Luxury raised its prices. It forgot to stay different

In nearly every brand conversation I’ve had this year, the same confusion surfaces. Executives cannot tell whether they are moving too slowly or too quickly in a direction nobody actually chose. I say that as someone whose job is built on understanding where things are heading. Speed explains part of it. Access explains more. Every brand now works with the same tools, reads the same trend reports, and buys the same best-practice playbooks, which means the output converges even where the intent does not. Brand strategist Eugene Healey has a name for the result: the “slop economy.” His argument is that artificial intelligence did not invent slop. Rather, what we are looking at is a consolidation of aesthetics predating AI by years, visible in gray cars, stock furniture, and fast-casual bowls. Luxury ought to be the last industry exposed to this. It is not. Prices across European personal luxury goods sit at least 52% above 2019 levels, according to HSBC, and Bain estimates that roughly 50 million customers dropped out of the market between 2022 and 2024. An industry that charges a rarity premium has spent five years raising the premium while narrowing the rarity. The real slop isn’t AI Slop, in common usage, describes the low-quality repetitive content generated at scale by AI. Healey’s reframing is the more useful one: the real slop is an economic model rewarding scale and repetition over character. Once you look at slop through that lens, it turns up everywhere — food, retail, brand design, and architecture. Cafés resemble each other. So does typography and the studied sense of originality. Call it an economy of efficiency, where brands adopt value propositions and visual languages already validated by the market. But the results suggest a more fitting name: an economy of conformity. My argument is that building real distinction requires discomfort because new value begins with disagreement — a sustained disagreement with your category, or with the values shaping how people consume. Sustaining it is uncomfortable because it almost always means giving up a formula that already works. Le Labo makes its fragrances to order, hand-blended in front of the customer, in a category where margin depends on scale. Brunello Cucinelli manufactures in Solomeo, an Umbrian village of 711 people, while the rest of luxury has moved workshops abroad to cut costs. Soho House decided that not every finance professional needed to belong and built a club for the creative industries instead, which meant deliberately excluding people who did not share that culture. Gabrielle Chanel put jersey into womenswear when it was still understood as material for men’s underwear and abandoned the corset while her competitors were still building around it. Each of those decisions cost something at the time. That was the point. Oura’s bet against the wearable playbook Creative discomfort rarely means inventing a category. More often, it means examining an existing one and identifying what is still missing, even when the category looks healthy. Wearables illustrate this pattern. At the peak of the category’s growth, Oura challenged its most basic assumption — that wearable technology had to look like technology. The Finnish company’s last private funding round, announced in October 2025, valued it at $11 billion, more than double Burberry’s market capitalization of roughly £4 billion ($5.3 billion). Oura launched its fifth-generation ring in May 2026 and has since filed confidentially for an IPO. That comparison is imperfect. A funding round is not a market price, and Oura is not a luxury house. It is still instructive, however, because the decision that produced the company was available to every business in the category, and none of them made it. Trust your own observation, and be willing to bet against what your industry treats as settled. Salomon’s lesson in staying true Marketing discomfort means losing part of the market in order to build stronger loyalty in the part that remains. Pressure for growth pushes the other way. Ask a room who the target audience is, and the most common answer is “everyone.” Appealing to everyone usually ends with appealing deeply to very few. Heikki Salonen, appointed Salomon’s first creative director in early 2026, put his position on the record in June. He described watching the brand become fashionable during his years at Maison Margiela and said plainly that “Salomon should never become a fashion brand.” His vision is to engineer products for performance that the fashion community can adopt, rather than products whose core value is looking good. Holding that line publicly, at a moment when every performance brand is chasing cultural relevance, is uncomfortable. It also protects the thing that made the brand worth adopting in the first place. There is a Spanish expression for the alternative: pan para hoy, hambre para mañana. Bread for today, hunger for tomorrow. Perhaps the question executives should be asking is the reverse of the usual one — not what is lost by speaking to fewer people, but what is lost by speaking to everyone. Consumers are part of the conformity cycle Consumers complete the cycle. Markets respond to what people appear to want, and people ask for what already feels familiar. We have spent a year discussing taste and the autonomy it supposedly confers. The uncomfortable reading is that we are becoming more uniform, not less: same influencers, same brands, same places, same aesthetics. Developing real taste requires discomfort too, and occasionally it requires being willing to look strange. Pay attention to how it feels the first time you wear something new or walk into an unfamiliar room. If it feels immediately comfortable, either you can see value before everyone else, which is rare, or you are recognizing a code that once belonged to someone else’s act of courage before repetition turned it into convention. The questions every CEO should ask None of this matters to a chief executive unless it changes a decision. It should. When every competitor has the same tools, the same reports, and the same playbooks, doing what everyone else does stops being the safe option. Efficiency used to be a moat; now, it is the floor everyone starts from. What remains to differentiate on is precisely what efficiency strips out: a point of view the category does not yet share. Most internal pressure runs toward comfort — the decision nobody will contest, the campaign that tests well, the audience defined as everyone because narrowing it feels like leaving money on the table. That pressure is not irrational. It is optimized for the world as it already is, rather than for value that does not exist yet. So the useful thing is not a framework but a short set of questions worth returning to before any major call: Who are we deliberately not for, and are we willing to pay that price? If the answer is nobody, the decision is probably not protecting anything. Where did this idea meet no resistance internally? Comfort inside the building is often the earliest signal of sameness outside it. What are we doing right now purely because the category validated it? Not because it is wrong, but because it is worth knowing which parts of the business run on borrowed conviction. Discomfort for its own sake is not the argument. Plenty of uncomfortable decisions are simply bad ones. The difference is whether the discomfort comes from a genuine insight into what the category lacks or from randomness dressed up as boldness. The companies mentioned above were not uncomfortable and successful at the same time. They were successful because the discomfort came first, and they trusted it enough to keep hold of it.

Luxury raised its prices. It forgot to stay different

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag

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Luxury raised its prices. It forgot to stay different

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag