Why high-net-worth customers are redefining what ‘special’ means

A rhinestone Birkin sold in Ho Chi Minh City this spring for $440,144, roughly 35 times its retail value, with no boutique, no waitlist, and no years of relationship-building. Jane Birkin’s own prototype crossed the block at Sotheby’s last year for $10.1 million, becoming the most expensive handbag ever sold. Read those numbers, and the bag-as-trophy story looks unstoppable. Now consider another set of numbers. Bernstein research shows secondhand Birkin and Kelly prices easing from their pandemic peaks, with the average resale premium settling around 122% above retail, still higher than the original price but far below the speculative highs of three years ago. The same object, two opposite trajectories. And the explanation matters enormously for anyone managing a luxury brand. The easy answer points to a softening economy and cautious spending. I do not believe that explains anything at this altitude. The clients who buy at the Hermès level are not retreating. Something more interesting is happening, and I have been tracking it across our work for clients for a while now. Luxury’s most sophisticated high-net-worth individuals and ultra-high-net-worth buyers are applying a new, unforgiving scrutiny to what actually creates value and what merely signals it. They are redirecting spend toward genuine rarity and pulling back from anything that has become too familiar. The Birkin, of all objects, has now caught the edge of that scrutiny. The Birkin paradox: How luxury icons dilute their own value I was asked recently by the Wall Street Journal what makes an “It” bag, and I went deep on the Birkin because it is the most iconic bag with an incredible global demand. I conducted two decades of quantitative research across luxury markets with a focus on why people buy luxury, and it points to a consistent mechanism: when an item is clearly associated with luxury and carries a differentiated story, it produces a positive perception shift in the people who see it. That shift is the entire engine of desire. But the same research shows the engine has a limit. When an object becomes too ubiquitous, its signal power does not fade gently. It drops sharply and often without warning. That is the paradox at the heart of the Birkin’s success. It became one of the most recognized status objects on earth. Every visible carry, every celebrity arm, every viral unboxing expanded its cultural footprint and, in doing so, quietly diluted the exact quality that made it precious. I have discussed this issue with luxury investors at finance conferences over the last years, always for the same reason. Hermès did almost everything right. The brand kept the bag scarce with a discipline few houses can match. And yet after decades of selling it, with more bags entering circulation, a deepening resale market, and relentless social media visibility, the iconic status that built the Birkin may, at some point, begin working against it. Scarcity managed perfectly at the point of sale does not protect you from ubiquity accumulated over time. The rising bar of rarity If this were only about handbags, it would be a curiosity. It is not. An identical pattern is unfolding in every market where the affluent store meaning in objects. Look at collector cars. Analysts describe a market splitting cleanly in two, with documented, historically significant cars commanding record sums while ordinary examples and over-restored cars struggle to meet estimates. We have seen this movie before. The Ferrari bubble of the late 1980s burst when speculators who had treated cars as paper assets fled, and values fell sharply. What survived, and what eventually recovered, were the cars people loved rather than the ones people traded. Look at art, where the signal is sharpest. The 2026 Art Basel and UBS report describes a market becoming increasingly polarized, with the high end recovering its share of total value while the middle tier loses ground. The key insight is this: the report argues that the middle’s decline is not due to falling demand but inflation lowering the threshold for high-end spending, pulling works that once sat comfortably in the middle upward by value rather than by desire. Read that again. The middle is not collapsing. It is being redefined out of existence from above. What qualified as special yesterday is simply pleasant today. That is the surprising observation underlying all three markets. The bar for rarity keeps rising, and it rises fastest where success is greatest. Achievement at scale manufactures its own ceiling. The more broadly desirable you become, the more your best clients begin searching above you for the next thing that fewer people can have. Build ceilings, not hype So here is the question every luxury leader should be asking, independent of the category they are in: What in your portfolio is genuinely rare, and what has simply become well known? Those are no longer the same thing, and your most valuable clients have already separated them in their minds. A brand that confuses recognition with rarity will keep investing in visibility long after visibility has started working against it. This makes disciplined brand storytelling and scarcity management more critical than it has ever been. The instinct, when a category cools, is to manufacture heat. That instinct is dangerous. The hype-driven collaboration, the engineered frenzy, the drop designed to break the internet for a weekend — all of it trades long-term meaning for short-term noise. A stunt like the Swatch and Audemars Piguet collaboration generates exactly the kind of visibility that feels like a win and ages quickly into a liability. It floods the signal precisely when the most discerning buyers have started rewarding restraint. My guidance for brands is to do the opposite of that reflex. Build deliberate ceilings. Create tiers that remain genuinely out of reach. Protect the few things in your range that cannot be commoditized by their own popularity, and resist extending the iconic product into every channel until it is everywhere and therefore nowhere. The resale market is only the visible readout of an invisible shift in how the wealthy decide what deserves their money. Demand at the top is not contradicting the softening below it. The same force is producing both. Your best clients are moving upward, and they are asking a sharper question than they used to: not what looks expensive, but what is actually rare. Are you certain you still know the difference in your own brand? This is an opinion piece by Daniel Langer, CEO of Équité, recognized as one of the “Global Top Five Luxury Key Opinion Leaders,” and advisor to some of the most iconic luxury brands in the world. He serves as an executive professor of luxury strategy and pricing at Pepperdine University in Malibu and as a professor of luxury at NYU, New York. Daniel has authored best-selling books on luxury management in English and Chinese, and is a respected global keynote speaker. Daniel conducts in-person masterclasses on various luxury topics across the world. As a luxury expert featured on Bloomberg TV, Forbes, The Economist, and others, Daniel holds an MBA and a Ph.D. in luxury management and has received education from Harvard Business School. Sign up for his online luxury masterclasses at the Jing Academy.

Why high-net-worth customers are redefining what ‘special’ means

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Why high-net-worth customers are redefining what ‘special’ means

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag