When speaking of ‘shopping’, many people remember it as a women’s activity, because women adore shopping that they can spend their time all day and they could shop everywhere from the low price to very expensive goods. Do you agree that shopping is a woman thing? In general, shopping is globally known as one of the addicting activities, but ‘luxury shopping’ is another level of addiction that typically occurs in every gender. Luxury shopping does not include only fast fashion, but also supercars, furniture, and many more. The luxury industry can fulfill most of the customers’ desires, by launching diverse types of products to reach customers’ needs.
There are many reasons why people are addicted to luxury shopping’, which is mainly based on luxury shoppers’ experiences including myself.
Definition of ‘Luxury’ referring to Merriam-Webster, an indulgence in something that provides pleasure, satisfaction, or ease but not necessary.
1.The Uniqueness Design
Have you ever noticed any luxury brand within less than a minute? That is because each luxury brand has a very strong design pattern that could make people recognize it’s their brand without stamping their brand tag clearly and huge on its product. It is not an easy thing that every brand could do. As the luxury brand has enough assets to hire many designer experts with quality experience who could make the design unique in its ways and could represent the brand in the best way possible.
The left picture is the signature pattern of Louis Vuitton and the right picture is the pattern of Bottega Veneta, which both represent their brand very well without having an outstanding logo or brand tag. People could immediately recognize what brand designed the bags in less than a minute.
2.The Superb Quality
The luxury items didn’t come with just the brand’s image and uniqueness designs, but also the marvelous products’ quality compared to the general brand in the market. It is reasonable that the higher the price gets, the higher quality the customer should receive.
For example, the general bag stores on the internet usually use cheaper material like PU leather (artificial leather) which expires in less than a year, compared to a luxury brand like Chanel that uses caviar leather (pebbled calf leather) which could last for more than 50 years.
The left picture is PU leather from the general brand and the right picture is pebbled calf leather from Chanel.
3. The Reputation of The Brand
It is undeniable that a lot of people buy luxury items because of the brand’s popularity. For the luxury shopper, they know that they could afford items with the same quality at a lower price. Although, they will still purchase the more expensive one due to the name of the luxury brand that they adore.
‘It is different because it is Hermès.’ — Nittha Weesommai
4.The Stories Behind Products
Having stories behind products could highly increase the price of items. Most of the luxury brands do their marketing by sharing the process of how their product is produced, how it is delicately made including hand-craft or handmade techniques. Handmade products take more time than the ones produced by machines, in which the level of price is triggered by this factor too. Moreover, by doing marketing utilizing the product’s history could influence the rising of price.
These are two examples of how people get influenced by the behind story of the product. The first one shows how the Lady Dior bag was made and the second picture is Princess Diana carrying the Lady Dior bag.
The story of the Lady Dior bag is “According to Marie Claire, Christian Dior’s iconic Lady Dior handbag was released in 1994 with no actual name, under the creative direction of Gianfranco Ferré.
However, the bag was presented to the Princess of Wales as a gift from Bernadette Chirac, then-First Lady of France, during a visit to Paris in 1995.
After that moment, the bag became instantly synonymous with Diana, and Marie Claire reports that the late Princess ordered the bag in every color.
It wasn’t long until the bag became one of the Princess’s most-worn accessories, and she wore it at multiple events and state visits.”, (Harper’s Bazaar, 2018).
After that, the Lady Dior bag became the dream bag of women around the world.
5.To Advance Self-Image in Social Status
Lastly, in today’s world, a lot of people tend to use luxury items to upgrade their looks and their social status. As people give more importance to self-image with the price of items other people use, it could classify the hierarchy of social status each person is in. Especially in Chinese and Thai society, these are some examples of photos of how they use luxury items to enhance their looks to look rich.
To wrap up everything, each person has different reasons for buying luxury items yet this mentioned reasons-above are the common factors driving them to buy luxury goods. Some people might buy it because of the unique design, the superb quality of the products, the reputation of the brands, the stories behind products, to advance their self-image in social status, all of these factors might be their reasons for buying a luxury item.
‘Lastly using luxury items or not is your choice and each person’s preference, it is no right or wrong.’
