What is ‘HAUTeLUXE?’
HAUTeLUXE means High & Luxury. Its about products made with Haute Love, passion, integrity and authenticity and services are delivered with genuine kindness and care. In French the term is ‘Haut Luxe’ pronounced like O! Luxe. Grand Luxe is a more common description but the word, Grand better suits traditional luxury of old than today’s contemporary luxury brands. Super-Luxury implies something ostentatious, something to show-off – ‘bling bling’ – in bad taste.
We are proud to announce that The Branding Journal USA has just listed our new book “HAUTE ‘Luxury’ Branding” as one of their Top Recommended Branding books alongside the big names such as Keller, Kapferer and Aaker!! What a lovely surprise!
HAUTeLUXE combines both tradition and trend and sets the standard for contemporary good taste. HAUTeLUXE encompasses marques that are not known to all and not accessible to all. The connoisseur will know them, and thanks to internet more are becoming connoisseurs. The word ‘brand’ does not suit the Haute luxury labels. ‘Brand’ implies mass awareness, industrialised production and mass marketing strategies. Luxury and brand are words that simply don’t fit together in that they are at opposite ends of the spectrum, however what is today referred to as ‘luxury brands’ is a true hybrid of the two opposites. It involves the implementation of mass marketing techniques as well as the luxury desire methods of yesteryear.
The HAUTeLUXE mentality is very much about human curiosity, intuition, adventure, authenticity and surprise. It’s about human relationships, passion, desire, love, integrity and trust. It’s about family, kinship, honour and heritage. It respects and pays tribute to the living creators that remain discreet and dedicated – always aiming to give more than expected. Most importantly it differentiates between the industrialised and democratised luxury brands driven by business plans and the non-industrialised, hand-crafted, impeccably-made, super-humanised, soulful and often unrecognised, visionaries that are driven by a passion for creation. It is they that will win favour with the connoisseur-client of our times, most of whom feel ‘luxed out’ by today’s common ‘luxury’ brands.
The HAUTE ‘brands’ are expected to continue to lead the way towards a more planet-friendly approach to luxury, where the word ‘waste’ will mean resource and that exceptional man-made creations will prevail over robotically produced goods. Please note that our book “HAUTE ‘Luxury’ Branding” follows from our earlier writings of years 2009 to 2010, the “12 Step HAUTeLUXE™ series” written for The Luxury Society.
The series was primarily written for those who are responsible for managing their brands in some form or another. Essentially it provides guidelines for building coherent brand stories – relationship and love stories with customers. Much of these early insights have proven to have been accurate and as such, have been updated and further developed in our book.