Worth Every Penny

Have you ever seen a piece of clothing that you loved but looked at the price tag and put the hanger down to only immediately feel the need to leave the shop? But something inside of you wanted to purchase it despite its high price? Well, you should know that you’re far from being the only one struggling in such situations.

Luxury has always been a synonym for quality. The luxury apparel industry built their brands focusing primarily on using and offering the best materials for their products crafted to perfection by skilled craftsmen.

So, when we pay a handsomely a higher price, it includes the unique artistry, designer’s time, brilliance, material and the impeccable quality of the product. People often equate cost and quality, which explains why luxury brands keep their prices on the higher end of the spectrum.

When you pick up a Saint Laurent leather jacket, you are assured that you are investing in a unique piece crafted by artisanal experts creating a product made from the best of materials. Brands focus more on developing their identity. That’s what we call branding. Branding is the expression of the essential truth or value of an organization, product, or service. It is communication of characteristics, values, and attributes that depict the essence of the brand whilst telling its story.

When you buy a luxury product, a large part of it is the feeling you get when you purchase it: “Buy a normal watch and you will know what time it is; wear a Rolex and you feel like you own it.” So, what you’re buying besides the product but are much more invested in the feeling that comes with owning it. Robert Duffy, co-founder of Marc Jacobs International, sums it up perfectly in a New York magazine piece, “Luxury is something you don’t need, it’s something you want. The bag of potato chips I ate for lunch was a luxury.”

The biggest budget that luxury goods and services works on developing each and every day is marketing. Brands spend millions of dollars on fashion shows, celebrities, photographers, models, ads and ad placement in the right magazines. So, most of the money that what we pay for clothes goes to the department that builds the aspiration amongst consumers and generates the desire to be wearing, flaunting or simply shopping for those products.

Mass-production is what Luxury avoids. Making 100 garments instead of 1,000, drives both the cost and the retail prices up. It is exclusive and unattainable, that what makes it desirable and the reason why customers are willing to pay steep prices for the products.

High fashion prices can be so expensive because that’s what shoppers are willing to pay for. It’s a fact for fashion as it is for food, gadgets, cars, and the list goes on. Some customers find joy in buying clothes that exclusive to a certain fashionable niche or they simply want to have the same dress and bag as the one they’ve seen adorned by a celebrity or seen in a magazine/movie/TV show. And as Coco Chanel said before: “The best things in life are free. The second-best things in life are expensive.”