Post by Gerald Roden

Luxury didn't lose its clients. It priced them out. According to the latest Bain-Altagamma Worldwide Luxury Study, the industry lost 70 million consumers between 2022 and 2025, reducing the active global base from 400 to 330 million. One number. Worth pausing on — and worth asking precisely who we are talking about. Not the buyers of Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, or Hermès. Ultra-premium clients have remained broadly resilient. The fracture is elsewhere: in the aspirational segment. The Longines buyer. The entry-level Cartier client. The person who, three years ago, was making their first deliberate move into luxury — and who has now quietly stepped back. These consumers were not conquered by a competitor. They were priced out by the industry itself. Between 2021 and 2023, luxury prices rose by an average of 20%, a strategy justified internally as elevation. What it produced externally was disconnection. And Bain's partners were unusually direct about it: even among the wealthiest clients, the word they used was betrayal. Price increases without a corresponding leap in creativity or meaning had broken something beyond a transaction. The watch industry knows this anatomy well. Entry-level references that once opened a brand relationship with younger buyers have been repriced out of reach or quietly discontinued. The collector pipeline — the person who buys a Tissot today and a Longines in three years and an IWC at forty — has been interrupted. Brands optimised for the short-term margin of existing clients, at the cost of the long-term depth of their future ones. The strategic question for the industry in 2026 is not whether growth will return. It probably will, modestly. The question is what kind of growth: one that rebuilds breadth, or one that simply extracts more value from a shrinking base. Luxury has always needed two things at once: a pinnacle to generate desire, and a wide enough base to sustain it. The pinnacle is intact. The base is eroding. That is not a cyclical problem. It is a strategic one — and it will not be solved by the next product launch. (Source: Bain & Company – Altagamma Worldwide Luxury Market Study, November 2025) #Luxury #Strategy #Watches #ConsumerTrends #LuxuryMarket