I dislike Louis Vuitton as much as the next guy, but let’s not accuse them of things they aren’t guilty of: their products aren’t made in sweatshops in impoverished nations ruled by cruel despots. The majority of their products are made in Paris, with some lines made in Spain and the United States. There was discussion of opening a factory in India, but that has not yet happened.
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This fetishisation of largely useless luxury is an abomination.
Sent from my iPhone
Technical question, TFA says that sales growth is at 4% (so there IS growth), and I’m not sure where the “goods sales down 9%” comes from. I just wanted to know if I should not feel bad for them or definitely not feel bad for them.
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At this point, it’s tough to consider luxurious a device that is sold in 3/4 of the world and this year sold nearly as many devices as there are people in all of the Spanish speaking countries in South America.
Now maybe if your signature said “Sent from my Vertu”…
Hmm. As a longtime Apple fan boy up until eight years ago, I would call Apple a luxury brand. There are certain software development communities (I’m looking at you Ruby on Rails), where not using Apple hardware is looked at with distrust and derision. When I bought Apple hardware- and I bought a lot of it- I paid easily 1/3 to 1/2 more than I should have, just to have the Apple name and design. After I realized that I wasn’t getting any real added value, and bad build quality on every device, and bad repair service, I switched to commodity hardware and Linux and never looked back.
When it comes to the iPhone, it is still priced way out of the reach of most mobile customers in the world, even after the introduction of the cheaper model recently. Of course, the iPhone is getting slaughtered by the Android juggernaut (80% of sales now and rising). It doesn’t matter if the iPhone is on sale in 3/4 of the world, or if it sold “as many devices as there are people in all of the Spanish speaking countries in South America” (That’s about ~ 189 million people, and I can’t find sales figures anywhere near that for just the iPhone). When you look at the global sales numbers, the iPhone is a drop in a vast ocean. According to Mashable, they’ve even had to cut production of the iPhone 5C by 50% due to slow sales. Times are tough, and people are looking for more value.
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I bought Coach branded boat shoes at Nordstrom Rack (a highish-end clothing clearance/discount store that mostly sells last year’s models) a couple years ago. They’re actually made by Sperry (a well-known manufacturer and purveyor of boat shoes), and I know this because the store had, at the same time, an identical model that said Sperry on it.
The Sperry-labeled one was selling for ~$100 (MSRP was labeled $150). The Coach-labeled one was $45 (MSRP labeled $325). Again, it was identical in every way except it has a Coach logo on the tongue (which is obscured by the laces) - it actually has fewer logos and branding than the Sperry one.
I bought the Coach ones because they were cheaper but also the fact that they’re labeled Coach and not Sperry actually gives me some weird joy when I wear them. Not because I like Coach - I’d never normally associate myself with this type of luxury brand - but because apparently the Coach logo actually greatly devalued them in this case.
I can’t let myself completely off the hook here; I am obviously a hipster who made the decision to buy Coach shoes ironically. I wanted nice boat shoes but don’t like the Sperry brand (particularly the way they cover the shoes with their branding) and the associations it has, and Coach serendipitously offered me a solution.
The other solutions would have involved the ~$300+ alternatives that are the only way to get what I want (in terms of quality and style) without the Sperry association. A luxury brand made something normally out of reach accessible to me!
Also, for people who buy this stuff seriously, I do actually think things like Louis Vuitton bags can really work as accent pieces (or even better, things like their classic luggage - see photo). The rest of your appearance (well, your clothing mainly, as illustrated by Keith Richards in the photo) has to be at a very high fashion level, though. The reason these things usually look tacky is that people carry them around while wearing track suits or sweatpants.
Don’t be silly. You can’t internet with a Vertu.
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