Just before the price increase, I have bit the bullet and bought a 6 ring in Empreinte as I want to retire my current round "croissant" 6 ring GM after over 10 years of daily service in order to preserve this impeccably made piece.
I love this item so much and have gotten so much use out of it every single day. It moved with me and housed keys of 3 different flats, two of which are somewhat distant memories now. I was long buying holy grail bags, one more fabulous than the other, but at the end of this I realise my holy grail is this tiny little keyholder that makes me smile without fail every single time I pull it out of my bag.
The design of the croissant shaped 6 ring has proven superior to the design of the rectangular 6 ring as the croissant cannot suffer from the misalignment or accidental bents that the rectangulars frequently do. Over the past couple of years, I ordered the rectangular 6 ring in canvas on multiple occasions to take over from my trusty croissant, but each time I was shocked at the difference in quality. The rectangular ones all arrived crooked, with (usually the left) corner of the front "flap" sitting higher, skewed, than the right or one of the corners sticking up as if it had been bent out of shape. The canvas felt so different, light and flimsy in comparison to the one on my croissant. The buttons on the new rectangulars all arrived slightly tarnished or scratched, which doesn't bode well for the longevity of the current hardware. My croissant, despite being a workhorse for the past 10+ years, doesn't really show any wear at all. Not on the glazing, not on the canvas (despite it being folded no cracks ever appeared), not on the inside, not on the outside. The hardware of the key hooks looks still shiny and gold. Maybe the button is slightly tarnished in its center but you wouldn't believe how hard this item worked if you looked at it. On multiple occasions it took a nose dive onto the pavement, yet you cannot tell. It's due to the far better structural design, which holds itself in shape very nicely as well as the superior material quality.
With the price increase looming and myself still looking for a 6 ring to take over from the croissant, I ended up trying my luck again with a 6 ring in Empreinte, which arrived a few days ago. It's my first Empreinte piece and it's lovely. It does appear to match my canvas croissant in sturdiness, so I will finally keep this one. This is the only LV piece I have bought in many years and I only bought it because I made such great experiences with its predecessor from bygone times, not because current LV is in any way appealing to me. The artistic direction, well, not my cup of tea. I was a Sofia Coppola Bag kind of girl, understated supple leathers and understated canvas SLGs. LVMH unfortunately decided a few years ago that they wanted to take the Supreme hype beast route in terms of style, releasing pieces so gaudy that they appear like fakes. Of course the flimsy quality doesn't help with the fake look.
The price for value does not check out anymore. I'm not sure the current strategy to create artifical scarcity around the stock, is working out the way LV wants to, either. I thought it was to move up to a different clientele, but whenever I walk past my local LV, there are only young girls and boys queuing outside, who clearly don't belong to the income bracket LV appears to be aiming for. Good for them, I too was one of them when I first got into LV back in the day, but it just goes to show that this pricing strategy doesn't seem to have the desired effect. The wealthy, who want true exclusivity, still don't show up at the stores (they all order online, the hotline or via personal shoppers) and the longtime loyal upper middle class customers simply get frustrated and turned off with the dwindling quality and the poor availability. If one has to deal with high prices and poor availabily, why not move on to Hermes in that case and get excellent quality? Certainly, this is an anecdotal observation, but in my circle most of us have moved exactly into this direction. Not because any of us ever had Hermes on the radar as a goal, but because LV became so unattractive over time that we started to look for alternatives.
In the not-so-distant future, LV will also have priced out a large chunk of their new customer base, those lovely young people, who want to invest their hard-earned money into a good-quality starter piece. I'm curious to watch from afar what clientele will be left in the end. I honestly have no idea as LV's current strategy seems erratic and entirely ignorant of its consequences.
I love this item so much and have gotten so much use out of it every single day. It moved with me and housed keys of 3 different flats, two of which are somewhat distant memories now. I was long buying holy grail bags, one more fabulous than the other, but at the end of this I realise my holy grail is this tiny little keyholder that makes me smile without fail every single time I pull it out of my bag.
The design of the croissant shaped 6 ring has proven superior to the design of the rectangular 6 ring as the croissant cannot suffer from the misalignment or accidental bents that the rectangulars frequently do. Over the past couple of years, I ordered the rectangular 6 ring in canvas on multiple occasions to take over from my trusty croissant, but each time I was shocked at the difference in quality. The rectangular ones all arrived crooked, with (usually the left) corner of the front "flap" sitting higher, skewed, than the right or one of the corners sticking up as if it had been bent out of shape. The canvas felt so different, light and flimsy in comparison to the one on my croissant. The buttons on the new rectangulars all arrived slightly tarnished or scratched, which doesn't bode well for the longevity of the current hardware. My croissant, despite being a workhorse for the past 10+ years, doesn't really show any wear at all. Not on the glazing, not on the canvas (despite it being folded no cracks ever appeared), not on the inside, not on the outside. The hardware of the key hooks looks still shiny and gold. Maybe the button is slightly tarnished in its center but you wouldn't believe how hard this item worked if you looked at it. On multiple occasions it took a nose dive onto the pavement, yet you cannot tell. It's due to the far better structural design, which holds itself in shape very nicely as well as the superior material quality.
With the price increase looming and myself still looking for a 6 ring to take over from the croissant, I ended up trying my luck again with a 6 ring in Empreinte, which arrived a few days ago. It's my first Empreinte piece and it's lovely. It does appear to match my canvas croissant in sturdiness, so I will finally keep this one. This is the only LV piece I have bought in many years and I only bought it because I made such great experiences with its predecessor from bygone times, not because current LV is in any way appealing to me. The artistic direction, well, not my cup of tea. I was a Sofia Coppola Bag kind of girl, understated supple leathers and understated canvas SLGs. LVMH unfortunately decided a few years ago that they wanted to take the Supreme hype beast route in terms of style, releasing pieces so gaudy that they appear like fakes. Of course the flimsy quality doesn't help with the fake look.
The price for value does not check out anymore. I'm not sure the current strategy to create artifical scarcity around the stock, is working out the way LV wants to, either. I thought it was to move up to a different clientele, but whenever I walk past my local LV, there are only young girls and boys queuing outside, who clearly don't belong to the income bracket LV appears to be aiming for. Good for them, I too was one of them when I first got into LV back in the day, but it just goes to show that this pricing strategy doesn't seem to have the desired effect. The wealthy, who want true exclusivity, still don't show up at the stores (they all order online, the hotline or via personal shoppers) and the longtime loyal upper middle class customers simply get frustrated and turned off with the dwindling quality and the poor availability. If one has to deal with high prices and poor availabily, why not move on to Hermes in that case and get excellent quality? Certainly, this is an anecdotal observation, but in my circle most of us have moved exactly into this direction. Not because any of us ever had Hermes on the radar as a goal, but because LV became so unattractive over time that we started to look for alternatives.
In the not-so-distant future, LV will also have priced out a large chunk of their new customer base, those lovely young people, who want to invest their hard-earned money into a good-quality starter piece. I'm curious to watch from afar what clientele will be left in the end. I honestly have no idea as LV's current strategy seems erratic and entirely ignorant of its consequences.
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). After the wars the European and American middle class widened: lawyers, doctors, businessmen could afford Vuitton, and there was way more of them than the Earls and Dukes and Princes of the previous era. So Vuitton targeted them. Marketing was adjusted accordingly, they did not want to sell you the dream of becoming upper class by getting Vuitton, but a new position that was even higher than that: the movie star. The icons and ambassadors of fashion were A-list actresses: Audrey and Grace Kelly back then, and now Lea Seydoux and Jeniffer Connelly. But this is the end of that era, they are replaced by Emma Chamberlain and the Dolan twins. Who are the faces of a new Vuitton that you don't buy to last generations, but purely to show off wealth, and only in that moment. And now they target the nouveau riche of other geographic regions, and their hypebeast children. They are (again) bigger in size than the previous target audience, and they are not after classic pieces, but after the seasonal stuff. Which is not to be bought every 10 years, but 6x a year now.
