30 Jun 2023
Luxury used to be associated with extravagance and excess, the word luxury originates from Latin ‘luxuria’ excess and ‘luxus’ extravagance, but now luxury brands like us are finding that the customers are perceiving luxury to be more about the experience and the added value behind the product. We are finding that our customers value the experience of shopping for their item and the story behind it as much as owning the piece itself. Perhaps after the pandemic, we are all valuing human connection more than ever and this can also be a key part of the luxury experience too.
Araminta Birse-Stewart our Founder and Creative Director explains, ‘90% of our clients discover us by word of mouth, there is no one thing we do that creates true luxury its is about covering ever detail to the best of our ability, we achieve this by creating personal connections with our client during their visits to our castle like atelier combined with creating pieces with a story they can connect to and that make them feel special, when they are with us but also from the memories created that travel away with each of our pieces’
Frank de Pino in ‘Media Boom’ (June 19, 2023) explains that today ‘luxury focuses more on things that money cannot buy, such as the notion of freedom’ and goes on to quote David Abraham of Design House Abraham saying that ‘luxury today is about value, not property’.
We have brought in QR codes and include these with our products as we are finding our customers want to hear the story behind the piece and the inspiration behind the design and the story of the brand.
Richard Kestenbaum in his Forbes article (Dec 16, 2021), on explaining how the definition of luxury is expanding and changing cited Jared Weiner of The Future Hunters and his ‘3 T’s of Luxury’, ‘time, truth and trust’. He went on to explain that consumers valued their time and wanted an experience from their shopping.
Another component of a luxury product is its rarity, we find that customers are fascinated to find out all about why we use alpaca fibre and that it is rarer than cashmere (there are estimated 5 million alpacas worldwide used for their fleeces, compared to around 700 million cashmere goats).
The Slow Fashion movement has been growing and our brand very much fits into this category (one full-time handweaver produces 45 pieces in a year) but now we are learning about ‘Quiet Luxury’, Annie Davidson Watson in Vogue Magazine explains ‘quiet luxury…it’s exceptionally high-quality, logo-free …it’s not a trend, it’s the opposite’. At a time where we are all on a journey to net zero and sustainability, we like so many brands welcome the move to customers wanting to buy items that last that like our products are made to be passed to the next generation not thrown away.
If you would like to take a look at our timeless collections, click here for MINTA, our contemporary interiors collection, or here for HERITAGE our Handwoven and Millwoven tartans and here for SIGNATURE, Araminta’s woven works of art.
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