Who wants a $10,000 Coach Bag? *pics*

maxter

O.G.
Feb 5, 2006
7,334
337
This article is from the latest issue of Forbes. Since it talks about how Coach wants to compete with high-end designers like Louis Vuitton and Prada I thought it appropriate to post on the main handbag forum.

I found the article quite interesting. As a fan of Chanel I don't know if I would put Coach in the same category. I was just wondering how others felt about it.

Trading Up
Allison Fass 01.29.07
Coach has thrived peddling accessible luxury. Now it sells handbags that will give mainstream fans sticker shock.

Shoppers jam the Coach flagship store on Madison Avenue in Manhattan to eyeball 230 stylish handbags. Average price: $300. Few seem to notice a nook set apart by striped curtains, a section of great interest to Coach Chief Executive Lewis Frankfort. There, a Coach courier bag costs $800. A $1,300 sweater coat hangs near a pair of $700 jeans. A charm necklace, priced at $250, rests on a table atop a zebra-skin rug. Frankfort pauses during a recent visit to admire a Coach satchel made from python skin, and its $2,500 price tag.

The higher-priced items and exotic animal skins are part of Frankfort's plan to burnish the Coach brand and expand the market for its bags and accessories. The new offerings cost 48% more on average than earlier Coach products. They were introduced in September to celebrate Coach's 65th anniversary. The upscale assortment has been so successful it represented 18% of Coach's revenue from full-price shops this past October and November. This year Frankfort intends to make it a stand-alone brand called Legacy with its own stores. "The addressable market for Coach is a lot larger than we ever contemplated," Frankfort says. "It's huge."

By offering more high-end bags and apparel while Coach also accelerates store openings in less affluent cities like Buffalo, N.Y., El Paso, Tex. and Gainesville, Fla., Frankfort hopes Coach can keep its cachet and attract dollars available at the upper end of the luxe market. Other luxury companies, including Ralph Lauren and BMW, successfully cater to multiple income tiers.

Appealing to Park Avenue ladies who lunch, as well as sweatsuit-clad shoppers in Jersey City--and everyone in between--could help the retailer maintain its breathless eight-year-long growth streak. The company, with 443 stores, has made a fortune selling stylish but fairly affordable handbags. Revenue has quadrupled since the company went public seven years ago, when Coach bags were most often purchased by career women looking for well-made totes. In the year ended last July 1, sales rose 23% to $2.1 billion, and income before interest and taxes rose 34% to $765 million. The company's stock hit a high of $45 this month.

Frankfort, 60, expects the Legacy assortment, emblazoned with Coach's logo, to attract fashionistas who usually favor Louis Vuitton and Prada. If you are the kind of person willing to spend $4,500 for a lime-green ostrich-skin bag, Coach is there for you. It now offers expensive accessories, like a $120 iPod case. Soon there will be perfume, too. Coach quickly sold all eight of the $10,000 tobacco-color Ali Alligator shoulder flap bags it rolled out as part of the Legacy collection.

"It's amazing how many people ask me now, 'Can you hook me up with Legacy?'" says Samuel Frankfort, 28, Frankfort's son, a Wall Streeter who hobnobs with a posh crowd--and tagged along during his father's interview.

The premium push comes as industry watchers whisper that Coach is saturating the middle market, making its logo--and its more moderately priced bags--too ubiquitous to be desirable to well-heeled shoppers. Frankfort wants to attract more buyers like Ingrid Deutsch, who favors Christian Dior and shuttles among homes in Manhattan, East Hampton and Palm Beach. But she sniffs that Coach is too "pedestrian" for her taste. "The upper-income consumer is looking to replace Coach with another brand," says Marshal Cohen, an analyst at NPD Group, retail consultants in Port Washington, N.Y.

Legacy isn't Frankfort's first stab at chasing a tonier crowd. When Coach was still part of Sara Lee in 1993, Frankfort oversaw the acquisition of Mark Cross. But it cannibalized customers from Coach and distracted execs, so Frankfort, who joined Coach in 1979 when sales were just $6 million, discontinued Mark Cross four years later. Coach execs insist there is plenty of room for growth--and that Coach can sell an $800 bag as easily as a $50 wristlet purse.

"The broader we get, the less issue we have around having a lot of customers carrying Coach, because they are all carrying different Coach bags," says Reed Krakoff, Coach's executive creative director.

Adds Frankfort: "Frankly, we're more optimistic about our future than we were 12 months ago."
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Thanks for sharing - interesting article.

Actually Coach here in Europe is not at all well-known (hint: they could export??) - but seriously, I didn't know the brand until I joined this forum. I am not sure though whether they will be able to get into the market this easily - in the end they have a lot of classics to compete with....
 
"The broader we get, the less issue we have around having a lot of customers carrying Coach, because they are all carrying different Coach bags," says Reed Krakoff, Coach's executive creative director.

Thanks for posting this article. I was a die-hard Coach fan until a couple of years ago, when they started making more Signature items than the old-school leather stuff I loved.

I think the gentleman quoted above is sadly mistaken. One of the things I currently dislike about Coach is that they are everywhere. I went to my son's middle-school event a few weeks ago, and saw at least a dozen Coach bags...distributed about evenly among parents and students. I don't care if they offer a large variety, I still don't want to carry the same brand as every mom and teenage girl in town. I don't consider myself "well-heeled", but the article's comment about Coach being too pedestrian these days is exactly what I mean.

After buying nothing but Coach for years, it also pisses me off that they are now raising their prices in order to compete with the higher-end market. If they raised prices and improved their styles and quality accordingly, it would be one thing. But to just charge more for the same old stuff, well...the consumer gets the short end of the stick. I don't like it when LV does that either.
 
I think Coach has some really good styles... But it will never be on the same level as Chanel or Louis Vuitton... They are all Made-In-China~!!
Nothing wrong with Made in China, but if the company is paying 1 USD an hours to some chinese factory worker to get the purse made, it should not charge the customer 500 dollars for it.. That just mean they are having too much markup.. Don't you think?
 
One of the things I currently dislike about Coach is that they are everywhere. I went to my son's middle-school event a few weeks ago, and saw at least a dozen Coach bags...distributed about evenly among parents and students. I don't care if they offer a large variety, I still don't want to carry the same brand as every mom and teenage girl in town. I don't consider myself "well-heeled", but the article's comment about Coach being too pedestrian these days is exactly what I mean.

i completely agree, i'd maybe spill out that much at hermes (obviously if i actually had the ten grand to spend on a hand bag in the first place) but not on coach......
 
I think it's great that they are branching out and trying new products. They have an amazing Legacy line out now, too, as well as all the traditional stuff.
 
Have you all seen and handled any of the new Leather Legacy bags? They are really nice quality and completely worth the 400-800 dollars. While I agree the Signature Pieces are overpriced, the Legacy line is very nice.
 
I have seen some of the Legacy leather bags up close and in person, and they are indeed more like what I used to love about the "old" Coach - good quality leather, classic design, sturdy hardware. I was happy to see that they are including a few of these in their new lineup, but I still think they are overpriced.
 
Coach does have some very nice bags, but as hippiechic said, they are *everywhere*. Every teenager and early 20-something wears one and they all start to look the same after a while. The Legacy collection is very pretty, but I don't think that the regular lines have anywhere near the quality and craftsmanship of Louis Vuitton, Chanel, or Hermes.
 
I think they've found their niche, and I hope they stay in it. I can see it being their falling point if they plan on price increases and ignoring their core audience. Although that 4,500 ostrich piece seems to be more about gaining headlines and magazine inserts.
 
A UK perspective which I thought was fascinating - in a piece in the London Evening Standard just before Christmas, female brokers in the City were talking about how they spend their phenomenal (immoral?) bonuses and one proudly declared amidst stories of yachts, trips to tropical islands and champagne that she'd bought a Coach bag . . .for a British girl it was clearly the ultimate purchase due solely, I imagine, to its relative anonymity here . . .Fascinating how some brands are worldwide desired (LV, Chanel, Gucci, Fendi, Prada) and some are utterly relative to location . . .