Premium Clients Are Done With Perfect. What's Happening In Luxury Branding Right Now [ep. #19]

[00:00:00] She's saying that I should sell to my premium clients in every email. Yes, I am. Because if you're thinking, "I don't want to bother people too much, I don't want to sell too much," your premium buyer is going to be pissed if you don't sell to them in your emails. They've spent time allowing you into their email inbox, sharing their data with you and opening your emails because they want you to solve their problem, and you're not selling to them.

[00:00:25] Welcome to Rich Work, the podcast for established female entrepreneurs ready to turn their expertise into premium clients and consistent high ticket revenue. I'm Rachel Pearson, global brand and business strategist, skincare obsessed and always distracted by booking the next mini break. Here you'll learn how to position like a luxury brand, attract clients who love to invest and build wealth that lasts, so you can create the business and life you want, not someone else's version of success.

[00:00:55] This is where premium positioning and building wealth meet for women who are rewriting the rules. Let's get into it. This week and next week's episodes are going to be slightly different. We'll see whether you can feel the difference, but usually when I come in to record these podcasts, I have a plan.

[00:01:13] It's not overly structured, but I have a through line. I have bullet points to follow because your girl can talk, so I need to be contained in some way. I planned out a couple of episodes to record, and they're great. They'll come out in the future and they'll be good, but when I came to record these, I was feeling really blocked, and I thought, "What is going on here?"

[00:01:36] I'm not usually somebody who sits on ideas. I have the opposite problem, where I have 1,001 ideas going through my brain and I have to rein myself in over which one to focus on. Then it came through that this is the whole point of what I see going on right now in businesses that are leading in their space, in their category, that attract premium clients and are going to charge highly because of the rarity of their work.

[00:02:04] In today's episode I'm going to talk about the shift that I am seeing in luxury and premium around authenticity. I'm being asked to comment on it in the press, and I also see how it relates to business and to premium positioning, to how you show up in content, and even how you create events, whether that's online events or in room experiences.

Why Luxury Brands Are Going Back To Their Roots

[00:02:25] I have been asked recently to comment several times on this move that we see in luxury, going back towards a brand's roots, which is not unheard of right now in the luxury space. It's what a lot of these brands have built on, their heritage and their values. They have really stood out for something and have stuck very closely to it, and that's why they have differentiated within their market.

[00:02:48] What we are seeing is that brands which established really strong values and heritage are coming back into what that looks like today, looking back at what they used to [00:03:00] stand for when they first started, and asking whether they can bring that back through the brand again. We're seeing this in fashion.

What Prada And Bottega Are Really Selling With Imperfect Clothing

[00:03:07] This is one of the areas I've been noticing and have been asked to observe, that fashion houses are expressing themselves in collections. They're creating materials, and they're using materials that go back to designs that once were symbolic of that brand. We're also seeing this move in fashion towards collections that are not overly curated and not overtly couture, but raw and sometimes quite industrial.

[00:03:36] This is where I see a shift happening. As an example, a number of fashion houses have done this. Prada had models who walked down the runway earlier this year in 2026 with stains on their shirts. Louise Trotter, who has recently taken over as creative director at Bottega, is looking at developing the brand's unique voice again.

[00:04:02] It's very industrial. It's looking at how you don't hide imperfection anymore. So why is this happening? I'm talking about fashion here, but this is also what I see happening in business, and I'm going to come on and talk about it. There is an obvious argument that, because of the way technology has advanced and AI is creating so much of what is not true anymore, it's hard to tell what is real and what is fake.

[00:04:28] But I think this goes further than that. I think we are going beyond whether something is authentic or not. What is guiding brands back into this heritage, into showing imperfection, is really based on how people are buying now. When consumers are looking to buy at a higher price point or to invest in something, whether it is a piece of couture clothing, a bag, or business coaching.

[00:04:59] This is a parallel I'm going to bring through in a minute. When your premium clients are looking to invest at a level that feels a stretch, they want something that mirrors back who they are and what they stand for. They don't just want to feel that it's authentic and true, they also want to feel what it feels like for something to be crafted, that they're buying into something with a proprietary element that they cannot Google, that they cannot type into AI and say, "Can you reverse engineer how this happened and let me know?"

[00:05:32] So what we're seeing with these fashion examples is that brands are showing their craftsmanship and the humanness that comes into it. It shows that there has been labour that has gone into this. There has been handcrafted stitching and decisions about where to put that stain, what to leave in and what to leave out.

[00:05:53] What this signifies is that there is creative direction, that there is a decision making process behind every garment that is put out. This is what I see shaping premium positioning for brands in the luxury space, especially in the creative industry. Let's go back to really owning that we are not mass manufactured, that we are not throwaway, that there have been very intentional design decisions brought into every piece, every part of this garment, every part of the design.

[00:06:23] We're also bringing together a creative, collaborative process where ideas, experiences and human creativity are responsible for everything that you see. So whilst it can look like simply an audacious statement when you see a high end fashion brand coming down the runway with stains, rips and layered texture, it isn't just to create a talking point.

[00:06:45] Yes, it does do that. These brands are smart. They know how to get social media engagement. But these companies are not missing a trick. They know it's more than this. It is a reminder of what you're really buying into, the thought process and the creativity that cannot be replicated. These designs, even if they don't look so put together, are entirely put together.

[00:07:09] Every decision has been made with an intention behind it. So you might be sitting there thinking, "This is all very interesting, Rachel, but I don't run a fashion brand." We're not sticking with fashion. In this podcast I'm always looking at the parallels, and at where we can bring in the thinking between what's going on outside the category and the business space, into high ticket businesses like you and I run.

Why Human Imperfection Is Becoming Premium In Business

[00:07:33] This is what I see coming through in the online space, whether you are in coaching or you have a different service based business. It's really about building a high ticket business and a brand that is not imitating anything else, that is different. If I were having a discussion on this podcast about how to just monetise a problem, solve a problem that everybody has, create a digital product, sell the shit out of it, put ads behind it and sell at volume, you can make a lot of money that way.

[00:08:00] But this isn't that conversation. What I'm talking about here is when you are in an online service based business and you are creating something that has a brand behind it, a service that represents that you are not mass market, that you're not for everybody, and that you're intentionally creating for your ideal client. This is where I see the parallel. I believe that human error is becoming a rarity, and our humanness, our ability to fail, is becoming something that is highly premium.

[00:08:35] However, there is an edge to this that we need to stay on the right side of. If this becomes performative, if it becomes, "Let me show you how much I failed in order to sell my thing," people feel that, and that's not what I'm talking about here. If it's not this overly performative way, then what does it mean to be more human, to show failure, to bring out that human edge in you?

Attract Premium Clients By Showing Your Thinking

[00:09:01] The first thing this applies to is content. If you're in business, you are a content creator. This is something I've always spoken about with my clients, but I think we are going to see it come forward more, and it is one of the content marketing trends I'd watch most closely. Show how you make decisions in a way that feels like you're letting your client, your buyer, into that process.

Make Your Content Feel Alive, Not Packaged In A Bow

[00:09:27] The content has to feel like it's alive. It's not, "Here's something I did 3 months ago, here's why it was scary, and look, now it's all worked out." That's too neat. It's like wrapping it up in a bow. It starts to feel like it has been packaged up into a place of vulnerability that is performing.

[00:09:47] It doesn't have to be that way, because you don't want people who just buy into the story of how you're human. You want them to be in the moment of it, to see how you bring together different ideas, how you are influenced by things, what you absorb, what you see, what you think, and your ability to bring those things together for your premium clients.

[00:10:18] That means they are going to pay you highly. These are the premium clients who want to see this process, this lived experience content where you talk through a decision that you have made or are making in your business, something you have let go of, something you've learned, a client example, or a conversation with a client that really shifted something for them.

[00:10:39] The specific question, or the way that you did this with them, could mean that they look at it in a different way. You want to take people in your content into that moment and show the thought process. It's not, here's what happened, here's how it worked, here's the result. That's the shiny thing.

[00:10:58] It's got to feel like they are being guided through, as if they're in conversation with you. Not explaining every detail to them, but feeling that tension of the decision, how it could have gone a different way. Why did you decide to go this way? Why was it this question that enabled your client to see things differently?

[00:11:17] This lived content is so powerful through storytelling, but it can also be you walking through a client example, a case story that again feels like a conversation you are having with a client in a very real way, so that somebody reading sees your thinking, sees your decision making in action.

Why You Should Sell In Every Email

[00:11:37] The other way I think we're going to see this human aspect come through is in email content. Email has been around for such a long time, but it is still such an underutilised medium. Even though everybody bangs on about how you need an email list and you need to own your own data, it's not about having an email list with huge numbers on it. It's about having an engaged email list of people who will buy from you.

[00:12:03] Gone are the days when you could have a newsletter and a list where you popped into the inbox sharing consistently and people would just buy from you. It is a privilege today to be in somebody's email inbox, because they will unsubscribe without a second thought. If they're not getting value from your email, which means if you're not selling to them, then they're going to go somewhere else.

[00:12:27] For anybody who is listening and thinking, "Hang on, let me rewind that, is she saying that I should sell in every email?" Yes, I am. If you're thinking, "I don't want to bother people too much, I don't want to sell too much," your premium clients are going to be pissed if you don't sell to them in your emails, because they've spent time allowing you into their email inbox, sharing their data with you, and opening your emails because they want you to solve their problem, and you're not selling to them.

[00:12:56] They're not going to sit there and think, "I just had a really great 5 minutes reading Rachel's email." No. If you think about the emails you've received in the last week, can you remember any of them? Probably not. If you did, it's likely that it was either because you connected with the story or because you wanted to buy something from it.

[00:13:20] What I think we're going to see is more of your human experience brought into your emails, and this is a key place for you to differentiate amongst AI. The majority of emails, because of the sheer volume, are AI generated. So I want you instead to think about emails as the most direct, intimate conversation you can have with your premium clients, with your potential client.

[00:13:47] This is somebody who has opted into your thought leadership. Somebody has decided to let you into their privacy. You have an opportunity to create a direct conversation with them. So let's not churn out AI generated generic content. It's a massive missed opportunity. Where I see emails going is much more conversational, and it's one of the content marketing trends worth paying attention to.

[00:14:08] You write it as if you're writing a reply back. You know how often on emails people will say, "Reply directly to me, it's always me in my inbox," and you think, "A, I'm not going to reply, and B, I don't think it's them." I get people replying to my emails, and I reply back to them. They're like, "Oh, it's you.

[00:14:28] Thank you for replying to me." It's because I view email like I'm having this one to one conversation. I want you to think about it as taking your subscriber a level deeper inside your thinking, whether that's inside your business, behind the scenes of what you're doing at the moment, or sharing something from a client conversation that you haven't shared on socials.

[00:14:49] They should feel like they're getting access to something they cannot get anywhere else. We've become really complacent with emails and with emailing our community. We treat it like it's a volume game. I've got X number on my list. How many times are you emailing them a week? It is an honour to have somebody subscribe to your email list, because they have chosen to give you a direct channel into where they show up every single day.

[00:15:16] You check your email every single day, probably multiple times a day. So what would happen if you chose to bring the most human aspect of your brain, of your business, of the way you see things, into your emails? Create emails that somebody feels a connection with, that they feel they've been taken into.

[00:15:37] This is a key way I see premium positioning playing out for those who are building a community and selling to it, and it's not by the number of subscribers on the list. It's going to be about how engaged those subscribers are, and how much the content stands out to build true connection.

Build Events Around How People Think, Not Who They Know

[00:15:57] The third area is that I think we are going to see a shift away from who is the biggest name in the room, who has the draw of a big reputation, towards who reflects the way that I want to build my high ticket business. What can I learn from their decisions? What can I learn from their failures? For some of you, that might not sound wildly different to the way events have been positioned in the last year or so, but I feel events have been positioned this way and not always delivered this way.

[00:16:28] In order for events to really stand out, because we are seeing so many more events coming through, we have to bring more of the humanness back into them. It cannot be a speaker on stage saying, "Let me take you through my failures," giving you a whole spiel about how they then built a multi 7 or 8 figure business, glossing over the reality of what it really took to get there.

[00:16:55] At this level, your premium clients don't want to invest in rooms that tell them the surface level, or where they're going to gather inspiration. They don't want to just hear information. What they want is a space that's going to challenge them to think differently. Critical thinking. The way somebody built their business, or the decisions they made, where you think, "That has completely changed how I'm looking at this problem in my business."

[00:17:26] Not because we have the same business, but because of the way they look at this and their logic of how they see the problem, where I think, "I haven't even thought of it this way." I think this is really exciting, because it is going to open up that opportunity for new speakers to come through and for event formats to be different.

[00:17:47] It's going to be less about who you know who can get you into the room, less about access to people with big reputations, and more about whether this room and the topic and what is going to be shared connect with how I want to build my high ticket business and how I want to think differently.

Your Ability To Fail Is Your Advantage

[00:18:12] So to come back full circle, everything I've spoken about in this episode points to the content marketing trends I believe will define the coming year. It is about how I believe the human error we're seeing in fashion is a marker of wanting to showcase human craftsmanship, human thought process, creativity and collaboration, the things you cannot replicate through technology currently.

[00:18:39] Our ability to fail is our superpower. Our ability to create things that have a slightly wonky edge to them shows that they are one of a kind, and that is what people want to hear about in your content. It's what they want to hear about in events. How did you move through something? It's what they want to read in your emails.

[00:19:02] That humanness behind the person, taking them behind the scenes of your business, is where your content can really activate at a different level, because you're taking potential clients, your reader, into a lived moment of decision making, of experience. But the big warning sign, the red flag, is that you cannot perform this.

[00:19:24] The moment it tips into, "Let me think about what I can say that makes me look more authentic so that people see me on a different level," you completely miss the point. It has to come from an intention of, "Let me share who I already am." Yes, we can call this embodiment, but I think this goes further. I think what we're seeing is a shift that takes it further, into integral truth.

[00:19:46] You have such deep self-trust about what you do that you don't need to prove anything. It's simply sharing what you already do with your premium clients, the decisions you're discussing with your team or making behind closed doors but not bringing forward. Bring that forward more, so that you're showing your thinking, showing your decision making.

[00:20:09] When I go back to that fashion example, what these fashion houses are doing is not going, "How can we be so controversial by putting stains on our clothing that everybody wants to buy our brand?" That's not the environment they operate in. They're thinking, "We want people to connect back in with our creative direction, with what makes us differentiated, with what we're doing in the creative process that never meets the runway.

[00:20:34] Let's show them that." That is what I'm inviting you to do from this episode today. A bit of a different episode for you. This has been my raw thoughts on what I'm getting asked about, what I'm seeing, and the content marketing trends I predict are going to define the year ahead. I'm generally pretty on the money with what I see coming through in the future.

[00:20:51] But I would love to know any thoughts you have on this, any reflections. You can DM me over @rachelpearson.co on Instagram. All the links are below to connect with me on social media, and I would love it if you find these episodes interesting and they help you think outside the box, if you could write a review.

[00:21:11] It helps Rich Work to reach more of the right women. My name is Rachel Pearson, and I will see you next week for another episode of Rich Work. Thanks for tuning in to Rich Work. I'd love it if you left a review. It helps other women to find us. In the meantime, follow me on Instagram, @rachelpearson.co, for a different take on premium positioning, one that's not about fitting a box.

[00:21:37] See you next week.