Breaking into the Lucrative Luxury Goods Market
3 min read
Unless you’re in the business of selling luxury goods, most business-minded people and certainly entrepreneurs don’t quite understand the psychology behind a desire for what are referred to as luxury goods. You don’t even have to be in business for it to blow your mind as to why on earth someone would readily spend something like 20,000 Euro on a handbag, just because it’s branded with some “famous” designer’s name. “Who buys this stuff?” a certain Mr. Piers Morgan can be quoted as asking, on the Marbella episode of his hit series “Piers Morgan On…” (Piers Morgan on Marbella).
Nevertheless, it appears to be somewhat of a binary situation, where it’s either you get it or you don’t. Either way, the luxury goods market can be a very lucrative one to get into and there are different ways of doing so.
The conventional luxury goods sales route
You would probably need quite a bit of start-up capital to go the conventional route in selling luxury goods, but the good news is that pretty much all the marketing will have been done for you. Having paid rent on the equivalent of a High Street retail outlet location, something like the concept store of a well-known luxury goods brand will inevitably draw the clientele you’d be looking to sell to. The marketing efforts of the brand managers, which feature the likes of celebrity endorsements and the likes, basically trickle down to all franchisees or retailers in one way or the other.
As mentioned though, you would need a considerable amount of start up capital to go this route.
Cutting down on your overheads
One way of cutting down on the overheads you would have otherwise had to contend with is through operating something like an online retail store for the luxury goods you want to sell. It’s much, much cheaper to set up an e-commerce website than it is to rent a shop on the High Street, but it’s not a completely costless exercise. The servers on which the site runs cost money, albeit not a lot, so too will the marketing you’ll have to do in order to gain the trust of buyers, source the goods you want to sell and fulfil deliveries of any sold items.
Nevertheless, you don’t have to go the traditional route.
Direct marketing
One thing that stands out about the luxury goods market is that people are more likely to buy if they can hold the goods it their hands and interact with them on that level. So you can definitely make some good sales if you go the direct marketing route.
Clever sourcing
The best source for luxury goods may just be the so-called “second-take” market, where some of the props used in movies and on television sets are sold after being only used once or twice. Most of those props are luxury goods, making for the latest iterations of what’s available on the market, so it’s worth looking into this second-take market to source goods that you can physically show your prospective customers.
