I’m pleased to announce that the first Sleevehead Briefing has been published and the topic is the quintessential English menswear brand Alfred Dunhill. This is a follow-up to my recent article and homage to Dunhill as the world’s first modern luxury brand.
Too often, luxury brands are described breezily and superficially. Brands like Dunhill, Chanel or Tiffany are described as “timeless”, “classic” or other equally generic term. Such cliched jargon is commonly found in the fashion press. But it is a telltale sign of a superficial understanding of a brand’s DNA.
Luxury brands deserve far more rigorous consideration and analysis than this cursory treatment.
This briefing provides the first brand analysis of Dunhill using luxury-specific tools and frameworks that are required to truly understand luxury brands. As far as I know, these tools are not taught at all in MBA programs and marketing classes in the US.
The video above provides a spoken commentary and includes the body of the slide deck created for this briefing. However, it does not show the appendix (containing a timeline of key dates of the brand), survey results of menswear consumers regarding their attitudes toward Dunhill and complete citations.
The full PDF version containing the appendix, survey results and endnotes is available for purchase separately ($1.99).