstract

Suzy Brian’s typical day begins at 7am. She usually starts off by scanning through her emails while sipping her morning coffee. On this morning, she opens her mailbox and observes that about twelve new messages have come through overnight, mainly from the several newsletters she had subscribed to, from luxury brands and other related websites. The first was an alert for a blog post from The Wealth Report, a blog by the Wall Street Journal, saying that the word luxury is dead. A quick read of the post and reader comments reveals that several people think that the term luxury is currently “slapped on everything from cellphones to toilet paper” and has therefore been rendered banal. She thinks that the word has even become more over-used since the beginning of the credit crunch by retailers and brands who desperately present every product as luxury in a bid to make a sale. At least this is the case in the home interiors market which she is quite familiar with. Anyhow, she isn’t convinced that luxury is dead because she knows that true luxury still stimulates the senses, evokes desire and inspires respect. People just didn’t seem to understand luxury anymore.

“Everything we use now online … blogs, etc, was what we did in 1990. There’s no difference. That was how we started.”

—Robert Cailliau, Co-Founder of the World Wide Web