Post by Alesia Radian

Everyone in luxury retail protects the top spenders. Almost no one protects the clients quietly holding the numbers together. Years ago, a line from Peter Fader and Sarah Toms’ The Customer Centricity Playbook stayed with me: the harder you work to develop your best clients, the more deliberate you have to be about the ones just beneath them. I saw it inside an international luxury fashion store. All the attention went to the VICs — the names everyone knew, the private appointments, the first look. Understandable. But just outside that spotlight sat a much larger group: the twice-a-year client, the gifting client, the one who came back only when someone gave her a reason. Twenty top clients and the next two hundred could be worth the same to the till across a season. Only one of those groups was being watched. That’s the quiet risk in most premium retention strategies. They confuse fairness with sameness. The job was never to treat every client the same. It’s to protect the top, develop the middle, and stop the lower-frequency clients with real potential from drifting away unnoticed. The clients you overlook are often the ones keeping the business steady. Nº 11 of The Retention Edit, on the clients premium brands quietly lose. #ClientRetention #CRM #LuxuryRetail #Clienteling