Of all the books that exist on this subject, this is one of the few insightful and well written texts with unique interviews and good depth of analysis. So far, the 'must-reads' in this field have been Kapferer & Bastien's 'the Luxury Strategy' and HAUTeLUXE.net's 12 steps[...]and Meta-Luxury should be added to the list. Of course if you read French, add ex-Hermes' Director, Christian Blanckaert's "Luxe". Most surprisingly is that Rebecca Robins, co-author of Meta-Luxury is a top dog at Interbrand that tends to rank luxury brands on popularity instead of reputation and excellence, but we see that they do indeed understand the fundamentals of authentic luxury and like many in the field, also share a dislike for the abused word, Luxury. Meta-Luxury is a good new description to match Haut Luxe in French and the authors support the term very well with their four pillars of luxury and especially their term, "the Culture of Excellence". They explain well the differences between the business-driven mass Luxury Brands and the unique achievement-driven Meta-Luxury marques. My slight disappointment was the overemphasis on craftsmanship relative to creativity, the artisan versus the artist/artisan. Vision is critical in this field but the interview with Pagani covers this quite nicely. My major disappointment was that by the time I had reached page 70, the entire chunk of pp 23 to 42 dropped out of the book and now I'll have to glue them back in again! Incredible! If you cant wait for the paperback, get this book anyway. Its the content that counts. My sincere thanks to the authors.
