Welcome to The Business of Luxury – where we dissect the world’s most desirable brands to uncover the branding, the marketing, and the psychology that make them impossible to ignore.
This week: The luxury market just split in two. And if you’re still marketing to “everyone,” you’re about to get left behind.
Because the future belongs to Very Important Clients – the 2% who now drive 45% of all luxury spend while the aspirational middle (I hate to say it) disappears.
High-end buyers aren’t hesitating because of price. They’re filtering harder than ever for one thing:
→ Can I trust this decision will still feel right six months from now?
So if your sales feel slower but your work is solid, this week’s dispatch reveals what luxury brands spotted 18 months ago… and how you can adapt.
While everyone’s been wringing their hands about “the economy,” the top tier clients keep spending. And the brands smart enough to notice are quietly redesigning their entire business model around a single insight: the future belongs to Very Important Clients.
Not “high-net-worth individuals.” Not “premium customers.”
VICs… the 2% of clients who drive 45% of all luxury spend while the aspirational middle retreats to vintage and little treats.
So what does all this mean for personal brands?
The Age of Very Important Clients has arrived
Around 35% of aspirational luxury shoppers, the ones spending under €5,000 annually (that’s about £4,300/$6,000), have either reduced or completely halted their luxury purchases.
They’re reallocating to savings, wellness, secondhand. The safe bets.
Meanwhile, high-net-worth clients spending over €50k per year? They’re concentrating their purchases.
→ Doubling down on the brands they love and trust.
This isn’t a temporary quarter to quarter blip. It’s structural realignment of the whole economy. Yikes!
Luxury has stopped being a volume game (it should never have been about volume but that’s another post for another time).
It’s now an importance game. And the brands winning aren’t the ones with the biggest audiences, they’re the ones designing experiences that make VICs feel like the only client in the room.
The rest are competing for an increasingly cautious aspirational market that may never return to pre-2023 spending patterns.
Let me show you what I mean…
What VICs actually buy
(Spoiler: it’s not the Product)
Most traditional, commodity marketing gurus think VICs want luxury because it’s expensive – nope, they don’t. They want justification, and that’s why brands have to work much harder in this economic climate to make every decision feel defensible months down the line. Like it’s an investment.
The boffins at 1Bain have discovered something interesting.
Top-tier clients are demanding four things before they buy:
- Precision. Not options. Not “we can do anything.” They’re paying for exactness. For someone who’s solved their specific problem so thoroughly that the solution feels inevitable. VICs want “the thing” not some approximation.
- Intimacy. Direct access. Remembered preferences. Being seen as an individual, not a transaction. Personalisation at a 1:1 level is the ultimate “I see you.”
- Craftsmanship. Depth of thinking, process, provenance. They want to understand how you arrived at this level of expertise. The journey matters as much as the destination. Your wisdom IS the product and AI can never replace that.
- Justification. They need to be able to explain – to themselves, to their peers –why this and not an alternative. You’re not competing on features (that’s a low level play). Instead, you’re competing on coherence to their identity and how they want to live their life.
This is about becoming the kind of brand that makes sense at the level they operate.
The kind they can confidently recommend without a whispered caveat.
Depth acts as a client magnet (when you use it correctly)
We’ve been taught to think more visibility = more opportunity.
VICs think visibility equals noise, overwhelm, and even desperation. Yeah, I said it.
They’re filtering for resonance (I feel seen) and congruence to their world view (I feel heard and understood). And what they’re filtering for is depth that signals you’re operating at their altitude.
This means for expert personal brands:
- A clear, uncompromising lens. Not “I help people with X.” More like “I believe Y is fundamentally misunderstood, and here’s the lens that reorganises everything.” Luxury brands don’t apologise for their perspective. Neither should you.
- Historical, cultural, or technical literacy. The reasoning behind your lens – the why of your perspective – needs to be sound, evidenced through either case studies of your own clients’ results or hardcore research and evidence from the industry that validates how you see the world.
- Specific, named frameworks and language. VICs want proprietary thinking they can credit to someone. Make it easy for them to cite you.
Depth isn’t showing off. This isn’t a PhD paper you’re writing.
It’s showing you’ve done the work they don’t have time to do – and that you speak their language without them having to translate it.
You’re interpreting the world for them and consolidating it into your brand.
Proximity beats visibility every single time
VICs don’t discover brands through algorithm luck. They discover them through trusted context:
- A recommendation from someone whose taste they respect.
- A well-written piece forwarded by a colleague.
- A DM exchange that felt like talking to a peer, not being sold to.
This is why the traditional, commodity-based, “grow your audience” playbook is broken for premium positioning. You don’t need 100,000 followers. You need 100 people who trust you enough to introduce you into rooms you can’t buy your way into.
For you, this might look like:
- Private Telegram group instead of a Facebook group
- Quarterly in-person salons instead of monthly webinars
- DM conversations instead of email sequences
= Being known deeply by 50 people instead of vaguely by 5,000
VICs pay for access to people who are slightly hard to reach but incredibly high-leverage once you’re in.
Scarcity isn’t artificial when it’s structural.
Every interaction is an audition
That newsletter they subscribed to. That DM reply. That discovery call. Every touchpoint either confirms you operate at their level, or quietly disqualifies you.
VICs aren’t just evaluating your service delivery with a logical checklist. They’re evaluating whether working with you will feel like the right decision six months from now when they’re explaining it to a friend.
Does working with you feel calm, safe and measured or a chaos factory?
For personal brands, this translates into:
- How you show up – Are you explaining and justifying or assuming fluency? Educating or resonating? VICs don’t need the basics. They need the nuance, the wisdom, that “I feel seen” feeling.
- How you onboard – Is it seamless or scrambling to patch things together? Do they feel rare and precious or treated like they’re just another Stripe notification?
- How you deliver – Is the work presented with the same precision they’d expect from a Michelin chef? Or does it feel like you’re still figuring out your process?
The brands VICs choose don’t just do good work. They make the client feel sophisticated for choosing them.
Here’s the punchline…
The shift to Very Important Clients isn’t coming. It’s here. And it’s sorting premium service providers into two categories: those building for depth, proximity, and earned trust… and those still optimising for reach and volume.
The future belongs to the former. The question is whether you’re building for it.
