PACKAGING DESIGN & SOLUTIONS: LUXURY
How to understand luxury Attempting luxury packaging? Doug James of Honey talks us through the process that he believes should be implemented
You would think that, with all the talk of hard times from here until the seas freeze over, the one sector that would really suffer would be luxury gifting, the passing of apparently frivolous products from one person to another.
S
Doug James is Managing Director of Honey, brand, design and marketing agency. For more information, visit
www.honey.co.uk.
ome of the panic signals out in the market and the degree of brave whistling in
the dark from retailers would seem to bear this out. But that is to equate hard times with a return to a very basic level of existence. Times are hard but not that cataclysmic. At least, not yet. And some trends are up. At one
end, top London stores are showing serious profit returns. Selfridges’ profits are up by 20 per cent to £107 million, Fortnum &
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Mason’s were up by 134 per cent despite snow, students and animal rights protests. Moss Bros are back in profit mainly because of the hire of outfits for school proms. At a more modest end, people are spending 15 per cent more on a bunch of flowers than they did three years ago and sales of chocolate selections are expected to rise by 17 per cent, while a whole new sector of super- premium chocolate has emerged. This is not a coincidence. In
hard times, people seek compensatory gifts or self-gifts to make up for other, more expensive treats being unattainable. There are, of course, still a few people whose natural habitat is Kensington and Notting Hill and who have no money concerns. The ones we so
enjoy hating. They need not concern us here. They are not real people. There is, of course, a sliding
scale of luxury. It is often said that today’s luxury is tomorrow’s necessity, though it remains to be seen whether that cliché will go into reverse in the next few years. For the purpose of this article, I am defining luxury as the frivolous, unnecessary purchase. Unnecessary from a practical point of view, that is, but highly necessary from an emotional point of view. There is still money to be made in this area. But, like any market, there are no easy pickings. Say luxury and you think of art for art’s sake. Not a bit of it. You still need rigorous segmentation and targeting. Get it right and opportunities lie in several areas.
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