Ged Carroll

Category: luxury | 奢華 | 사치 | 贅沢

Over the space of 20 years, luxury changed enormously. The Japanese had been a set of new consumers for luxury, but in terms of numbers they hadn’t eclipsed the US as the biggest market for luxury.

China’s ascent into the WTO (World Trade Organisation) made a lot of business people and politicians a lot richer. China challenged the US in terms of luxury market size. On their rise, Chinese consumers changed a lot in their sophistication as they educated themselves on luxury consumption.

These new consumers picked up new traits such as wine drinking. This also meant that luxury goods became new asset classes as Chinese money looked to acquire only the best. Chinese culture in turn impacted luxury design. Chinese new year became more important than Christmas.

Then there was the second generation money. Young rather than old consumers. Consumers who were looking for something less formal, either because they didn’t wear anything but streetwear or they worked in the creative classes rather than the traditional professions and high finance.

The industry had traditionally avoided rap artists and R&B singers, now Jay Z and Beyonce are the face of Tiffanys and Fendi had collaborated with Rihanna.

They no longer wanted to have to wear a jacket and tie to have afternoon tea at the Mandarin. They took an eclectic look more attuned to the Buffalo Collective than Vogue Italia.

You had hybridisation with the street to create a new category of luxe streetwear in a way that also owes a debt to football casual terrace wear and the pain.

Now you have Zegna badge engineering approach shoes from alpine brand La Sportiva and Prada has done a similar thing with adidas’ iconic Stan Smith tennis shoes. Balenciaga with their Speed Sock looks like a mix between Nike’s flyknit football boots and the Nike Footscape sole.

As I have written elsewhere on this blog:

Luxury has traditionally reflected status. Goods of a superior nature that the ‘wrong sort’ of people would never be able to afford. Luxury then became a symbol that you’d made it. In Asian markets, particularly China, luxury became a tool. People gifted luxury products to make relationships work better. It also signified that you are the kind of successful business person that partners could trust. You started to see factory managers with Gucci man bags and premium golfwear to signal their success. Then when the scions of these business people and figures in authority were adults, luxury has become about premium self expression.

  • New Zealand + more news

    New Zealand

    An end to cigarettes? New Zealand aims to create smoke-free generation | New Zealand | The Guardian  – banning tobacco sales to people born after 2004, will drive illegal sales. New Zealand could quite easily have a prohibition type situation on his hands with rampant tobacco smuggling and organised crime. New Zealand has been a leader in tobacco legislation but replication of this in other countries could be challenged in courts on grounds of discrimination 

    Business

    The vanishing billionaire: how Jack Ma fell foul of Xi Jinping | Financial Times – the Yahoo! and Softbank Alipay ownership piece should be read by anyone looking to invest in Chinese stocks. Bilking the western investors was seen as a mark of loyalty by the Chinese government

    China

    Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise – ChinaTalk – Xi Jinping just like two days ago was bragging about all these gangs that he’s been able to crack down on it. But the fact that he’s able to say he cracked down on [3,600 “mafia like groups] means that there were a whole lot more than [3,600 ganges- to crack down on in the first place. In the past few years, a few of the potential faults that you write about if China isn’t able to increase its workforce and find decent jobs for the common folk who haven’t made it to the cities yet is crime and social unrest. What are your thoughts about criminal enterprise in China and how it feeds into the themes that you talk about in your book? In the 1980s in Mexico, there was no crime. It wasn’t the Mexico that we know today. The Mexican government talked about what a safe place it was as they were growing very fast. Of course, everybody had a job. Everybody was employed. And that’s China today. China’s not a dangerous place, but Mexico wasn’t a dangerous place in the 1980s. What happened in Mexico, of course, is China happened, right? Wages in Mexico went up, as everybody got employed and the factories in Mexico decided to move. The maquiladoras moved to China. They moved back to the United States. They moved to elsewhere in the world and suddenly, within a couple years, 10 million people lost their jobs and that was 20% of the Mexican labor force – such a great interview

    Consumer behaviour

    Covid-19 and the rise in news misinformation – Press Gazette – “Our analysis of traffic to the top 100 global English-language news sites reveals that while news consumption soared overall in 2020, untrustworthy news sites saw bigger surges in readership” – Hat tip to Alan Morrison

    Finance

    How Dublin quietly became dumping ground for some of Europe’s riskiest corporate loans | Irish Times – shadow banking special purpose vehicles moved from Holland to Ireland

    Ideas

    Books that suck you in and books that spin you out – Austin Kleon 

    Systems Thinking in Seven (7) Images 

    Luxury

    Louis Vuitton joins China’s JD.com amid online luxury battle | Vogue Business – interesting move, is Tmall losing its grip?

    How Arnette Is Leading the Movement to Bio-Friendly Eyewear – bioplastics

    Gucci “Aria” Show Reveals Co-branded Balenciaga Pieces – SLN Official – this all looks like the the kind of shanzhai items I would have seen back when I first visited Shenzhen 15 years ago

    Marketing

    Browse our library of ebooks, webinars and videos – handy collection of resources by Meltwater

    Retailing

    What brands should know about Zhihu | Vogue Business – Initially invite-only, Zhihu has grown into an online content community of 75.7 million average monthly active users, who ask and answer questions and have access to in-depth articles, columns, videos and live-streaming sessions, often produced by the platform’s 43.1 million content creators… It makes most of its revenues through online advertising, but also offers a membership programme and online education to users, as well as content-commerce solutions to brands

    How the pandemic helped Walmart battle Amazon Marketplace for sellers | Reuters 

    The a16z Marketplace 100: 2021 

    Security

    Future Trends: Far-Right Terrorism in the UK – A Major Threat? | Global Risk Insights – there are also reasons to think that far-right terrorism may not develop into the major threat. Large ideological schisms exist within the far-right milieu (such as disagreements over anti-Semitism, capitalism, and violent vs democratic action) that keep far-right activity fractured. Far-right groups also tend to disintegrate due to infighting at a higher rate than Islamist groups do. Additionally, law enforcement may find far-right groups easier to infiltrate and monitor, as there would not be any linguistic or cultural barriers to surmount

    The $1 billion Russian cyber company that the US says hacks for Moscow | MIT Technology Review – One area that’s stood out is the firm’s work on SS7, a technology that’s critical to global telephone networks. In a public demonstration for Forbes, Positive showed how it can bypass encryption by exploiting weaknesses in SS7. Privately, the US has concluded that Positive did not just discover and publicize flaws in the system, but also developed offensive hacking capabilities to exploit security holes that were then used by Russian intelligence in cyber campaigns. 

    Much of what Positive does for the Russian government’s hacking operations is similar to what American security contractors do for United States agencies. But there are major differences. One former American intelligence official, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss classified material, described the relationship between companies like Positive and their Russian intelligence counterparts as “complex” and even “abusive.” The pay is relatively low, the demands are one-sided, the power dynamic is skewed, and the implicit threat for non-cooperation can loom large

    US Senator Who Served as Ambassador to Japan Lauds Closer Ties but Issues Warning | Voice of America – English – American concern about technology transfers extends beyond its relationship with Japan. “When the U.S. shares its cutting-edge technology with allies, it runs the risk that some of what is shared ends up in the hands of adversaries,” she said. For his part, Hagerty says that compared with four years ago, when he first took up the post as U.S. ambassador to Japan, the strategic challenge facing America “continues to get more serious, particularly with respect to China.”

    Technology

    Designed by Apple in California, Not Assembled in China | Above Avalon – Apple’s brand is less dependent on where its assembled

    Logic Chip Teardown From Early 1990s IBM ES/9000 Mainframe | Hackaday – The 1980s and early 1990s were a bit of an odd time for semiconductor technology, with the various transistor technologies that had been used over the decades slowly making way for CMOS technology. The 1991-vintage IBM ES/9000 mainframe was one of the last systems to be built around bipolar transistor technology, with [Ken Shirriff] tearing into one of the processor modules (TCM) that made up one of these mainframes – I remember when I was at college that bipolar / CMOS hybrid chips were touted to provide a radically faster computer chip

    2102.12627] How to represent part-whole hierarchies in a neural network – This paper does not describe a working system. Instead, it presents a single idea about representation which allows advances made by several different groups to be combined into an imaginary system called GLOM. The advances include transformers, neural fields, contrastive representation learning, distillation and capsules. GLOM answers the question: How can a neural network with a fixed architecture parse an image into a part-whole hierarchy which has a different structure for each image? The idea is simply to use islands of identical vectors to represent the nodes in the parse tree. If GLOM can be made to work, it should significantly improve the interpretability of the representations produced by transformer-like systems when applied to vision or language

  • Lee Dunne + more things

    Lee Dunne

    How Lee Dunne challenged the depiction of working-class mothers | RTÉ – I originally didn’t know Lee Dunne as a novelist. Instead he was part of my childhood. Lunchtime listening when I wasn’t at school was Harbour Hotel, a radio soap opera written by Lee Dunne that gave a good sense of everyday life. The graininess of listening to the show on medium wave added to the experience. Dunne wrote each episode a bit like Roshomon, with each character talking about an event (like an argument) from their perspective. RTÉ’s obituary also focuses on Dunne’s social commentary literature that was banned by the Irish government in the 1960s through to the mid-1970s. Lee Dunne like James Plunkett wrote about the everyman. Plunkett’s work differed from Lee Dunne in that it had more of a socialist tenor to the content. Lee Dunne had particular success with his 1969 novel Goodbye To The Hill, more Ireland related content here.

    Beauty

    Shu Uemura to Exit Korean Market | BoF – Shu Uemura, a Japanese beauty brand owned by L’Oréal, is exiting the South Korean market in September after 16 years. While some speculate this is due to Korean consumer boycotts of Japanese products that began in 2019, L’Oréal states the withdrawal is part of a strategy to optimise its brand portfolio and respond to local market demand. Another contributing factor is likely the intense competition within the Korean beauty market. Shu Uemura currently operates over 70 outlets in the country.

    Five China market strategies that domestic brands do better than foreign brands | Daxue Consulting – I would add western brands rather than all foreign brands

    Consumer behaviour

    NewNew™ on the App Store – god this dark. In th sage words of Matt Muir – how else do you describe a new app, with significant VC funding, whose main purpose seems to be to allow ‘creators’ (we’ll come back to that word) to earn money from their ‘fans’ in exchange for letting said ‘fans’ determine the course of their life, in some sort of modern, ersatz version of The Diceman?

    How China’s online hate campaigns work – Protocol — The people, power and politics of tech – In today’s China, a nationalist campaign involves something far more complex than paying people to post scripted messages parroting Beijing’s line. The government has mastered the craft of influencing people’s genuine emotions and having these ordinary users do the trolling and doxxing — for free. Oftentimes, this means appealing to misogyny or chauvinism, something that virtually guarantees more clicks. Many videos and articles attacking Xu have tried to paint her personal life as promiscuous and delinquent. Web users have frequently called Xu a “female Han traitor,” a dog whistle that conflates concepts of chastity and national loyalty

    Europe

    Why Can’t Europe Cope With the Coronavirus? – Carnegie Europe – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – EU states are too integrated to manage the crisis separately and not integrated enough to do so collectively, an inability to make rapid decisions, and a breakdown of trust between governments and the governed

    Ethics

    P&G reportedly testing Chinese workaround to Apple’s privacy changes | Marketing Dive – I find it hard to believe. if they’re seriously considering this, P&G have their head up their ass on ethics. They don’t need to do highly targeted marketing because Byron Sharp. This just looks like a waste of money

    Finance

    How China structures loans to become Africa’s “preferred” lender — Quartz Africa – Chinese contracts contain broad confidentiality clauses that stop borrowers from sharing details about the contracts, or sometimes even the fact that they exist. And with a confidentiality clause in every contract in the dataset since 2014, the contracts had become more secretive over time. Most of the clauses commit the borrowing countries not to disclose any of the contract terms or related information, unless required by law.

    Hong Kong

    The Rise and Decline of Hong Kong – From the British Colonial Era to the Chinese Communist Takeover | The Greater China Journal 

    Hong Kong’s electoral changes: the Communist Party is taking over | Hong Kong Free Press HKFP – good summary of the different structures and challenges in the new Hong Kong ‘electoral’ system

    Hong Kong’s elites should think about an exit strategy – Nikkei Asia – The most serious concern for Hong Kong’s elites is the impact on their interests if China’s economic integration plan is fully implemented. Hong Kong’s tycoons may see this plan as a great opportunity and believe that their connections on the mainland will help them. But they may be in for a rude shock. Beijing wants to integrate Hong Kong’s economy not to enrich its tycoons, but to make the city’s economic future even more dependent on the motherland. In this process, Beijing would understandably give preference to mainland players, in particular state-owned enterprises, at the expense of Hong Kong’s businesses. – this covers all the reasons why I think Jardine’s pivot to Indonesia is smarter than Swire doubling down on mainland China

    Ideas

    Zhang Baijia: Reflections on China’s Research on Frontiers and Relations with Neighboring States | 高大伟 David Cowhig’s Translation Blog – Hard intelligence is specific information; soft intelligence is the understanding that makes possible the interpretation of hard intelligence. I found this differentiation fascinating delineating information and knowledge

    Information security

    Israel Reportedly Behind Cyberattack That Caused Blackout at Iran Nuclear Facility – reminds me of the Tehran show on Apple+ about Israeli spec ops and hackers in Iran

    Apple Mail Zero-Click Security Vulnerability Allows Email Snooping | Threatpost 

    Media

    Cannabis streaming service sets debut date, program slate – The Third M – MM+M – Medical Marketing and Media – High Times meets NBC. What’s next Crypto News Network for the bitcoin and NFT fans?

    Retailing

    The great British retail reopening | Vogue Business – The 12 April reopening of all physical stores in the UK is an occasion for optimism, but it’s heavily laced with caution. “The big question is how much of the massive increase in total share of spend will online retain?” says Richard Hyman, veteran UK retail analyst. His rough estimate, he says, is about 85 per cent. “If online hangs on to a material portion of spend, then the cost of selling something in a shop will have gone up significantly.”

    Covid’s effect on Rodeo Dr, Oxford St, and Russell St retail closures — Quartz – worthwhile looking at for its retail information and its beautiful interactive design

    Technology

    Job search | Amazon.jobs – interesting job ads. Amazon is looking for a lot of product designers and software engineers to work on visual search and augmented reality as part of the ‘next generation of shopping innovation’ – I found this via the ex-Yahoo! employees groups on LinkedIn. Yahoo! had a large contingent of people working in areas such as image and video search that would be of interest to Amazon now. The team is based just down the road from Sunnyvale in Palo Alto

  • Beauty calendars of China + more things

    Chinese beauty calendars

    How China’s Beauty Calendars Defined an Era’s Aesthetics | SixthTone – the history of China’s beauty calendars is the history of China opening up and closing back down again. The beauty calendars aren’t high art or pornography like the Perelli calendar of old. But for the time, they were at the bleeding edge of changing social norms after Mau. The calendars declined when the Xi administration stopped state owned enterprises giving or receiving calendars.

    Business

    ‘Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism’: a book by Angela Zhang | Chillin’Competition – fascinating read on Chinese corporates the Chinese antitrust system

    Consumer behaviour

    Children Beating Up Robot Inspires New Escape Maneuver System – IEEE Spectrum – children are monsters at times. Really interesting article

    Legal

    Former Tencent employee ordered to pay US$167,000 for breaching non-compete pact after joining TikTok owner ByteDance | South China Morning Post – shocking. I hope ByteDance are picking up the tab for him. I am surprised that he lost, generally these contracts are hard to enforce. Secondly, the case wasn’t in Shenzhen where Tencent would win because that’s where their headquarters are, but in Beijing. Finally, the damages were surprisingly high

    Luxury

    Queen of the Night: One-of-a-Kind Porsche Taycan 4S Artcar by Richard Phillips Blossoms in Switzerland | Automobiles | RM Sotheby’s – Sotherby’s sees this as a direct line descendant of Janis Joplin’s painted Porsche 356; but given that this a brand art collaboration I see it more as a copy of the BMW Art Car project

    Why Gold Watches Are Increasing in Value and Demand – Robb Report – more of a opinion piece on why gold watches are have never had a better change of success than now due to increased market share

    Information security

    The UK Is Trying to Stop Facebook’s End-to-End Encryption  | WIRED – THE UK IS planning a new attack on end-to-end encryption, with the Home Office set to spearhead efforts designed to discourage Facebook from further rolling out the technology to its messaging apps. – Unsurprisingly Patel is using child molestors as its excuse. No words about how metadata and good police work can get around the limitations of encryption. When you take this in account with the new police bill going through parliament, it all looks exceptionally authoritarian in nature

    Suspected Chinese spies cover tracks in efforts to breach Vietnamese government | CyberScoop – more security related content here.

    UK

    Elite wars – The Ruffian – I understand why campaigners and commentators are upset by Sewell’s tone and by the over-managed press launch. But loudly complaining about this kind of thing while refusing to engage constructively with the arguments of the report seems irresponsibly trivial. After all, what’s at stake here is far more important than a dispute between elites over tone, terminology and media management. Everyone is in agreement that racism is a serious problem in Britain. Shouldn’t we focus our disagreements on what to do about it? – well worth reading the whole article and the reports that it links to. The Conversation covered most of the opposing views high points here: Race commission report: the rights and wrongs | The Conversation 

  • The split economy

    Split economy

    The split economy is used a term differentiate from the sharing economy. I first heard of it on the Robin Hood Snacks Daily podcast. The sharing economy has been discussed ad infinitum and is very popular. It encompasses high growth businesses like AirBnB, Uber and DoorDash.

    The split economy is used to differentiate itself from the sharing economy. They have some elements in common. Like the sharing economy, the split economy focuses on maximising the utilisation of assets. The difference is that the consumer isn’t paying for a just a service, but also fractional ownership of an underlying asset.

    An example would be fractional ownership of sports cars via ‘clubs’ :

    • Curvy Road
    • AutoXotica
    • Exotic Car Share

    Fractional ownership of art:

    • Feral Horses
    • Masterworks
    • ArtSquare.io

    None of these are necessarily ‘new’ business ideas, but they are now starting to get heat behind them.

    Pacaso

    Snacks Daily discusses a company called Pacaso. Pacaso buys high end properties and then divides it up into fractional ownership. They then charge a management fee to configure the home with personal pictures, a full fridge, fresh laundry and extensively cleaned. Its a sophisticated boutique experience, that is cheaper than full ownership, but with all the practical benefits.

    Pacaso

    Back in the day, Pacaso would have been described as a timeshare business. However the reputation of timeshares has been tainted by high pressure selling and criminality. Split ownership allows Pacaso to put distance between the timeshare sector and itself. It allows the business to ride the coat tails of valuations enjoyed by sharing economy companies.

    More similar posts here.

  • Adult male virginity + more news

    Adult male virginity

    Adult male virginity soars | Boing Boing – There are far more merciless forces in play, not least dating and hookup success being forced onto the same algorithmic curve as everything else on social media; the increasingly hypnotic impulse to live lives online; and the generally hopeless economic circumstances of young people who are getting very little out of life, but haven’t yet decided to burn it all down – interesting disparity between men and women in the data. I think the reasons behind adult male virginity soaring are multi-causal. I can see how adult male virginity trends will be be endlessly kicked around by a football to suit one viewpoint or another

    China

    How much will China grow as an export market? | Hinrich Foundation – Policy makers are currently in a conundrum over how best to engage economically with China. Underlying much of the debate is the assumption that China is a huge and rapidly growing market. While that has historically been true, the falling import intensity of China’s economic growth suggests a more limited market than foreign exporters assume

    A number of Hong Kong oligarchs brought up in mainland China, initially made their money on smuggling materials into China. This was back when the country was closed off. This included luxury goods, oil, truck tyres, machine parts or antibiotics. For instance, casino magnate Stanley Ho made his first fortune during world war II and the aftermath smuggling luxury goods from Macau into China. So it didn’t surprise me to see Fujianese Chinese connections involved in smuggling crude oil into North Korea.

    New York Times YouTube channel

    The New York Times Visual Investigations team used a mixture of old school investigative journalism and open source intelligence techniques championed by Bellingcat to blow open the story.

    What The West Misses About China – Persuasion – the move from soft to hard authoritarianism and how consumerism compensates for it

    Consumer behaviour

    The Complex Legacy of China’s Cinematic Pirates 

    Economics

    A Brief History of Semiconductors: How The US Cut Costs and Lost the Leading Edge | by Employ America | Mar, 2021 | Medium – As the industry matured and the competitive environment changed, the policy framework shifted as well. Since the 1970s, industrial policy has been incrementally replaced by a capital-light “science policy” strategy, while mammoth “champion firms” and asset-light innovators have replaced a robust ecosystem of small and large production-focused firms. While this strategy was initially successful, it has created a fragile system. Today, the industry is constrained on one side by fragile supply chains narrowly tailored to the needs of a few firms with enormous investment moats, and on the other side by the many asset-light design firms who are unable to generate or capture process improvements – this going into reversal is going to offer a bonanza for semiconductor manufacturing equipment vendors

    FMCG

    George Weston to sell Weston Foods » strategy – reorientation of the business towards retail and pharmacies

    Hong Kong

    Hong Kong Cantopop singer Eason Chan cuts ties with Adidas after brands reject forced labour – probably one of the odder celebrity backlashes against western companies not wanting to use forced labour in its supply chains. Chan is a Cantopop singer, he has low to no exposure to the mainland. His fan base is in Hong Kong and amongst the Hong Kong diaspora. On balance, give the age profile most of his fans will be ‘yellow’ in terms of their viewpoint. He is doing himself no favours by putting his head over the parapet. His fan base will shrink because of his hyper ‘blue’ alignment. I wonder what brought about his performative outrage. It carried more weight than Hong Kong politician promising not to wear another Burberry scarf until the brand backtracked on using Uighur picked cotton.

    Luxury

    Luxury groups warn £1bn in investment at risk from VAT relief cut | Financial Times – I know not a lot of people will be shedding tears and a lot of the tourists would be more interested in a Schengen area visa allowing freer travel. This might be less of a story than the industry makes it out to be because of Brexit.

    Luxury Brands Are Moving Into Online Stealth Mode. But How Can They Measure Success? – At the beginning of this year, Italian fashion house Bottega Veneta signed off its social media accounts not with a bang, but with silence. The move, which was followed by the removal of its content on its Weibo account, was praised by many and marked a decided shift in the wider luxury market between brands that choose to be more inclusive in mindset, and those that are taking a more exclusive approach with their customers – I was surprised when many luxury brands went on to social media in the first place. On the flipside it makes complete sense for premium streetwear brands like Moncler.

    TikTok For Business – Moncler using TikTok for brand awareness

    Marketing

    What do consumers actually think of ads? – GWI 

    Media

    Apologist op-ed for disgusting racist tweets by African American editor against Asian Americans – Teen Vogue Editor’s Tweets Aren’t the Whole Story | The New Republic 

    Retailing

    H&M boycott in China intensifies over Xinjiang supply issue | Marketing | Campaign Asia – The statement surfaced on social media yesterday and sparked an online storm of opinions. Comments on Weibo included “get out of Chinese market”, “the company’s clothes sucks, and I will no longer buy”, and “I heard that you are boycotting Chinese cotton, then I will boycott your products”. Chinese actor Huang Xuan has also terminated his relationship with the brand, according to reports. On his Weibo account, he posted a statement that said he was “firmly opposed to any attempt to discredit the country”. Those calling for a boycott claim that international sanctions against China are unjustified and based on “biased reports in foreign media and from international human rights campaigners”. – its a day with a ‘y’ in it, which means that China will be waging war by other means. The most recent high profile example would be the way Lotte was run out of China. The sooner the west start boycotting the Chinese market and supply chain the better. More at the FT – H&M and Nike face China backlash over Xinjiang stance | Financial Times 

    Technology

    Molson-Coors Discloses Cybersecurity Incident that Affected Production in 8-K Filing | Data Privacy + Cybersecurity Insider – Molson Coors Beverage Company (the “Company”) announced that it experienced a systems outage that was caused by a cybersecurity incident. The Company has engaged leading forensic information technology firms and legal counsel to assist the Company’s investigation into the incident and the Company is working around the clock to get its systems back up as quickly as possible.

    Inside the NSA’s War on Internet Security – DER SPIEGEL 

    Hacking Weapons Systems – Schneier on Security – there is no reason to believe that software in weapons systems is any more vulnerability free than any other software. I was reminded of ‘Windows for Warships‘.

    Alba Party supporters’ details hacked from website – STV News