From Handbags to Holidays
This isn’t just a fleeting trend cooked up by millennials. It’s a fundamental rewiring of what we consider valuable. The logic, to me, seems painfully simple. A new watch is lovely, but its appeal fades. The memory of a brilliant festival weekend or a trip that went slightly, comically wrong, well, that lasts a lifetime. It’s social currency. You can’t exactly bore your friends with a detailed account of your new toaster, but a story about seeing your favourite band live? That has legs.
This "experience economy" is powered by a simple human desire for connection and novelty. Companies that have figured out how to bottle and sell this are, in my opinion, sitting on a potential goldmine. They aren’t just selling a product, they are selling an entry ticket to a memory. And people, it turns out, are willing to pay a handsome premium for that.