Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Ben, are you saying that the Chinese consumer market became a thing? Yes, but actually the Japanese consumer market became a thing first. In the 70s and 80s, there had finally been enough infrastructure built after World War Two and Japan's economy was soaring. Japan also had this characteristic where they have, for thousands of years, had this reverence for fine craftsmanship. As their economy developed, the middle class emerged, and they're primed to receive luxury. It was this incredible hotbed, especially when Louis Vuitton first entered the market, to sell handbags. I think 2006 marked where 40% of all Japanese people owned a Vuitton product and extremely branded monograms everywhere. By 2008, all luxury goods—period—were sold in Japan and another 30% were sold to Japanese traveling abroad, especially in Hawaii. That meant that Japanese people bought half of all luxury goods. It is wild, the globalization story around what happened to luxury from the 70s to the 2000s. The next chapter after that, which is a whole order of magnitude more, is China, which I think I'll put a pin in for now because I think we can talk about it more as it relates to modern day LVMH. Just to give folks a sense of scale, I think before the pandemic, China was the largest luxury market in the world, right?…

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