By Ciaran Bossom. Chief Executive Officer. PreSeason

As a teen, I was an avid consumer of luxury fashion, back when fast fashion didn't yet exist and shopping vintage was a visible signal of limited means. I was following a culture of newfound wealth flaunted by Wall Street MBAs, their more successful finance benefactors and mentors, and not insignificantly an emerging wave of successful women earning executive roles for the first time — women for whom the wearing of symbols of that success necessarily included limited edition handbags, luxury power suits, and tastefully paired rare designer jewelry.

For the newly wealthy, luxury offered overt symbols of prosperity alongside social codifiers of taste and privilege these consumer cohorts hadn't known before. Before social media influencers dictated the terms of style-born self-consciousness, buying luxury meant buying craftsmanship, heritage, and carefully curated symbolism — a curated substance and success that hard-to-obtain items bestowed on the wearer.

So much of that brand equity — the equity that once drove hoards of shoppers to line up outside Hermès in Manhattan ahead of new Birkin drops, much as later consumers would line up outside Apple's showrooms — has been lost. More than 70 million active luxury buyers have exited the market since 2022 (source: Global Growth Insights, 2026). The first decline in luxury sales since the pandemic, a $7 billion drop between 2024 and 2025 (source: Bain & Co.), was the first of many signals that elevated prices, overheated trend cycles, and overproduction had begun eroding the market.

But these industry issues aren't the core problem. The question CEOs need to ask is: if consumers still want luxury, why are so many of us deliberately avoiding the brands famous for selling it? Why are remaining luxury shoppers — including high-net-worth consumers — favoring unbranded Italian artisan trunk shows, luxury resale platforms, and rentable fashion over current releases?

The market isn't being disrupted from outside. It is revealing what it has become from within.

Luxury's value was never the object. It was the coherent system of meaning the object carried: provenance, scarcity, craft density, cultural intelligence. Price was simply the symbolic encoding of that system. Mainstream coverage frames today's luxury market as a "polycrisis" (Bain & Co.) — a confluence of tariffs, China-based shifts in sentiment toward Western brands, post-pandemic normalization, and Gen Z loyalty gaps.

None of that is the primary focus of this story, nor the root cause of what can now be called a collapsing luxury value system. This isn't a temporary lack of desire, and it isn't a "consumer connection" problem needing a fast fix. The market's downward momentum represents systemic degradation, not external shock.

A 50-60% decline in luxury fashion sales since the pandemic. A roughly 50-60% decline in natural diamonds over the same span (source: Diamond Exchange Houston). A 33% drop in watch prices on the second-hand market (source: CNBC)— a multi-billion-dollar parallel distribution and valuation system where strong resale values validate brand equity, encourage primary demand, and position luxury watches as tangible financial assets. These aren't cyclical corrections; they're structural disclosures. This is the lens CEOs need to apply to their businesses if they want to re-architect the model before losing everything — including the brand meaning that's core to brand equity, and that often plays an outsized role in Goodwill on a company's balance sheet. Look no further than the $21 billion Goodwill and Intangible Asset line in Apple's most recent 10-Q filing with the SEC for a sense of scale.

Luxury brands were already playing catch-up after the pandemic, many seeing undue risk to their stature and failing to recognize the brand growth potential of digital commerce. The rising cost of digital transformation pushed them to pay a premium upscaling supply networks — chasing faster trend cycles, broader distribution, more scalable production.

All of this looked like progress: on-paper indicators of growth and value creation to boards and investors. The opposite was true. The move to faster, broader, and more scaled dismantled the very conditions under which brand authority had been carefully architected over the last century.

As a reactive response to accelerating sales decline, luxury bag brands rather than cutting production volume, artificially sustained the market – as nearly 80% of industry growth between 2019 and 2024 was driven by aggressive price increases rather than an increase in unit sales, according to data from the McKinsey State of Luxury Report.". But that price hike tactic came only after brands were already caught in the Velocity Trap they'd tried to avoid by shunning digital — this was the point at which luxury goods brands’ operational efficiency already outpaced cultural production capacity, creating objects faster (now at a higher price points) than new cultural meaning could be generated. Buyers stopped recognizing the accruing heritage value, craftsmanship, and curated symbolism these houses once cultivated with such care.

Triggered by rapid overexposure and weakened exclusivity, the global luxury sector faces a structural slowdown with theMcKinsey State of Luxury Report projecting annual market growth to contract to just 1% to 3% through 2027. The hopeful news: loyal customers aren't gone. They've simply shifted their attention to resellers. Sales of luxury handbags on TheRealReal have risen 20% since 2023 (source: The Real Real Investor Communications). The second-hand luxury market surpassed $57 billion in 2025, growing 4-6% and outpacing new luxury goods. Keyword searches for vintage bags were up 131% year-over-year in May 2026 (Source: Boston Consulting Group).

Brands shouldn't mistake this for thrift-store shopping. It's a more precise signal of what customers are actually seeking: historical meaning, heritage symbolism, storied craftsmanship, and proof of the time value of culture instilled within a brand.

‍The resale market isn't competition — it's the most honest focus group luxury has. Use it to rebuild brand meaning before touching margins. Five moves to start now:

‍1. Audit meaning before margin.
Score every product line on three variables: heritage/provenance clarity, perceived craftsmanship, and narrative strength. Flag SKUs that fail all three as liabilities — regardless of sales volume — and redirect creative/marketing dollars away from them until they're restored.

‍2. Turn resale into R&D.
If a product is actively traded on the secondary market, build a formal feedback loop from that resale behavior straight into primary creative direction.

‍3. Make provenance provable.
Use AI to give customers an immutable record of who made the object, where, with what materials, and when. This is core infrastructure for restoring meaning — not a marketing gimmick.

‍4. Rebuild stores as meaning, not transactions.
Monobrand stores grew 30%+ in size but sales still fell 2% since 2023 (source: Bain & Co.) — bigger wasn't the fix. Redesign flagships not just close sales faster.  Rather, shape them to convey, with a subtle yet full-sensory experience, what “elevation” should mean for customers of the brand, so these same customers have a reason to return.

‍5. The lapsed customer is still winnable — but not with a discount.
70%+ of the 70 million who left plan to come back within three years. They're not waiting for lower prices. They're waiting for the object to be worth the promise again.