Isabel Giordano: Nowadays there are really well-established luxury brands and conglomerates that everyone knows about. What is your opinion on luxury brands that aren’t so well known, or a new luxury brand that is trying to grow, do you still think growth is possible?

Gianni Serazzi: Excellent question, but not an easy one to answer though. First of all, what is luxury? One of the key elements of luxury is that it allows brands to demand a premium price to their customers, generation after generation. How can you prove that a new luxury brand will be there after several generations?

Let me give you an example: Tesla had fantastic financial success. It is unclear how much of a premium price they can demand from a consumer, but even if we assume that they can, how can we prove that Tesla is considered as a luxury brand as of today, so the next generations will want to buy a Tesla product?

Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Hermès have all proven to be luxury over time, and they will remain luxury for the next 10 generations. When Man will be living in space,  chances are there will be a Louis Vuitton product up there, way after everybody that we know is gone.

Launching a luxury brand is hard. Maybe 150 years ago, when you were not competing with brands that had already been around for so long, and were already well developed, you could have had a chance to launch and grow. Today it’s much harder, not impossible, but because 90-95% of the luxury brands that we will have 100 years from now already exist, the difficulty is much higher.