Luxury and products.
As far as I remember, luxury has always been about more than products. It is about emotion. About desire.
About the invisible connection between a person and something they don’t just want to own, but to experience. And yet, today, something feels different.
Step into many boutiques and, instead of passion, you feel pressure. Instead of emotion, you feel targets.
Instead of connection, you feel transactions. This is not a market problem. This is something deeper.
A simple experience that says a lot
As some people who know me well are aware, I am a passionate music enthusiast. When I have the opportunity, I invest in high-quality audio equipment. I am not a frequent buyer. In fact, the last time I purchased something from my neighbour store was almost two years ago.
And yet, when I walked in recently, two things immediately struck me. First, the salesperson remembered my name and called me friendly using it. Second (and more importantly) his passion.
The way he spoke about the products was not technical or staged. It was genuine. He made me feel the product. He made me imagine what it would be like to experience it in my own space. At no point did I feel like I was being sold something. I felt like I was being invited into something, try, experience, enjoy. And he was enjoying it with me. It was a conversation between two people with something in common. It was “luxury” in a non a luxury boutique.
The uncomfortable question to ask
If this level of passion and connection exists outside the luxury world, why is it becoming so rare within it?
The industry keeps asking the same questions:
– Do we have the right products?
– Are our prices positioned correctly?
– Are we targeting the right markets?
But these are not the real questions anymore. The real questions are far more uncomfortable. Do we still have the right people? And more importantly, are we creating the conditions for them to develop and operate?
What don’t we say out loud
There is a growing reality in the industry that is rarely addressed openly. Talented professionals are leaving retail because the pressure is no longer sustainable. A significant number of women leave retail not because they lack ambition, but because the industry still struggles to accommodate something as basic as raising children. Long and inflexible working hours, weekend demands, and limited control over schedules
make it extremely difficult to combine a career in retail with family life. This is not a question of capability.
It is a question of structure. Many are burning out trying to achieve targets that do not reflect the complexity of today’s market. Some end up on sick leave not because they are not capable, but because the system around them is.
An entire generation went through Luxury based Masters and specific business schools. They enter retail with energy, ambition, and passion… but not always for the same reasons. Some are genuinely driven by a desire to build relationships, to understand clients, to be part of an environment where emotion and experience matter. Others are attracted by what retail appears to offer on the surface(access, image, proximity to the product). And that, in itself, is not the problem. The real issue is that the industry often struggles to distinguish between the two.
And in this confusion, we don’t just fail to recognize talent, we actively push it out. Not because it isn’t there.
But because the system is not designed to sustain it.
© Training Luxury — All rights reserved
Client experience: just an illusion
At the same time, the industry continues to proudly speak of the idea of “client experience.” But there is a fundamental contradiction:hHow can we expect people to create meaningful, emotional experiences for clients when they themselves feel exhausted, controlled, and disconnected?
Luxury sells emotion externally, but too often suppresses it internally. And this is where the real fracture begins.
Luxury curtain falling
In a recent conversation with a long time industry professional, another pattern became clear. He believes that often the issue is not only pressure. It is also inertia. People who are meant to drive business forward are often caught in endless meetings where no real decisions are made. Organizations speak about agility, yet decisions take months.
They speak about innovation, yet continue to hire the same profiles, from the same brands, with the same standards, reproducing the same thinking.
This is not transformation. It is repetition, just presented more convincingly. And the consequence is inevitable: you cannot build a different future with the same mindset and the same level of courage.
© Training Luxury — All rights reserved
The real crisis in luxury
It is tempting to attribute the current slowdown only to external factors (geopolitics, economic uncertainty, shifting markets), which play by the way a crucial role. But these are accelerators, not root causes. The real issue is internal.
Luxury is becoming transactional. And when a sector built on emotion becomes transactional, it loses the very essence that made it desirable in the first place. But there is another layer to this. Too often, the people who are closest to the business are the furthest from decision-making. Decisions that should take days end up taking months. Not because they are complex, but because they are postponed or not taken at all. Multiple stakeholders, endless alignment, constant validation loops. In the name of collaboration, we create systems where no one truly decides. It’s the paralysis by analysis. And while organizations are trying to protect themselves from risk, they end up losing something far more valuable: Momentum.
Opportunities disappear. Productivity fades away and the people who brought ideas forward gradually disengage.Because when everything needs approval, nothing really moves. And when nothing moves,
the business slows down internally, before externally.
There is also a deeper issue at play: a lack of true delegation. Everyone is busy. Everyone is involved.
But very few are actually empowered to decide. And in this environment, complexity increases, while accountability decreases. The paradox is clear:the more layers we add to control the business, the less control we actually have over its direction.
Where do we restart
Not from new collections. Not from pricing strategies. Not from more sophisticated presentations. And certainly not from adding more layers to already complex systems.
We restart by addressing what we have been avoiding.
- Rehumanizing the retail
Retail is not a process. It is a human experience. And yet, too often, we treat people as extensions of targets,
rather than as the very source of emotion and connection. Rehumanizing retail means creating environments
where people can and need to learn (duties are coming with the full package also for retail professionals). Environments where people express judgment, intuition, and personality, not just execute. Environment that promotes people passionate about human relations, not just the ones good looking with some language skills who bearly stand the idea of walking on the shopfloor. Because clients don’t remember processes. They remember people. Because in the end, the equation is simple, you cannot sell passion with people who are running out of it.
2. Redefining performance
If revenue is the only metric that matters, then everything else will eventually disappear. Passion, care, attention to detail. They don’t vanish overnight. They fade quietly when they are no longer recognized. Redefining performance means asking a harder question: what kind of behavior are we truly rewarding? Because over time, people don’t align with what we say. They align with what we measure.
3. Simplifying how we decide
Speed is not the enemy of luxury: that is confusion. Decisions need ownership. Ownership requires trust. This means fewer layers, clearer accountability, and the courage to accept that not every decision will be perfect. Mistakes are not the opposite of success. Because the real risk today is not making the wrong decision.
It is making none.
4. Creating careers people can sustain
Attracting talent is not the challenge. Keeping it is. If a career in retail is incompatible with having a life outside of it, then the industry will continue to lose exactly the people it needs most. Flexibility is no longer a benefit.
It is a requirement. And ignoring it is no longer a choice, it is a cost.
A Final Thought
Luxury was never meant to be efficient. It was meant to be meaningful. And meaning does not come from products alone. It comes from people, their energy, their belief, their ability to make something feel real.You cannot sell passion with people who are running out of it. So the real question is not whether luxury will recover. It is whether it is willing to change what needs to be changed internally to deserve it.
