Why luxury’s best people are leaving — and what the industry stands to lose

Over the past year, I have watched colleagues and industry contacts I respect make the same decision independently: to leave organizations they once admired. Not because the work had lost its meaning, but because the cultures they navigated had become incompatible with meaningful contribution. These are not isolated cases. They are a pattern, and the numbers are beginning to reflect it. CXG’s report, “The Advisor Effect,” published in November 2024 and based on 12,000 surveys of retail employees from 12 luxury brands conducted between 2022 and 2024, found that 51% of luxury retail employees plan to leave their positions, up from 30% just two years prior. The industry’s habit of treating culture as secondary to strategy is beginning to show its cost. Luxury is in the middle of a talent crisis it has not yet named. The brain drain is quiet, incremental, and almost invisible in quarterly results — until it isn’t. The middle management trap Middle management is where culture either holds or fractures. It sits between strategic intent and operational reality, shaping how organizations actually behave over time. Many professionals enter luxury with genuine admiration for the craft, trading higher financial compensation elsewhere for symbolic proximity to heritage, beauty, and purpose. Over time, as roles stabilize, familiarity can become insulation. Incentives begin to favor preservation over exploration. New voices — particularly those with strong capabilities or visible ambition — can unintentionally unsettle an equilibrium that has grown comfortable. What follows is rarely the result of individual malice. It is system reinforcement: informal alliances, selective information flows, and surface-level politeness masking territorial behavior. The Devil Wears Prada posture — cruelty framed as rigor, exclusion recast as standards — once read as authority. Today, it signals outdated operating logic. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2024 report, top-quartile engaged teams outperform their bottom-quartile counterparts by 18% in productivity and 23% in profitability. Fear-shaped environments produce the inverse. Talent does not walk out overnight; it responds to repeated signals. When effort no longer leads to growth, capable individuals recognize that the system has reached its limit and move on. CXG’s research points to a fundamental misalignment between brands’ perceptions of the work environment they provide and client advisors’ experiences of it — and that gap is driving roughly half the industry’s retail workforce toward the exit. What C-suite silence signals Culture does not form through mission statements. It forms through what leadership rewards, what it allows to pass without comment, and what it quietly protects. The signals rarely need to be explicit. Promotion decisions speak. Silence during conflict speaks. Selective enforcement speaks. When high performers behave poorly without consequence, behavior becomes currency. When discomfort is pushed downward rather than addressed, fear spreads without needing a name. A senior HR partner at one of the world’s most influential technology companies — a sector that has already navigated the talent disruptions now approaching luxury — put it directly: the challenges luxury will face are already forming. By the time they surface, leadership pipelines will feel thinner, innovation ecosystems more fragile, and trust far more expensive to rebuild. The C-suite’s influence on culture operates long before any transformation initiative is announced. It shows up in who is challenged, who is shielded, and who absorbs the emotional cost of tension. These decisions determine whether a system evolves or simply preserves itself. An inflection point for new entrants Luxury still holds a powerful appeal. The craft, the heritage, the cultural weight — the desire to contribute to something with history and meaning. That pull is real, and so is the industry’s need for fresh perspectives. But entering luxury today demands discernment. Skills open doors; culture determines whether professionals thrive once inside. Before accepting an offer, the questions worth asking are structural: How does power circulate? How does feedback move? How do people behave when they believe no one important is watching? The best organizations in this industry will challenge talent and develop it. They will meet energy with opportunity. When that fit exists, luxury delivers on its promise. Growth, however, should not require self-erasure. Contribution should not demand assimilation into dysfunction. The two are worth telling apart — before signing. Behavior is the strategy The external world has evolved. Certain internal behaviors, however, have remained comfortably familiar: ego dressed as confidence, quiet cruelty framed as rigor, territorial behavior protected as loyalty. None of this reflects how high-performing organizations actually function. Culture is shaped by daily behavior: the tone in meetings, what is tolerated in moments of discomfort, choices made when no one is watching. These accumulate quietly, determining who stays long enough to contribute and who leaves to protect their sense of self. For luxury to remain competitive — as a creative industry, a talent destination, and a business — culture cannot be treated as a soft concern. It is a strategic one, and the window to address it before the damage compounds is narrowing. Carlotta Rodben is a luxury innovation specialist and author of “Beyond Luxury: The Promise of Emotion.” She previously led innovation at Chanel and now advises luxury brands on strategy and transformation.

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Why luxury’s best people are leaving — and what the industry stands to lose