COSTLY vs EXPENSIVE
Hermès artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas was featured on a segment of 60 Minutes in December 2024.
For the uninitiated, Hermès is the top of the top when it comes to luxury.
✧ Hand hewn skilled craftwork
✧ Premium materials
✧ Elevated details
✧ A rarified legend 189 years in the making...
There’s a particular moment in the show when the artistic director describes the difference between an object being COSTLY or EXPENSIVE.
For example, Birkin bags, which retail for around $9,000 and can fetch upwards of hundreds of thousands at auction, are not EXPENSIVE, says Hermès artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas.
“I’ve always heard that Hermès is very costly. Not expensive. It’s costly.”
“Being COSTLY is the actual price of making an object properly, with the required level of attention so you have an object of quality.”
“EXPENSIVE is a product, which is not delivering what it’s supposed to deliver, but you’ve paid quite a large amount of money for it, and then it betrays you.”
• Where does your product sit along the COSTLY vs EXPENSIVE spectrum?
• How confident are you that your product is not betraying your customers?
• Regardless of the actual selling price, what degree of craft, care, human touch, lore and story is being imbued in a ‘costly’ way into your product proposition?
COSTLY = True Value for Money
EXPENSIVE = Betrayal
