There are those who say that luxury is a mansion with sea views. Those who can live in it never abandon it, as is the case with high-end century-old companies. Now, as before, many of them strive to reach a depth that marks distances from simple exhibitionism.
“It’s about respecting the past and projecting it into the future,” says Raphaël Gantchoula-Kanoui, CEO of Bulgari Spain. “The most important thing is authenticity,” he emphasizes to express that the source of eternal youth is staying true to one’s origins. An immortal manna that, in the case of Bulgari, includes Italian design, the entrepreneurial and family spirit of the Greek silversmith Sotirios Voulgaris and the pleasant spirit of la dolce vita.
Unlike what happened at the beginning of the century, the most aspirational companies on the planet are upholding values ??far removed from exhibitionism. In the words of the Asturian designer Carlotta Barrera, an expert in tailoring, today true luxury is creating a timeless garment that will stand the test of time for years.
High-end luxury brands want to stop being a simple symbol of ostentation and embrace new values. The question is: what names are newly created brands adopting to compete with classics such as Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Cartier, Dior, Fendi, Versace, Tiffany
The first tendency continues to be to resort to the name of the founder because, in some way, there is nothing more personal and non-transferable than one’s own surname, especially when most of the descriptive names are recorded in the registry.
This would be applicable, for example, says Jordi Mateu, the CEO of Summa Branding, to a watch brand such as Richard Mille or to Stuart Hughes, a fine jewelry workshop that turns the latest smartphones, iPods and laptops on the market into exclusive pieces.
“A derivation of this trend is to invent a name that works very well, in the case of Lucas Fox”, the luxury real estate company created a few years ago by lawyers Alex Vaughan and Stijn Teeuwen, adds Mateu from the spacious hangar in the 22@ district of Barcelona. which serves as headquarters for Summa.
“In our company we divide between descriptive names (that tell something), evocative (that give a clue or suggest something) and abstract (that mean nothing),” says the general director of this consultancy that has illuminated throughout its history names like Criteria, Applus, Altiant or Gerard Piqué’s Kings League.
However, in the case of luxury things get complicated because for a few years it has been trying to acquire a depth that marks distances from simple presumptuous exhibitionism, according to Quico Vidal, a Mallorcan who has created names like Camper and who currently directs Nobody Progressive Brands.
“Increasingly, luxury brands want to stop being a simple expression of ostentation and socio-economic status,” he says. “Today, great luxury – Vidal continues – is fighting for relevance, for the whys and for what lies behind it. Consumers increasingly like to choose relevant products, because of what they are like, because of the history they have, because of how they are made, because of what their values ??are or because of the company behind it… all of this adds value and ends up becoming the true luxury”.
And he gives as an example Loro Piana, the hyper-luxury Italian brand worn by those who like to feel the sacrosanct pleasure of a garment made with materials as noble as cashmere or hand-woven wool. This is the clothing worn by the defenders of so-called silent wealth, that is, those who do not need to flaunt their vanity.
“There are brands that create real value by using raw materials of extraordinary quality, by treating their suppliers well, by proposing a timeless aesthetic… It is this depth that any new company that aspires to create a name for itself should try to capture. in the supremacy category,” says Vidal.
When it comes to coming up with the name of a new luxury company, there are several trends. Egle Toia, the co-director of the Luxury Marketing Management program at the Esade business school, cites the following: Use short names “since the new generations have a short attention span,” she says. “Also having values ??behind them, being very authentic and not forgetting who they are and where they come from,” she adds.
Likewise, Egle Toia continues to explain, the oldest luxury brands but also the most recent ones must not neglect the emotional component so that their customers feel unique.
When Jordi Mateu is asked to put the four or five ingredients that the name of a new luxury brand must contain in a cocktail shaker, he cites the following: mystery, depth (“in the sense that the name makes you wonder things” , clarifies), beauty and legacy (in the sense of reclaiming their roots).
Aristocrazy, the name created for the fashion jewelry brand that has revolutionized its sector since it opened its first store in Madrid’s Serrano Street in October 2010, is a good example of another current trend: using acronyms or combinations of words. .
To create a brand design superior to that of its competition, Nadie, the company run by Quico Vidal, proposed a sizzling word from two apparently antagonistic words: aristocracy and crazy. The objective was to connect with the “new urban and independent woman,” “who likes to succumb to the impulse of buying a piece of jewelry, because women no longer wait for a man to give them a piece of jewelry,” as Juan Suárez usually comments. , the founder of the brand and, in turn, the descendant of a fine jewelry brand with almost 83 years of history.
The backdrop to many acronyms is that there are fewer and fewer free words in the registry. The RAE dictionary has 93,000 terms, among which it is possible to find more than 19,000 words classified as Americanisms. Compared to these 93,000 words, there are almost a million registered trademarks (although this figure also includes graphic trademarks such as drawings, logos, etc., as well as trademarks that have expired). For this reason, the names of newly created companies are increasingly less descriptive and are often forced to incorporate alphanumeric combinations (numbers, underscores, asterisks, exclamation marks, etc.) in order to be registered. This works, not only for luxury, but for any other sector.
Sergio Ituero, the creative director of Damenáme Naming, is very aware of this. Perhaps for this reason, he points out, another option is to slightly modify the surname. This would be the case of Arturo Obegero, the Asturian designer from Tapia de Casariego who is behind Harry Styles’ latest looks. “I imagine that Obegero has changed some letters in his last name,” says this creative. In any case, it is a more subtle modification than what other fashion designers such as Elio Berhanyer (Elio Berenguer), Paco Rabanne (Francisco Rabaneda) or Hannibal Laguna (Anibal Angulo) made in their day.
Iturbe points out another interesting feature: a part of the great luxury is tending toward the Arab and Oriental, coinciding with the fact that in China, India and, in general, the Arab world, money is flowing in abundance. As a result, brands with movie names such as Casablanca have appeared (whose designer, Charaf Tajer, has managed to create an intense and fun style that has triumphed among celebrities such as Hailey Bieber or Gigi Hadid and their millions of digital followers).
Niche perfumes with oriental names have also emerged, such as Omán Luxury (sometimes the stoppers of their glass bottles are decorated with 22-carat gold and Swarovski crystals), Floraiku, “an acronym between flower and haiku,” explains Ituero. , or Amouage, a perfume made in the Sultanate of Oman that combines the French word amour and the Arabic term wave, ????.
There are other trends worth mentioning. For example, according to a scientific study, “the mere association of a brand with Italy or France as a country of origin makes the consumer perceive it as having higher quality and be willing to pay a premium,” this research indicates.
This is an interesting debate: what is the language of great luxury? Is English, being a kind of Esperanto, less equipped in terms of naming to create sumptuous expectations? Egle Toia, Jordi Mateu, Quico Vidal and Sergio Ituero claim to agree, to a greater or lesser extent, with the conclusions of this study, that is, that everything that sounds French or Italian in sectors such as fashion or beauty is perceived as of superior quality, although they clarify that there are enough exceptions to consider it a mandatory rule.
But, beyond all these trends, and how much the luxury industry is changing, there is something that remains unchanged: when consuming luxury products, there are two great ways to do it: with an almost innate elegance or with an attitude impostada. “Only those who have that know-how make the whole thing great,” recalls Ituero. “However, many times the opposite effect occurs: someone tacky in a luxury product can end up bordering on ridiculous,” he warns.
