Welcome to The Business of Luxury. Where we decode what makes luxury brands desirable and valuable, and apply those principles to your luxury personal brand.
This week: if you’re building a luxury personal brand and Black Friday is making you want to reach for a sale sticker (or claw your own hair out), this one’s for you.
Every autumn the same thing happens.
Brands that have spent eleven months looking expensive suddenly slap a discount on everything and shout about it in your inbox. cringe.
Black Friday was built for traditional, commodity marketing. It runs on high volume and low price, which is exactly why high-street retail and e-commerce love it.
A luxury personal brand runs on something else entirely.
So here’s what I would do if I were running Black Friday for your luxury personal brand.
The (wrong) advice you’ve been given
The standard advice is to discount everything.
Pile it high, sell it cheap. It’s Black Friday so why not!?
Plenty of experts and founders follow it without realising what it does to the way they are perceived. A few days of discounting will undo years of brand perception.
If you’ve spent all year looking expensive, a discount makes you look like a clearance rail. You’ve just broken the rules on what makes something luxury.
Scarcity, urgency and price are not the problem
I’m not going to tell you never to discount, never to rush anyone and never to mention a deadline. Scarcity, urgency and a good price all have a real job to do in a business. They work, when they’re framed properly. The framing is the whole game.
The luxury houses worked this out a long time ago.
According to ESSEC’s Sonja Prokopec, Louis Vuitton tightens its supply so there is less surplus to begin with, then sells what’s left through staff sales.
When Dior does hold a sale, her point is that it happens in a basement on rue Montaigne rather than in the boutique. You may get a Dior product, but you don’t get the Dior experience.
Net-a-Porter built The Outnet, a separate site on its own domain for past-season stock, so the main shop never had to see a red sales sticker.
(It has since been sold on. The principle hasn’t gone anywhere.)
Rituals does a high-street version of the same thing. Its sale is a “Private Sale” that only logged-in My Rituals members can shop, for one week, on selected items.
And in November 2025, Phoebe Philo emailed her mailing list a private link to what was described as a “secret sale”. No banners on the site. Nothing on social media. If you weren’t on the list, you didn’t know.
Notice the pattern. The price is fenced away from the brand, and the people who see it are the ones already inside.
For a luxury personal brand, that translates reeeeally simply.
No red sale banner on your main sales page, no public countdown, and a way in that is reserved for your list, your clients and your members. Insiders only.
Give it a reason
Every deadline needs a reason, and Black Friday is a perfectly good one. What matters is what you wrap around it.
Tell a story that belongs to you and your business.
It’s the last stretch before the Christmas break, and this is the one moment in the year you’re opening up access to something that wasn’t available before. That is an event with a reason.
A clearance event only ever has one reason: you want the cash. yikes!
You’re not a clearance rail, here’s what to do instead
The clearance version is a big red sticker and X amount off. All you’ve done is tell everyone who already bought that it wasn’t worth what they paid.
So don’t make it about money. Make it easier to buy.
There are three ways in:
A payment plan that wasn’t available before. The price stays where it is. The door gets easier to walk through. E.g. Start now for £99.
Patronage. If someone has spent £1,000 with you in the last 12 months, that £1,000 is credited towards the thing they’d like to buy next.
Access that isn’t money at all. If someone has bought two of your products in the last two years, they get access to something that has never been available before.
In general, luxury brands need to move away from visible sales and towards triggers like client events, brand stories and client birthdays. Just sayin’.
And patronage is a similar thing, pointed at a person instead of a date.
Real urgency & real scarcity
Urgency works when it’s aimed at someone who can buy but hasn’t been given a reason to buy today. Don’t tell them to hurry up. Tell them this is probably the best opportunity they’ll have all year to buy the thing they want, and make sure that’s true. This is where language and copywriting earn their keep.
Scarcity works the same way, as long as it’s real. If you can’t take on more than five clients at once, say so, and say why: five is the number at which you can give each of them the best of you.
A countdown timer with nothing behind it is fake urgency, and your best buyers can smell it.
If nothing in your business is naturally limited, give the limit a story. Something as simple as “my lucky number is six and I use it for everything, so there are six places” will do. It’s playful, a little cheeky, and perfectly honest, because you’re telling them it’s your choice.
The rule is simple: whichever number you pick, you hold it. The moment you sell a seventh, it was never a limit and you’ve broken trust with your audience.
Why access works and a price cut doesn’t
Restricting access is the oldest luxury lever there is because luxury goods are Veblen goods, where demand rises with price.
Hard to get things also changes how we value things.
Here’s the science...
In 1959, the psychologists Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills asked women to go through an embarrassing initiation before joining a discussion group. The ones who went through the harder initiation rated the group more highly, even though it was deliberately dull.
We value what we’ve had to work for.
Now flip it.
Cut the price of something someone has already bought and you break the signal of value. They feel rotten about what they paid. We all hate that feeling. It’s called ‘buyers’ remorse’. It causes Cognitive Dissonance: Mental stress from second-guessing a big choice or clashing with your own expectations. And next time, they’ll wait.
What a luxury buyer is actually buying
Premium brands compete on the spec: the fastest, the best, the biggest horsepower, the optional extras thrown in. Premium buyers are hunting for a really good deal they can tell their friends about, and a discount speaks their language perfectly.
A luxury buyer isn’t comparing spec. They’re buying identity and belonging. It says something about them, and they want to be part of something.
For a personal brand, the spec version is a page listing modules, hours and bonuses, followed by a slashed price. We’ve all seen this tactic and we’re so fed up of it.
The luxury personal brand/belonging version is who they’ll be in the room with, and the entry to get in. Plus, if you’re selling an outcome or transformation then leaning on identity also has the same effect.
The Bottom Line on Black Friday
Stop running a sale, unless you have a really good story to put around it.
Start writing reasons wrapped in stories. Give people access. Make it easy to buy with a payment plan. Reward the people who have already backed you with patronage.
Then run every offer through one test before it goes out.
Would the buyer feel good about buying it, and would someone who bought from you before feel good about it too?
Hardly anyone buys a necessity on Black Friday. We buy something that piques our interest and makes us feel good about buying it. A sale sticker makes your earlier buyers feel foolish.
What happens after Black Friday?
Hold the price and you stop teaching people to wait for the next sale.
Make patronage a default, not a Black Friday only thing. Your buyers become the most important people in the room, and what they’ve already spent turns into their next purchase.
Add a payment plan and your higher-priced offer opens up to people who couldn’t say yes in one go.
And if you’ve spent the last 12 months building a luxury personal brand, then run a sale with discounts, breakneck speed, urgency and fake scarcity, you’ve not just destroyed the last 12 months. You’ve destroyed the next 12 months of your brand as well.
If you’d like to be on The Guest List
This is the work I do with experts and founders: taking what’s visible in a brand, going underneath it, and finding the mechanism that’s actually producing it. If you’re reading this and thinking I think this is happening in my brand too, you’re exactly who I write for.
I’m opening something in late November. I’m not telling you what’s inside. I will tell you that the people on the guest list hear first.
