Tag: luxury

Singapore – The Carousell Group, a multi-category secondhand goods marketplace in Greater Southeast Asia, has completed the acquisition of LuxLexicon, a Singapore-based luxury bag reseller and accredited luxury consignment platform. This effort intends to strengthen the group’s luxury category by pursuing an omnichannel approach and expanding its premium luxury goods. 

The Carousell Group has purchased LuxLexicon’s company and assets in order to add LuxLexicon’s brand, large inventory of premium luxury bags for consignment and resale, and knowledge of offline retail to its portfolio. With this acquisition, LuxLexicon will be able to take advantage of Carousell Group’s expertise in international expansion and online recommerce, which will lead to further growth. Under Florence Low’s direction, LuxLexicon will continue to exist as a stand-alone business, keeping its name, staff, and retail location.

To encourage more consumers to use secondhand choices, the group launched initiatives in 2023 to improve convenience and trust in the purchase and sale of authenticated luxury bags. Carousell Certified Luxury is one such program that gives customers the assurance to buy verified luxury handbags. Since its launch, leads from the Sell to Carousell Luxury program—which allows users to sell or consign their bags directly to Carousell—have increased , more than doubling. 

Speaking about the acquisition, Marcus Tan, co-founder of Carousell Group, expressed, “We are excited to partner with Florence and the LuxLexicon team to accelerate our ambition of creating the largest managed marketplace for authenticated second hand luxury bags where users can buy and sell with trust and convenience. We originally met Florence to partner with LuxLexicon for our Carousell Certified Luxury programme. After conversations, we realised that we had a similar vision, and by joining forces with LuxLexicon’s expertise, we could help each other supercharge our luxury bag business in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan over the next few years.” 

He added, “We have been strengthening our recommerce foundations to drive our multi-category approach on our top growth categories. Part of these efforts were acquisitions for fashion, mobiles and autos over the years, and we are thankful to have these founders not only continue to partner with us to drive our mission, but also lend their expertise to the wider Carousell Group’s businesses over the years. Beyond growing organically as a top priority, we will continue to seek acquisition opportunities with the right partners across our focus categories and markets to accelerate the future of secondhand in Greater Southeast Asia.”

Meanwhile, Florence Low, founder of LuxLexicon, said, “LuxLexicon and Carousell Group share a common goal of providing a trusted and accessible platform for buying and selling authenticated luxury bags. Additionally, we both see similar strong consumer demand for popular brands such as Hermès, CHANEL and Louis Vuitton. This acquisition allows us to offer more variety of bags and recommend interested consumers to each other. I am excited to further grow the brand with Carousell Group’s scale, investment and regional expertise in the coming years and beyond.”

Asia Pacific – Social media conversations on shopping are expected to shift now that the way people purchase has changed once again with the ushering of the post-pandemic. This has been evident in social media listening company Digimind’s latest report which revealed that within APAC, internauts have produced over 8 million online mentions of luxury brands in the year 2022.

We need not go too far on this occurring reality when the recent viral TikTok incident supercharged the conversation on ‘luxury’, where a Singapore-based Filipino teenager drew backlash for calling her first Charles & Keith bag purchase as ‘luxury’.

At present, the interest of consumers in conversations on luxury shopping persists. The report by Digimind monitored the public posts of online users from four APAC countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines – that mentioned the top 10 luxury brands namely Cartier, Chanel, Dior, Gucci, Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Rolex, Tiffany & Co., and YS. 

Within the overall 8 million social and web mentions in the region, the report showed that Thailand tops the volume of these online mentions, accounting for 37% of it, or in particular, 2.9 million. This was followed by Indonesia with 1.94 million and the Philippines contributing 1.92 million. Meanwhile, Malaysia and Singapore recorded 867,000 and 295,000 mentions, respectively.

Since the four countries do not have the same population numbers, the data was based on the number of active social network users per country.

The report also explained that there may be several factors on why these luxury brands were being talked about online. First, there is a 79% positive sentiment recorded behind the brands amongst APAC consumers. Another factor is the collaboration of K-pop artists with the said luxury brands. Iterations of these would be artists wearing custom-made outfits during their concerts or events. Furthermore, luxury brands are getting a lot of attention due to venturing into newer technologies, including Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT), the metaverse, and cryptocurrency for payment purposes.

Olivier Girard, head of Digimind APAC, said that the luxury culture in Southeast Asia is very much alive because of loyal customers, with fans adoring the ambassadors of these products. Girard also added that they noticed the continuous interest with great average of monthly mentions and sentiments from the people in the region.

He added, “When it comes to high-profile events, social media coverage is a critical area of monitoring, where a single blunder can potentially have massive repercussions on multiple stakeholders. Social media monitoring tools like Digimind Social offer brands the ability to spot the hottest trending discussions and extreme shifts in sentiment in real time, turning actual public perception into concise, actionable reports to activate the right escalation chain.”