A friend of mine just proposed to his girlfriend of 4 years.

He did it with a blue box and a blue bag.

She said yes.

The equation probably looks something like this.

So the blue box contained a rock and a metal circlet Which was shiny but  the blue bag was worth more than the shiny rock in the bluebox.

This of course makes a little bit of sense, after all, a poor bird had to be killed and skinned, and dyed, and  meticulously  put together.

Scarcity, workmanship, old world tradition and “best in the world” quality has to be worth something to the right people.

Ok so I can picture the marketing department of yet another french fashion  house sitting in a small room thinking , what shall we do next year? We already have our dead bird and  dead animal lines, those take hours of work and  have decent margins but , how do we make our  brand more accessible to the masses while at the same time increase our profit margins?

“I KNOW!!!!! Lets find a cheap readily available material, add some dead animal skin scraps andgive it a cool design twist (See!! I can fold it small and flat!!).  We should use the same basic shapeless shape, and make it in different sizes, colours and prints. Let them be mass produced in the far east, but lets have a cool embossed logo too to remind them that its Couture…. . Finally, we  should charge a  900% premium. We should sell millions…..

and they did.

Of course, the bag in question is,

The Longchamp Le Pilage Tote Medium

.

I love this bag because, it was a complete coup. Pure marketing in a product that has not diluted the brand but has made it accessible to a younger set. To give them aspirational goals to reach further up the brand while at the same time, allowing one to  own a few pieces of “branded” carrywear mostly guiltlessly. It also opened up a whole new world to  a generation 16-22 who would not otherwise be able to own silly-money designer totes. This allows easy entry into the brand, creating a simple way to gain recognition, improve  visibility and create a whole new Aspirational market segment for their higher end products.

I think this was brilliant.