Louis Vuitton Shows Pricing Power Amid Demand

Fashion brand Louis Vuitton is joining other high-fashion competitors in raising its prices Wednesday (Feb. 16) because of increased manufacturing and transportation costs, a spokesperson for French luxury goods company LVMH in China told Reuters.

Louis Vuitton’s price increases will affect the brand’s stores around the world and include leather goods, fashion accessories and perfumes, the spokesperson told Reuters Tuesday (Feb. 15). She said the price increases will vary depending on the product.

“The price adjustment takes into account changes in production costs, raw materials, transportation as well as inflation,” the label said in a statement to Reuters.

Some bloggers in China, who didn’t cite any sources, said some handbags, including Capucines and Neverfull, will go up 20% or more from today’s cost of 46,500 yuan ($7,323) and 12,000 yuan ($1,890), respectively, in China, the report says.

Luxury market tracking site PurseBop cited speculation that the increase would be between around 4% to 15-18%.

LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault said last month that the company would have to be “reasonable” if it were to raise its prices.

Last year, Chanel increased prices on some of its handbags three times, including a $3,000 jump for the Classic Flap Bag to about $8,200, up 60% from its 2019 price.

Related: LVMH Chief ‘Wary’ of Metaverse Bubbles but Sees Virtual Worlds as ‘Thought-Provoking’

Arnault said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call in late January that the company needs to tread lightly before entering Web 3, saying the metaverse is a potential business opportunity for LVMH, but cautions “we … have to be wary of bubbles,” according to a transcript of the call.

“[W]e are very much in a down-to-earth world,” he said. “We want real product selling for real … we are not interested in selling a pair of virtual sneakers for 10 euros. At the beginning of the internet … there were all sorts of things cropping up … And that was a bubble that burst.”

There could still be some relevant applications for the metaverse in LVMH’s business plan, but it will take time to see if they could be profitable, said Arnault, according to the transcript. He looks at the metaverse as “thought-provoking,” he said.

LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton is a founding member of the Aura Blockchain Consortium.