I'm Robin Mery Pratt and this is Transforming Luxury, a new podcast series from the Business of Fashion

in which we're investigating how market disruption, new technology and growing consumer scrutiny

are driving transformative change in the $300 billion luxury goods market over a special six-episode series presented in partnership with Kana.

Today, we're talking about luxury service.

From the emergence of Paris's oak couture industry,

where names like Charles Worth and Madame Gresh were becoming the prototype luxury brands

among European and American elites, luxury service was defined by how well specialist businesses catered to the

unique demands of their uniquely demanding clientele.

As the personal luxury goods industry grew and globalized over the succeeding century, it

maintained much of the spirit of the Couturias and Savois-Faire Maisons that founded it, the

race to attract and retain the customers rich enough

to afford the ever more expensive items produced by competing luxury brands

has seen dizzying amounts of money spent on clientelling,

the industry term for building a one-on-one relationship with customers.

But today, market leaders' ambitions are even higher,

using technology to make the personalised

experiences once only available for the global elite, accessible to larger and larger groups

of consumers, while mapping those consumers' desires and interests in previously unimaginable

new ways, building luxurious service that is cohesive, connected and critically effective across the

multitude of touchpoints consumers can now access brands through.

But before we talk about Luxury's personalized service going digital, I want to kick off

rooted in the physical world.

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