Hailed for Pristine Luggage, Rimowa Is Trying Something Different: Used, Dented Luggage

Since 2015, Charles Skuba, professor emeritus at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, has taught an elective course on luxury marketing. And to each class, he gives the same assignment. A wealthy relative, he tells his pupils, plans to give each of them a gift of $50,000 on graduation day—with the proviso that the money be spent on dressing for success. “So you need to spend $50,000 on 10 items in the luxury apparel and accessories category,” Skuba related, emphasizing that this is a theoretical exercise and no real money is being spent. The assignment not only requires his fresh-faced scholars to visit luxury stores to examine the merchandise and its presentation, it also serves to make them aware of the power and influence that upscale brands have on them as consumers. What Luxury’s Resilience Says About Marketing in a Downturn “I've had an ongoing study of 40 students a year, every year for eight years, tracking how they respond to this,” Skuba said. “I also figure out which brands they like," he added, "and Rimowa was often mentioned.” That is, no doubt, good news for Rimowa—especially because the 125-year-old luggage brand (maker of aluminum spinners that start at $1,425) isn’t a household name the way that Gucci, Chanel or Louis Vuitton are. And before long, it might be good news for the students, too. The upscale brand is testing a program that sells vintage, refurbished Rimowa cases at a fraction of the full retail price, bringing an otherwise aspirational travel product just a little bit closer to the undergraduate budget. Rimowa's Recrafted program sells road-worn cases (and status) at reduced prices. They’re not dents, they’re memories Though it may be one of the less conspicuous brands in the stable of Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (the French luxury colossus purchased an 80% stake in 2016), Rimowa has nonetheless been turning up in the news lately. In the summer of 2022, it became the first LVMH brand to introduce a lifetime guarantee. (It covers “all functional aspects of the suitcases,” not cosmetic damage, but we’ll get to that.) Then, earlier this month, Rimowa debuted a new campaign titled “A Lifetime of Memories.” Not unlike McCann-Erickson’s “Priceless” campaign for Mastercard—which emphasized personal bonding moments instead of just swiping the plastic—Rimowa’s campaign encourages travelers to reflect on the emotionally enriching experience of travel and instead of its many aggravations. Shot by filmmaker Fenn O’Meally and developed by creative shop Anomaly, A Lifetime of Memories follows four individuals—an artist, a DJ, a gourmet chef and a young couple—as they romp around the world pursuing their passions. But instead of showing beautiful people basking in a Balinese sunset or enjoying a petit déjeuner at Les Deux Magots, the campaign shows said beautiful people with their Rimowa luggage in tow. We’re not talking showroom-new spinners with their brushed aluminum glinting in the sun, but road-worn cases wearing all the dents and scratches that come with years of trundling in and out of airports and hotels. “We think [the cases] look sometimes even better with those dents and scratches,” Rimowa svp of product and marketing Emelie De Vitis told Adweek. “Because they're just a testament to all those little memories you accumulate throughout the years and the journeys you take. I’ve never seen other LVMH brands do this. You never see a scarred handbag [in an ad.]” “We think [the cases] look even better with those dents and scratches,” De Vitis said. Old goods, new prestige No, you don’t. And even outside the luxury segment, it’s rare that a brand will willingly shine the spotlight on what its products look like after years of wear and tear. For a time, the homepage of L.L. Bean featured customer testimonials about how well the brand’s signature Maine Hunting Shoe had held up over the years. (One of these letters included a photo of the writer’s pair of 44-year-old boots, chewed by an Alaskan Malamute but still on the job.) There’s also outdoor brand Patagonia that, as part of its sustainability mission, sells Worn Wear clothing that’s been… broken in, you might say. This program has many benefits for both the brand and its customer base.Bruce Winder, retail analyst But for most luxury brands—depending as they do on visions of chic, flawless living—photos of blemished goods are anathema. Rimowa’s strategy of showing well-used cases represents an investment that runs deeper than a single campaign, however. Currently in test in Germany and Japan is Rimowa’s Re-Crafted program that, if deemed a success, will come to the United States later this year. The pilot program works like this. The company encourages customers to bring in any old, broken or disused Rimowa cases they might own to a designated retail location. For the effort, each customer receives store credit (in Germany, €250, or about $274.) In turn, Rimowa refurbishes the case. “And then we sell it on our website at really amazing prices,” De Vitis added. On average, a recrafted case runs $584—less than half the price of a new, entry-level spinner. Rimowa decided to test the program in Germany and Japan for the simple reason that the brand—founded in Cologne in 1898—is sufficiently established in those countries that customers are reasonably likely to have old Rimowa cases gathering dust in the attic. Rimowa’s been an esteemed brand in Japan since the 1960s. It enjoys particular esteem in Germany: The cases’ signature grooved flanks took their inspiration from the German-built Junkers F13, the world’s first all-metal airplane. Moreover, since Rimowa builds its cases by hand, in its own factories, and from standardized parts that it keeps in stock going back decades, reconstruction is a relatively straightforward proposition—an extension of the repair services the brand already offers. Even so, a conglomerate like LVMH—which reported some $87 billion in revenue for 2022—probably doesn’t need the nominal revenue stream generated by selling used suitcases. For Rimowa, then, the benefits are in the branding, and there are several of them. Rimowa is breaking with luxury-brand tradition of showing only pristine goods. Reinforcing what luxury means Much like the cases pictured in the “A Lifetime of Memories” campaign, those sold as recrafted pieces on Rimowa’s website are only brought back to usable status: the company makes no attempt to cover the battle scars. “We’ve left the stickers. We’ve left the scratches and dents,” De Vitis said. “But a suitcase that’s aged looks super cool. And people are eager to buy them.” De Vitis conceded that, for many customers shopping in the luxury category, “aluminum scratches are not necessarily something they could feel comfortable with.” But Rimowa’s position is that age equates to character. And since only a seasoned traveler will get a suitcase truly banged up, the banged-up suitcase itself connotes an elevated social status. “Even in our stores, we’ll put an older suitcase—a suitcase that has lived—next to the [new one],” De Vitis said. “It’s like a passport stamp. [The case] becomes a very emotional object because you take it on some very special moments in your life. Those dents and scratches hold a particular significance.” Lessons in Luxury From The Marketers Rewriting Its Glossy Digital Playbook Enough of one that a new customer is happy to adopt the dents and scratches left by the case’s previous owner: Recrafted spinners are usually snapped up within an hour of their posting for sale. “This program has many benefits for both the brand and its customer base,” said retail analyst and adviser Bruce Winder. For starters, refurbishing a travel case “is in tune with the social trend of sustainability,” he said. “Customers demand firms address this issue head on, and this certainly does that.” And even if the proceeds are modest, Rimowa is “entering the growing resale market and capturing sales and margins internally, versus letting other resellers take them,” Winder added, referring to giants like The RealReal, 1stDibs and Vestiaire Collective. In Skuba’s analysis, the real equity for Rimowa’s burgeoning effort lays not just in selling refurbished items, but vintage refurbished items. It’s one thing for a used, but still pristine, piece of luggage to fetch a good price in resale. But when a piece is years old, beaten up, and still fetches hundreds of dollars? That’s a measurement of prestige. “Controlled resale reinforces the luxury brand status,” Skuba said. “[But] it’s sales of vintage luggage, really, and vintage sales really affirm multiple luxury qualities. It affirms excellence in craftsmanship, durability, timelessness and authenticity. It just plays into the luxury category’s strengths.” Skuba added that the lower prices for used spinners may also bring Rimowa into the budgets of Gen Z consumers who might otherwise not be in a position to buy a new one. Not that all the students at a prestigious university like Georgetown are on a budget, of course. While his luxury marketing class requires students to visit stores and list the brands they’d theoretically spend $50,000 on, a few use his class as an excuse to do some real shopping. One young woman, Skuba recalls, went out and spent five figures on a horse saddle at Hermès. “She embraced the assignment,” he said.

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