Copywriting for luxury brands
Learn the art of aspirational copy and how to use emotion-based marketing to write effectively for premium and high-end fashion brands.
TL;DR — Effective copywriting for luxury fashion brands can recreate the feeling of a premium in-store shopping experience using language alone. To write for the luxury fashion customer, it's important to focus on the feeling a fashion item gives rather than merely its features or benefits. Other key techniques include mastering the art of storytelling to build an elusive, aspirational tone and finding the balance between copy and high-quality visuals.
UNDERSTANDING THE LUXURY FASHION MARKET
Luxury fashion typically refers to high-end clothing and accessories with prestige and status. These items retail at a premium price point and are usually purchased by affluent consumers or those who aspire to a wealthy lifestyle. Recent consumer trend reports from McKinsey and Business of Fashion have reported a 'luxury slowdown', and economic conditions have led customers to be more discerning when making luxury purchases. As the market is now more competitive than ever, effective copywriting is even more essential for luxury fashion brands looking to make sales.
HOW TO WRITE FOR LUXURY FASHION BRANDS
The luxury shopping journey, whether online or in person, typically has a distinctively personalised and premium feel. Buying from a high-end brand should feel like a special experience, but how do you replicate the experience of making a purchase in-store online?
FORGET FEATURES, FOCUS ON FEELINGS
Traditional fashion copywriting focuses on the features of a clothing item and the benefits it can bring to a consumer, but luxury fashion copywriting is less about describing the product and more about creating a feeling. Consumers aren't purchasing a luxury item for its function or its price, they are purchasing to obtain a certain feeling, e.g. prestige, power, sex appeal, status. Understanding your brand's target customer can help you identify what this feeling may be, and then you can weave words and phrases that evoke this feeling into your copy. Use sensorial language to bring the product to life and help a customer picture the item. Instead of simply saying 'made from 100% cashmere', hone in on the senses and feelings of luxury the item conveys, 'handwoven from incomparably soft Himalayan cashmere'.
TELL A STORY
Luxury fashion copywriting does not rely on traditional marketing techniques like creating a scarcity mindset or focusing on price point, it instead takes a high-value storytelling approach. To sell to the luxury market, it's crucial to build lore around a product. You can do this by drawing on your brand's heritage, tradition or time-honoured techniques if it's well established, think Burberry and Chanel. If your brand is newer to the market, you can lean into interesting stories around innovation or ethos, like Stella McCartney and its progressive sustainability story, or if you are a disruptor brand, you can tell stories that show you defy conventions and go against the grain, like Margiela. Creating an effectively engaging story can help the customer to see the product as less of an object and more of the missing piece of their identity.
BE ELUSIVE
The idea of an item being almost unobtainable or extremely hard to secure is endlessly appealing to luxury fashion consumers, just look at the Hermes Birkin strategy. When writing for luxury fashion, avoid writing in a way that could be considered down-to-earth, colloquial or easily approachable. This comes across as ordinary at best and try-hard at worst, and neither warrant a luxury price point in consumers' minds. Long descriptions that give too much detail on a product leave little to the imagination, but being elusive makes a customer's imagination work to fill in the gaps. Short, concise copy that leaves an air of mystery and gets the customer thinking is the end goal.
CONVEY AN ASPIRATIONAL LIFESTYLE
Luxury fashion goes beyond what a product is and focuses on showing customers subconsciously what owning the product associates them with. A Goyard bag is not just an expensive tote, it's a subtle nod to wealth that only those in the know will recognise and appreciate. Effective luxury copywriting creates an aspirational tone by understanding the lifestyle their customer lives (or wants to live) and makes references to places, scenarios and people that align with this. Brands also describe their products as heirlooms or investments to evoke the feelings of a wealthy lifestyle where fashion pieces like theirs are valued.
HIRING A FREELANCE LUXURY FASHION COPYWRITER
There are copywriters who specialise in fashion and copywriters who specialise in the luxury industries, but few who truly specialise in both. Evaluating what tasks you need a copywriter to help you with can make choosing the right one easier. If you are working on product descriptions and collection copy, it will be worth investing in a fashion copywriter who has a deep understanding of fabrics and is familiar with tech packs, whereas if you are looking for help with ad copy that will be positioned in and around luxury hotel resorts, a copywriter that already knows those areas inside out would be more effective.
I have experience in the luxury and fashion industries, and you can reach out to me directly for a quote here.
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