If you don’t want to carry the same “It” bag that’s dangling from every fashionista’s arm, now you can design your own.
Labels from Gucci to Goyard are offering personalized touches that allow customers to choose the color, fabric and even inscribe a personal, handwritten message on the lining.
Demand for custom, or one-of-a-kind products, is not limited to pricey satchels. Almost every major luxury brand is experimenting with ways to make its merchandise more unique, industry executives said.
“It’s a serious trend in fashion,” said Ron Frasch, the chief merchant of Saks Fifth Avenue.
The move counters a longstanding tendency by designers, who, in an attempt to boost sales, have made their labels available to a wider array of people, not only the very rich, but also the mildly well off and even the middle class.
Designers like Oscar de la Renta and Karl Lagerfeld, whose clothes were once only affordable to the few, have reached out to the many with lower priced lines in stores like J.C. Penney and H&M.
“As luxury brands offer more entry level products, truly affluent consumers are increasingly seeking the unusual,” said Andrew Sacks, president of Agencysacks, a consulting firm.
High-end labels are responding by offering a variety of customized options, some of which border on the eccentric.
Who, after all, really needs a custom-made Burberry trench coat for their dog?
Burberry decided to make the pooch trenches available this month, after a similar service for humans proved wildly popular, a spokesman said.
This spring, Giorgio Armani will introduce the “Giorgio Armani Atelier” program for clients willing to pay upward of $40,000 for a one-of-a-kind evening gown.
Such personalized services are “a direct reaction to the saturation of the market by some labels, which have sought to impose the ‘must have’ accessory upon everyone,” said Gaetano Sallorenzo, Armani’s U.S. president of sales and marketing.
For the truly inspired, the possibilities are endless.
Verdura, a jeweler founded by an Italian Duke in 1939, recently mailed its latest catalog composed entirely of one-of-a-kind pieces such as a $115,000 sunburst brooch.
For $8,000, romantics can have a poem inscribed on the lining of a crocodile Ebury handbag by Anya Hindmarch.
If a basic Rolex isn’t the status symbol it once was, there’s Baume & Mercier’s $75,000 diamond-encrusted Hampton Spirit watch, one of only three in the world.
A 16-year-old girl recently ordered a $17,000 bespoke Maggie Norris bustier.
This piece of lingerie was made of antique fabric from Bergdorf Goodman, said Robert Burke, the store’s fashion director – proof that no customer is too young and no item too insignificant for a personal touch.