#burnberry

Have you ever wondered why these luxury brands never have discounts?

So let’s start from the basics. Why do brands provide discounts? Attracts customers larger than your niche, accelerates sales and improve image. Now I would want you to also focus to the reason which isn’t customer centric. For every brand, in a certain time of the year there inventory is full due to unsold products and to clear that inventory for the year they offer discounts and offer (buy 1 get 1 free etc.)

Now coming to our main question, luxury brands do not believe in the concept of discounts as they prioritize having a certain niche of “sophisticated” customers. Due to their high prices since only 10% of the population can spend a fortune and submit to these high prices they automatically become the prime consumers of that brand, therefore making the brand a luxury. They believe this also helps them safeguard their brand image. Not only do they define the class of their customers with high prices but also have recently announced a peak in prices soon to ‘eschew major promotions’ (namely Michael Kors and Jimmy Choo). So what do they do with their unsold items? They obviously cannot sell that the following year cause then how will they take the lead on fast fashion. So they burn their unsold items. Yes you read that right, no recycling, nothing green, just out straight burn it and start fresh manufacturing.

In 2018 the British luxury brand Burberry was found burning excess stock worth £28.6m (USD 37m) to reportedly safeguard its brand image. After which the news was flooded with this and then came the hashtags which spread everywhere, one of which was #burnberry. Two months after which Burberry gave into the pressure and announced the withdrawal of this burning process.

So maybe Burberry got fixed, but what about the other brands who keep manifesting GO-GREEN but succumb to these shallow practices to maintain brand name, and why are customers choosing luxury over sustainability?

When the world is melting what are you going to do use your Gucci sunglasses?