While reading the book, “Luxury World” by Mark Tungate, one particular passage, where the author visits the shop of custom & made-to-measure shoemaker Pierre Corthay, stood out for me, and I believe it speaks directly to the recent efforts among marketing professionals to deliberately confuse the boundaries between 1.) mass-production global fashion brands employing low-wage labor and economies of scale, and 2.) genuine high-quality and limited availability luxury goods that are crafted with passion, precision and care by independent practitioners.
Previous to visiting Corthay, Tungate interviewed Tina Gaudoin, editor of the Wall Street Journal’s luxury magazine, WSJ, who sharply rebuked Tungate for criticizing companies that churned out expensive but factory produced handbags as “simply mass retailers with sophisticated advertising.” Gaudoin stated that, “If you look at groups like the Gucci Group, for instance, within that group you have Bottega Veneta, which has always been an artisanal brand and has maintained that approach. Hermes in France has done the same thing. An interest in small, artisanal brands may be a trend, but unless they have some kind of financial backing, quite frankly, they’re screwed.”
When Tungate relayed this message to Corthay, Corthay’s response illuminated the vast gulf in attitude and approach that separates the bottom-line driven, publicly traded luxury-fashion conglomerates from the small, independently owned and operated producers: “It depends if you want to do a job you love, or if you want to make money,” said Corthay. “If I wanted to get rich, I would do something else. Obviously, the business has to turn over, to put food on the table and roofs over our heads, but our main goal is to take pleasure and pride in what we do. The notion of pleasure is, for me, fundamental.”
Which is not to say that creating a pair of shoes by hand is a triumph of employees spinning across green hills and singing happy songs all day — it’s hard work. An article in The National by Gemma Champ cuts through the romance of couture level shoe production and gets to the nitty-gritty, where workers start their training in their teen years and spend the next decades of their working life nailing, cutting, stretching, pulling, adjusting and fitting.
But these business owners and small brand workers have a direct relationship with their customers — they meet them face to face, listen to their requests, turn their ideas into realities and work until the item is perfect instead of merely good enough for a retail shelf, and this personal attention to detail is what the consumer population is finding so fresh and intriguing. Tungate writes, “As consumers become increasingly demanding, they are likely to look more deeply into the provenance of expensive items, and they will find that the patient skills of (craftsmen) like Pierre Corthay offer a reassuring alternative to all that is flashy, insubstantial and evanescent.”
Knapferer and Bastien note in their book, “The Luxury Strategy“, that true luxury springs from a history of talented craftsmen utilizing the best and rarest materials at their disposal to produce the highest quality merchandise their skills could allow. And while not all luxury is created equal (as not all skill levels and raw materials are the same), the frosting that will always and ever complete the luxury cake is the personal connection between the artisan and the client.
Funny enough, it’s the democratizing force of the internet (of which 21st century high-fashion conglomerates have been wringing their hands in anguish) that’s the environment where today’s artisans and artisan appreciators often meet, connect and thrive, with real artisanship having been pushed out of the brick and mortar world long ago due to the influx of global brands planting a flagship on every Main Street within rock-throwing distance.
For example, Mandy Aftel of Aftelier, an all-natural fragrance brand she established in Berkeley, California that exlusively sources the type of high-quality ingredients that global fragrance brands like Chanel, Dior and Guerlain flee from in terror due to their expense and rarity, states that, “I really like the closer connections I’ve made with my clientele through social media — I had always wanted this close customer relationship from the beginning. I love making things for them that are extremely beautiful.” And Swiss perfumer Andy Tauer arguably established the majority of his fan base for his quirky, handmade perfumes through regular updates to his personal blog that reveal the human mind behind the brand name, allowing his customers to establish a connection with him that lasts beyond the cash register.
*Note: Both Tauer and Aftel can be found on Facebook and Twitter, where they communicate with their customers and often request and receive feedback on upcoming product launches and ideas, but in an “I desire to hear from you” rather than an “I have a new product to push at you, now buy buy buy!” way.
With the global economic picture looking ever more illusory, with ethical quandries over the outsourcing of labor and the conditions in which that outsourced labor labors, and with the problem of counterfeit goods invading nearly every area of retail life, from fashion to perfume to cosmetics to electronics and more (Tim Phillips writes in “Knockoff: The Deadly Trade in Counterfeit Goods” that there are 40 million fake Swiss watches produced every year compared to only 26 million real ones), consumers are turning to producers they can personally get to know and trust, and this includes luxury customers as well as the average mainstream shopper, a fact that makes commerical luxury magazine editors like Tina Gaudoin very, very cranky (see above), because who’s going to buy all those expensive advertising pages if luxury customers continue turning their backs on the corporately funded and seemingly omnipresent designer brands?
But it’s not an “either/or” proposition — mass-produced fashion goods can live together in the same world with artisan goods, but the growing Buy Local movement presently favors a return to the one-to-one client-producer relationship, a relationship that we can already see in full-bloom in the artisan food movement, in the desire for consumers to know where their food has come from, how it was grown/raised, and where/how it was processed and packaged.
It’s not an accident that “vintage” style and heavy retro-influences have reappeared on the runways of major fashion houses, with global brands attempting to co-opt the cultural psychological shift of consumers who are rejecting the “‘more is more’ and ‘he who dies with the most toys wins’ (concept) in favor of an approach to consumption that is more careful, considered and conscientious.”
Because if everything old is new again, then we’re likely on the cusp of a Made By Hand resurgence in the retail sector, a resurgence that will nonetheless (and interestingly so) incorporate 21st century production technologies and communication platforms.
*Next: The Artisan Series: Who Are They? (Part 2) — where we start to zero in on specific producers of handmade perfumes, jewelry and more.
