Why luxury brands need to stop selling things

The brands winning in luxury right now think less like retailers and more like members’ clubs – building experiential marketing designed to be returned to again and again.

From Hermes’ elaborate escape rooms to Miu Miu’s literary salons, the real power comes from creating a longtail of connection: a living cultural calendar where every encounter deepens connection, loyalty and belonging – ultimately creating a members club-like community.

The membership mindset

The most elusive and most desired members’ clubs know that their real business is experience design. Every element – the guest list, the programming, the way a room feels at midnight – is engineered to make their members feel part of an unfolding story. Luxury brands hit the same note when they stop selling products and start creating truly immersive brand worlds that evolve over time.

Hermès’ Mystery at the Grooms escape rooms transformed brand codes into an interactive theatre experience. Gucci Garden in Florence blurred retail, dining, and exhibition into one sensory destination.

Miu Miu’s Literary Clubs swap catwalks for conversation. Jacquemus’ theatrical store openings feel more like local community meet-ups than ribbon cuttings.

Members’ clubs have been running this play for decades – from the IYKYK, unmarked door of 5 Hertford Street to Zero Bond, which turns the very act of getting in into cultural capital. They also understand the pull of newness.

Annabels can transform a familiar dining room into a new stage overnight. Silencio Paris might screen an avant-garde film one night and host an underground DJ set the next. Luxury brands that adopt this rhythm can turn their calendars into cultural engines, keeping audiences leaning in for the next surprise.

From transactions to tribes

To think like a members’ club is to design for participation, rewarding those who show up, not just those who spend. It means creating spaces, physical or digital, where clients connect as much with each other as with the brand.

It’s about programming beyond the obvious: unpublicised dinners, studio previews before the press, whispered “you had to be there” moments. And it’s about building a story that never quite ends, where every encounter feels like the next chapter in a long-running relationship.

The long tail of luxury

To avoid events being one-off marketing spikes, brands need to build a long tail into their experience strategy. Standalone activations are powerful for specific goals – fame, reach, buzz – but connection and loyalty grow over time. Long-term programming expands the experiential ecosystem, and with that, customer touchpoints.

For luxury brands, behaving more like members’ clubs means creating spaces and occasions that invite repeat interaction. The affluent audience operates differently from other customer groups: quality time matters more than quantity.

The more often a brand can bring its most valued clients together – in exclusive, rare, invite-only contexts – the deeper the sense of belonging, and the stronger the connection to the brand that follows.

Five ways luxury brands can borrow from the club playbook:

• Curate the crowd – Go beyond top spenders. Like members' clubs, design communities built around shared values and influence.
• Programme the calendar – Keep a rhythm of surprise and delight.
• Make access feel earned – Give top clients experiences that can’t be bought, only unlocked.
• Blur the boundaries – Merge retail, dining, art and performance under one roof – extending dwell time with the customer.
• Build a living narrative – Every touchpoint adds to a story, just as a club visit feels like the next chapter.

The product will always matter, but without an experiential strategy, it will never create true loyalty. Members’ clubs don’t just sell access to a space; they sell the thrill of belonging to a world.

Whether it’s an escape room in Paris, a literary salon in Milan, or a rooftop party in New York, the brands that win will be the ones that make people feel they’re not just buying a label, they’re stepping into a community. The rarest luxury isn’t what you own, it’s the world a brand’s most prized guests get to step into.

For more on experiential design, read our piece on how to make audiences feel something.