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There is a strawberry you can buy right now for $15 for a pack six. It is grown without pesticides in a vertical farm using Japanese cultivation techniques, available year-round regardless of season, and by most accounts it tastes like the strawberry you remember from childhood — the one you can never quite find again at a grocery store. The company is called Oishii. The berry costs like a small coffee.
There is also a sweatshirt you can buy for $50 that looks, to most eyes, indistinguishable from the $1500 one. The $50 version is from Quince, which just raised $500 million and is now valued at over $10 billion. The company’s genius is that it closed the perception gap, and then made you feel good about knowing it.
These are two different relationships to the same word: quality.
For the better part of a decade, quality has been a performance. Venkatesh Rao called it premium mediocre — the mass-market luxury illusion built not from the thing itself but from everything surrounding it. The illusion is constructed through branding, packaging, retail experience, service, and the right condiments — not through the underlying product. Aesop’s amber bottles. Flamingo Estate’s William Morris-coded jam jars. Carbone’s experience. The particular lighting in a Glossier store. Lucia Pizza’s $26 margherita on a plate that costs more than the pizza.
The branding is the signal, the product is an afterthought.
It worked so well that actual luxury followed. Dior made sneakers. Gucci made tracksuits. Louis Vuitton made a bucket hat and charged $800 for it. The
Behind the paywall, I introduce the idea of luxury commodities, created by the 10 percent of spenders being responsible for 50 percent of consumption, and why an economic oxymoron is the future of the brand and business strategy.