Ever notice how expensive brand-name leather goods are? Sure, you do. Brand-name leather goods have become an indicator of social status. For a lot of us, the allure of a brand-name leather good is hard to resist. No matter how small the goods you are looking at purchasing is, buying something from these luxury goods brands gives us a little boost of serotonin, which makes them so desirable, and that in itself is an impressive feat. These brands have found a way to leverage that little serotonin bump from shopping and used it to skyrocket to the top of the luxury goods market. Banking on the promised lifestyle and image associated with owning their products. Unfortunately, the power of that brand can sometimes make us pay far more than they are intrinsically worth. At the end of the day, these brands are at the top of their fields not because they use superior leather and hardware or because they are all meticulously crafted by redheaded Viking virgins. But because they are sold under a name. A name that we, as a society, have associated with luxury and a higher status.
This name doesn’t always mean higher quality, and the higher pricetag isn’t necessarily an indication of higher craftsmanship. While a lot of these big brands we all know certainly started with a talented master craftsman creating exquisite work in a workshop somewhere in rural Italy. They rarely remain built this way. With an increase in volume and the notoriety of the brand itself self a lot of these companies move their production overseas to countries and areas where their designs can be mass-produced to match the demand. Shifting the budget from production to marketing. These mass-produced items are then usually shipped to a sorting facility where they are inspected for quality and resold to us, the consumer. This isn’t to say that the quality is bad… simply not necessarily as good as implied. Instead of needing to meet specific criteria, they now need to fit within a range. Meaning that where before the button or clasp may have been placed before at the exact center of an item, and this was done by an expert craftsman who ensured it was… now it simply needs to be within a 3cm square at the center of a bag. On its own, this range is not a bad thing. But it’s when all our quality checks need to fall within a range rather than meet a specific measurement that we can start to see a decrease in quality.
With the potential decrease in quality, we don’t see a price decrease, but rather an increase. As we are now paying for the travel this bag has already done to get to us, as well as footing the marketing bill from the company itself. whereas you can often find a similar or better quality through a smaller artisanal company. These companies don’t usually have a multi-million dollar marketing budget and rather rely on word of mouth and their communities. This allows them to put that budget towards the highest quality leather and hardware instead. While we were never able to say for sure how much we were paying towards a brand’s marketing effort, this is no longer true. With more and more companies from China and Taiwan offering to sell the bags and goods they were making without the branding for sometimes up to a quarter of the cost of the “branded” counterpart, we are starting to see just how much we were spending on a name.
And so we get to the point of this article, it is up to you to decide if you are willing to pay sometimes 4 times more for an item simply for the prestige of owning a part of that brand’s “story”. Or if you would rather purchase from a small artisanal brand, where you know that you are helping to support a family, a neighbor, or a member of your community. Keeping in mind that usually, the price of a leather good at a small brand is significantly less than the same item at a big, established luxury brand. If you are shopping for a luxury good, I urge you to check out your local artisanal shops. After all, money spent in your community remains mostly in your community, whereas money spent at a big luxury brand goes to their marketing budget.