Luxury’s New Illusion: How Chanel and Hermès Manufacture Exclusivity

Luxury brands insist their prices are justified by heritage, craftsmanship, and rarity. In reality, much of contemporary luxury functions through something far less noble: codes. Behavioral codes, access codes, spatial codes. These mechanisms exist to legitimize steep price hikes, reassure wealthy clients that they belong to a protected elite, and increasingly, to obstruct everyone else through artificial friction rather than genuine scarcity.

What we are witnessing is not the elevation of luxury, but its simulation.

Codes instead of value

Historically, luxury relied on real constraints: time, skilled labor, limited production. Today, most major luxury houses operate at industrial scale, producing vast numbers of SKUs across fashion, leather goods, beauty, and fragrance. When physical scarcity disappears, symbolic scarcity must be engineered.

This is where codes replace value.

Mandatory waiting. Unnecessary appointments. Gatekeeping sales associates. Products that technically exist but are practically unobtainable. Confusing purchasing paths framed as “experience.” None of this enhances quality. It simply increases psychological distance.

Hermès is the most explicit example. Clients are segmented not by preference or usage, but by compliance. Purchasing history becomes a loyalty test. Desired products are withheld until a customer has demonstrated sufficient “commitment” through unrelated purchases. Scarcity is not merely a production outcome, but a disciplinary system.

Chanel, once positioned differently, is now adopting similar tactics without Hermès’ internal logic or operational discipline.

The failure of Customer Care and Relationships: when everyone is treated badly, not equally

What Chanel, and increasingly Hermès, fundamentally misunderstand is customer stratification.

In professional CRM terms, luxury clients are not a monolith. They fall into distinct behavioral and value-based segments:

• High-frequency ultra-high-net-worth clients
• Aspirational but loyal repeat purchasers
• Occasion-driven buyers with strong brand attachment
• Product-specific connoisseurs
• Gift purchasers with high intent and low tolerance for friction

Each segment defines luxury differently.

Yet these houses behave as if one blunt strategy fits all: slow everything down, obstruct access, and call it prestige.

This is not CRM sophistication. It is CRM negligence.

Take one real case from someone i who was telling me their journey this week: "My  husband and I purchase the same Chanel perfume once or twice a year, typically around Christmas, when I run out." From a CRM perspective, this is a predictable, high-intent, low-uncertainty repeat purchase. There is no discovery phase. No persuasion needed. No “education.” The value of luxury here is efficiency, ease, and quiet recognition.

Instead, the journey is consistently painful.

They explained: "The in-store process, especially at the till, takes forever. My husband does not feel pampered by slowness. He feels hindered. He is not being taken care of while waiting. No one anticipates his needs, acknowledges his intent, or optimizes his time. Chanel seems to believe that elongation equals elevation. For him, it does the opposite."

They have entirely missed the point of what luxury means to this customer profile.

Luxury, in this context, would be speed without stress. Recognition without performance. Service that adapts to the customer, not the other way around.

A lived example of obstruction disguised as service

This misunderstanding became glaringly obvious this Sunday.

This same person "As every year, I went to refill a perfume from Chanel’s exclusive line. A simple, focused goal: a Perfume (NOT eau de toilette) 15ml, ideal for travel. The boutique was almost empty. Still, we were stopped by a security guard who appeared unsure of his role, yet enforced it rigidly. Only after several customers exited were we allowed inside.

We were then directed toward a kind of “stewardess.” She smiled, but appeared poorly styled and visibly uncertain. We knew the store. We knew the product. There was no advisory value here. Only supervision."

This was not luxury. It was theatrical control.

Every additional layer added friction without meaning. And friction, in modern luxury, serves one function: to create the illusion that access must be earned.

At the perfume counter, we were told the refill was unavailable. No explanation. No alternative. No attempt to assist. The declaration of scarcity stood on its own.

Artificial demand, real alienation

Naturally, we turned to online purchasing. The UK site showed nothing. The French site revealed the final act of this farce: the perfume was unavailable to anyone unless one filled out a form. What was once sold as a 15ml refill could now only be purchased in a minimum quantity of 325ml, for €2,700.

This is not exclusivity. It is deliberate inaccessibility.

It removes the product from circulation while maintaining the myth that it exists somewhere else, for someone else. The wealthy are reassured they are exceptional. The loyal middle-class customer is quietly dismissed.

Meanwhile, there is no real shortage. Perfume is not rare. In fact, once exposed to air, it degrades over time. Forcing customers into excessive volumes makes little practical or qualitative sense. This is not about preservation. It is about obstruction.

Sales associates as a substitute for intelligence

Luxury houses often justify these experiences by pointing to the human touch: the sales associate. Yet many associates are undertrained, over-pressured to drive revenue, and structurally prevented from delivering true personalization.

What Chanel and Hermès fail to admit is that a poorly empowered sales associate is not superior to a strong analytical CRM system. In fact, without data-driven understanding of client behavior, preferences, and purchase cycles, human interaction becomes performative rather than meaningful.

True luxury should excel across all channels: in-store, online, post-purchase, replenishment. Instead, these brands rely on ritual and hierarchy to mask operational laziness.

Who ultimately loses

Middle-class clients are pushed out, not because they lack loyalty or taste, but because they are no longer useful to the brand’s theater of scarcity. Wealthy clients, meanwhile, are trained to accept declining quality, worsening service, and mounting inconvenience in exchange for symbolic validation.

Chanel, already criticized for declining quality and overproduction across categories, compounds the problem by pretending that obstruction equals exclusivity. When mass production coexists with artificial rarity, the contradiction becomes impossible to ignore.

Exclusivity cannot be scaled. Only simulated.

Why this deserves scrutiny

Luxury once stood for discernment. Today, it increasingly stands for compliance.

The issue is not high prices. It is the replacement of meaning with mechanics, service with ceremony, and respect with ritualized inconvenience. These brands are no longer just selling products. They are shaping social behavior through controlled frustration, all while calling it prestige.

This deserves closer examination. Not in lookbooks or runway reviews, but through serious analysis of power, access, and the erosion of what luxury is supposed to be.