David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yes. Again, I'm not sure that that's particularly useful outside of creating luxury goods. Luxury is the intersection of art and commerce. It is literally creating something that is so close to art, except it has to have some function. That's what makes something a luxury good outside of being pure art, which has no function, and is all about either buying to signal or buying to interpret for your own beauty, for that luxury for self concept we were talking about early. As soon as it has some function, now it's a luxury good. I actually think this lesson is incredibly useful. I had my notes to bring this up a little earlier, but now is actually the perfect time and analysis. I think, after having done this now, that the luxury industry is a creative products industry. There are other creative product industries, such as the movie industry, music industry, publishing industry, video games industry, and the parallels and lessons across all of these are very transferable, I think. In particular, I think one innovation that we probably didn't do enough justice in history and facts that Bernard brought to the industry and LVMH brought to the industry, is the professionalization of business management within luxury, partnering with creatives, and that there is an art to the business, too. That is so applicable in many things we've covered on this show. In the media industry, that is the NFL, CAA, Disney, the video game industry for sure. I think that was a big aha moment for me and doing this like, oh, the luxury industry is actually very similar. You're right. Anytime that you're in a creative industry, it really is about figuring out how to first do the necessary and not sufficient thing for success of finding the most creative, talented people to create. It is art, but it's art that also has a function. And then figure out how to market that. If you work backwards from the customer in a very Amazonian way—they literally call it working backwards—you end up with Amazonian products, which are unbelievably high utility and completely uninspired.…

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