Luxury Is Pricing Out Its Future Customers
Luxury’s problem may not be that people have stopped wanting it. They may have stopped imagining it as part of their future.
For years, aspirational consumers had a path into a luxury house. Someone might begin with a fragrance or pair of sunglasses, move to a cardholder, and eventually save for the handbag tied to a promotion, a new job, or a personal milestone. She did not need to afford the entire brand; she needed a believable first step.
That matters in a culture focused on the future self. People talk about manifesting the life they want, entering a new era, becoming “that girl,” or behaving like the person they hope to become. Luxury has always understood how to attach products to that transformation. The handbag was never only a handbag; it could represent the moment she felt she had finally become the person who could buy it.
Post-pandemic price increases have disrupted that relationship. McKinsey found that price increases accounted for more than 80% of luxury’s growth between 2019 and 2023, but higher prices have since begun weakening demand among aspirational consumers. The problem is not simply that each step costs more. In some categories, the middle of the path has disappeared.
When ownership stops feeling difficult and starts feeling impossible, aspiration becomes spectatorship. The consumer may still follow the runway shows, know the creative director, recognize the archive references, and watch every unboxing, but she is no longer moving toward a purchase. A luxury house can dominate the cultural conversation while losing the consumers who might have become future clients.
The market data suggests this is already happening. Bain estimates that the active luxury customer base fell from roughly 400 million people in 2022 to about 330 million in 2025. At the same time, clients spending more than €20,000 a year now account for more than 46% of personal luxury spending, compared with 30% in 2019.
Focusing on those top clients makes obvious financial sense. They are less price-sensitive, shop across categories, and generate enormous value. But luxury cannot wait until someone becomes wealthy to begin building its next generation of customers.
Loyalty often begins with the first accessible purchase. A fragrance or wallet can make a brand part of how someone sees herself, and research on identity-based choice suggests that this connection can shape later choices and spending. The purchase may be small, but the relationship it starts may not be.
Consumers have not stopped looking for ways to participate in luxury. They are buying pre-loved, renting for important occasions, choosing premium challenger brands, or moving discretionary spending into travel and wellness. The desire remains, but the money and customer relationship are moving elsewhere.
This is a great example of aspirational leakage. The luxury house still creates the dream through its campaigns, runway shows, celebrity placements, craftsmanship, and history. But when it no longer offers a believable route to ownership, another company captures the value of that desire.
Resale is the clearest example. BCG and Vestiaire Collective found that 66% of surveyed consumers used resale to discover or buy a brand for the first time. Someone’s first Chanel bag may now come from a resale platform, which then controls the authentication, service, recommendations, delivery, customer data, and first experience of ownership.
The answer is not to make luxury cheap. It is to create credible ways in through certified pre-loved, repair, trade-in, and entry products with real design value. These should feel like meaningful introductions to the house, not consolation prizes or the least expensive place to display a logo.
Luxury still needs scarcity, craftsmanship, and distance, but distance without direction eventually becomes exclusion.
I am interested to see which luxury houses begin treating resale and entry pathways as customer acquisition rather than brand dilution. The brands that do not may continue creating the desire while someone else builds the customer.
Dania Khalife
