 10-Oct-18, Retail In Asia 

In China, luxury goods are no longer exclusively for well-heeled city folk. In fact, the future of brands like Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Gucci and Prada may lie in smaller cities like northern China’s Hohhot, which is 10 hours by rail to the capital of Beijing and has a population of three million.

Image: Shutterstock

More than half of all luxury consumers in China live outside the top 15 cities, in second- and third-tier cities and other less developed ones. Luxury goods, more often associated with sophisticated city dwellers, have become commodities to be bought by the aspirational classes and strivers from the boondocks.

In cities that do not have physical luxury stores, buyers are twice as likely to make purchases online as those in the top 15 cities, but nearly 80 percent say they would not mind making the trip to a physical store to shop.

 Read the full article  

 Consumer & Retail insights