Is A Luxury Product Still Luxurious If It’s Made with Cheap Labor?

My Mother-in-law recently boycotted all products made in China. Her issues started with the contaminated dog food, were followed by the lead-coated toys, and the last straw was the tainted human food. 

Rat poison fed to puppies? Not in most U.S. homes.

Those three events of botched production sent a clear message to Gretchen: the Chinese had different quality standards than the United States, and buying their goods now was just too risky. 

Hahaha … Elmo stopped laughing when he was given lead-painted eyes.

Her boycott is ambitious, considering so many products are made in China. From dishes to pens, just about everything you buy nowadays is manufactured outside America. Many items are well-made, others are not, but for sure, numerous luxury brands have caught on to the low-price labor in China and other parts of the world. Many luxury products are made in countries where the labor is cheap, not necessarily because the labor is more skilled. This move—luxury made on the cheap—is a disparity to me, especially if the company isn’t passing on those savings to consumers or telling people what they’re doing.

Part of the cachet of owning a luxury item is knowing that a master craftsmen like an experienced leather tanner or bench jeweler labored over your exquisitely made object. 

Another part is getting what you think you’ve paid for. Some designers build their business on the craftsmanship of where their product is made. But what if a designer’s cachet is that they are Italian, yet they manufacture their jewels in China or elsewhere? As a consumer, this knowledge would affect my purchasing decision, but since there is no “made in …” label on jewelry like there is on clothing, consumers don’t know. Shouldn’t this be disclosed, much like gemstone treatments, to consumers in stores? 

It’s clear to the buyer that this sweater was made in China; Not so much with jewelry.

I’m not the only one who thinks this way. On Wednesday night, I struck up a conversation with a woman sitting next to me on the train. She was wearing a suite of David Yurman jewelry, so I asked her if she would care if her jewelry from this iconic American designer was made in China and not in the U.S. She said she would. After all, she paid $2,500 for her Yurman charm bracelet and just $100 bucks for a Silpada necklace she was also wearing. “I figured the necklace was made in China when I bought it,” explains Terri from Baltimore. “The necklace was cheap. But if I knew that [my Yurman] bracelet was made in China [for the price paid], I wouldn’t have bought it.”

 

David Yurman is American; his jewelry is not inexpensive to buy. Where is it made?

She also felt that way about Louis Vuitton bags: if she knew they weren’t made in France, then she wouldn’t buy one. [Vuitton is a French company, and its bags are made in France, Spain, and the U.S.; this information is on its web site. The David Yurman web site doesn’t cite where his jewelry is made.] And if Terri went abroad and wanted to buy a keepsake piece of jewelry, unless she was in China, she wouldn’t buy jewelry that was ‘made in China’—if she had any way of knowing. “When I go to Paris and shop for housewares, like towels, I always look at the tag to see where it’s made,” she says. If it’s not made in France, she doesn’t buy it because it’s not a real souvenir of the trip.

*** If you want to be interviewed for articles on this topic, phone me at (267) 481-4120 or email me at JHeebner@reedbusiness.com .