Fashion and luxury

Rebuilding value beyond price

Balenciaga

2021–2022

Uncompromising creativity
Saint Laurent

2022–2024

Beyond a luxury fashion brand, a cultural powerhouse

Luxury and fashion's top-tier clients haven't stopped spending: they've become more selective. They invest in brands that prove true craft, recognize them at every touchpoint, and create a circular journey worth staying in. The real question is: how do you build the infrastructure to capture them?

AREA 17 crafts change by uniting brand, experience, and technology into a single, coherent system.

Read our full Luxury and fashion report

Luxury brands can no longer sustain desirability by being everything to everyone. The ones pulling ahead have narrowed their positioning to a few dimensions they can own completely, made craftsmanship and provenance explicit for their most valuable clients, and encoded their identity and circular credentials in ways AI-driven discovery and resale platforms cannot flatten or strip of context.
Top-tier clients and younger buyers are ready to commit, but to brands that recognize them fully across every touchpoint. Unifying clienteling, authentication, and circular commerce into one platform is what makes that possible at scale. Equipping advisors with unified client views and redesigning flagships as behavioral intelligence hubs, from capturing dwell time to product trials, is what makes the physical experience feed the digital one rather than sit apart from it.
Resale platforms are already profitable on AI and logistics while most luxury brands still run on stacks that cannot support dynamic pricing, product authentication, or one-click resale. Deploying a unified digital core, embedding digital product passports across priority categories, and prioritizing AI where it directly protects margin is what turns the circular journey into a brand asset rather than a concession to third parties.

Fashion and luxury index

Celine

Since 2020
Van Cleef & Arpels

Since 2018
le19M

2023–2024
Saint Laurent

Beyond a luxury fashion brand, a cultural powerhouse

2022–2024
NIKE

Capturing the power of sport for all athletes

2022–2024
Maison Francis Kurkdjian

2022
Sephora

2022
Balenciaga

Uncompromising creativity

2021–2022
Le New Black

Fashion business goes digital

2014–2022
Fashop

2021
Zappos

Turning shopping from a to-do to a ta-dah

2019–2021
Clinique

2019
Tamara Comolli

2019
Charvet

2018
Sonia Rykiel

Celebrating and empowering women

2017–2018
Longchamp

2016
Style.com

See fashion first

2014
Theyskens’ Theory

2011
I-D Magazine

2011
Estée Lauder

2009–2010
Salomon Sports

2007–2010
BurdaStyle

2009
Madame Figaro

2006
Bourjois

2004

Explore full index

Fashion and luxury

Rebuilding value beyond price

Balenciaga

Saint Laurent

Craft, provenance, and circular credentials as desirability edge

Make every client feel known, wherever they engage

Infrastructure to own resale and protect margin

Fashion and luxury index

Celine

Van Cleef & Arpels

le19M

Saint Laurent

NIKE

Maison Francis Kurkdjian

Sephora

Balenciaga

Le New Black

Fashop

Zappos

Clinique

Tamara Comolli

Charvet

Sonia Rykiel

Longchamp

Style.com

Theyskens’ Theory

I-D Magazine

Estée Lauder

Salomon Sports

BurdaStyle

Madame Figaro

Bourjois