{"id":460285,"date":"2010-03-22T13:10:34","date_gmt":"2010-03-22T17:10:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/business\/archive\/2010\/03\/tiffany-and-williams-sonomas-strong-sales-say-luxurys-back\/37834\/"},"modified":"2010-03-22T13:10:34","modified_gmt":"2010-03-22T17:10:34","slug":"tiffany-and-williams-sonomas-strong-sales-say-luxurys-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/460285","title":{"rendered":"Tiffany and Williams-Sonoma’s Strong Sales Say Luxury’s Back?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A set of luxury retailers reported earnings today. Tiffany & Co. and Williams-Sonoma both reported strong quarterly sales. Is luxury back? <\/p>\n

Here’s a blurb from the Wall Street Journal<\/a> on Tiffany’s: <\/p>\n

In the Americas, sales rose 14% to $523.5 million. U.S. same-store sales rose 11%, including a 22% increase in the New York flagship.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Interestingly, analysts expected an even better result, so its stock is taking a beating today. But this is a pretty nice gain in sales for the company. <\/p>\n

And for Williams-Sonoma, Reuters<\/a> reports: <\/p>\n

Net sales rose 8.1 percent to $1.09 billion, beating the analysts’ average forecast of $1.07 billion. Sales at stores open at least a year rose 7.6 percent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Williams-Sonoma Corporation owns not only its namesake stores, but also high-end retailers Pottery Barn and West Elm. It further expects same-store sales to rise 8% to 11% this quarter. Those are pretty strong results and expectations. <\/p>\n

Does this data indicate that luxury retailers’ suffering is over? During the recession the rich were hit particularly hard<\/a>. That took a toll on companies like Tiffany and Williams-Sonoma that rely on wealthier customers. Obviously, these are only two data points in a large market, but looking at these results, I think it’s hard to argue that luxury won’t be experiencing a pretty solid rebound, as they are very characteristic of the broader industry. <\/p>\n

Other news we’ve been seeing recently about the rich getting richer<\/a> would also indicate that luxury should be faring better. Let’s face it: these retailers don’t need unemployment to decline. As the stock market and corporate profits improve that should directly help their target population. And wealthy individuals with a lot of equity holdings or jobs in corporate management are definitely feeling much richer than they were a year ago. That should make them more comfortable buying more luxury goods.<\/p>\n

Just as the wealthy generally recover more quickly<\/a> coming out of a bubble-based recession, so should luxury. <\/p>\n



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A set of luxury retailers reported earnings today. Tiffany & Co. and Williams-Sonoma both reported strong quarterly sales. Is luxury back? Here’s a blurb from the Wall Street Journal on Tiffany’s: In the Americas, sales rose 14% to $523.5 million. U.S. same-store sales rose 11%, including a 22% increase in the New York flagship. Interestingly, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1535,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-460285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1535"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=460285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=460285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=460285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=460285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}