Luxury Trends: Market Growth and Opportunities for Retailers (2026)

Luxury brands curate an entire world of exclusivity, service, and storytelling. But “exclusivity” shouldn’t mean “difficult to buy.” Customers expect the luxury retail world to follow them everywhere: letting them tap “Buy” on TikTok, book private showrooms, and redeem loyalty rewards in Paris.

Future-proofing is not a manual for surviving digital risks. Instead, it’s a strategic way to scale internationally without diluting what makes a luxury ecommerce brand feel rare and unforgettable.

The problem: many brands still rely on fragmented systems as they try to adopt these luxury trends. Individual tools may solve parts of the puzzle, but when slapped together, they can create friction and inconsistency. And those aren’t part of the story luxury brands want to tell.

For CMOs and CTOs in the luxury sector, unified commerce offers something closer to a real solution: a practical path to growth. This is the digital infrastructure necessary to consolidate every customer touchpoint with inventory and retail data. 

In this article, we’ll look at leading luxury trends and why they’re shaping a foundation for multiple-touchpoint global experiences.

The luxury market landscape in 2026

The luxury industry has undergone significant changes in recent years. Brands are feeling the effects of market volatility as price increases outpace quality improvements, and luxury consumers demand more than just the physical products.

Here’s a deeper look at the landscape of luxury in 2026:

• Market slowdown: Credit card spending on luxury items in the US declined in the first five months of 2025 compared with 2024, per eMarketer. Yet things appear to be stabilizing: over half of consumers plan to maintain or increase their spending on luxury items heading into 2026.
• Brand symbols are no longer a priority: Eighty-eight percent of high-income consumers now define status by knowledge rather than material possessions. As a result, luxury brands need to justify their premium prices by offering experiences alongside high-quality products.
• Watches and jewelry outpace: These categories generated the highest revenue in 2024, with sales totaling $152.95 billion. They outperformed luxury fashion, cosmetics and fragrances, and leather goods. 

Key luxury trends shaping customer expectations

• Channel transformation and omnichannel commerce
• Price sensitivity opens the door to luxury resale growth
• Evolving consumer behavior and loyalty patterns
• Personalization and experiential luxury evolution
• Operational efficiency and technology integration

1. Channel transformation and omnichannel commerce

Luxury brands like Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and Levi’s have all ramped up their direct-to-consumer businesses instead of relying on wholesale channels. It makes sense: DTC offers direct access to customer data, protects profit margins, and maintains control over your brand.

The challenge, however, is a demand for frictionless omnichannel experiences. As social commerce accelerates and digital discovery becomes second nature to luxury shoppers, brands need to offer not just different sales channels, but a connected experience between them. The prize? A 150% increase in customer spend and a threefold boost in loyalty. 

Yet to offer these seamless omnichannel experiences, luxury brands traditionally had to stitch different touchpoint solutions together, resulting in disconnected systems. Data delays, lost personalization, and an inconsistent brand experience: none of this screams “luxury.” 

Take luxury apparel brand Orlebar Brown, for example. The brand recognized the value of a truly omnichannel shopping experience: “Supporting our customers' shopping journey—which can begin at a store in Sydney, continue online from their home in New York, then end with a purchase from a store in St. Tropez—is always our priority," says Jamie De Cesare, the brand’s CTO.

They switched to Shopify’s unified commerce platform to solve these challenges, while expanding their international presence. The result: a 50% reduction in total commerce cost of ownership.

2. Price sensitivity opens the door to luxury resale growth

The luxury market is more diverse than ever—it’s no longer just the ultra-rich who are buying luxury goods. Per McKinsey, middle-income shoppers plan to splurge on discretionary items at a rate comparable to high-income consumers. 

Yet despite their consumers’ relative affluence, luxury brands are contending with increased price sensitivity. The Vogue Business Index found 40% of consumers said they would shop less for designer fashion in 2025, and 27% said they would switch to buying less expensive products. More than half planned to wait for sales or discounts before buying luxury fashion items. 

There are multiple factors contributing to this shift, from the rising cost of living to the weakening dollar. A standout influence, however, is sustainability. 

Almost half of the wealthiest consumers in the US consider a brand’s social responsibility as important when making a purchasing decision. Some 22% have already boycotted a brand or product for its poor sustainability or ethical values.

Brands like Balenciaga and Oscar de La Renta are leaning into their customers’ sustainability concerns with luxury resale programs that promise access to designer goods without the “brand new” price tag. Per BCG, this secondhand fashion market is growing three times faster than the firsthand market. 

3. Evolving consumer behavior and loyalty patterns

Platforms like TikTok and Instagram are critical luxury channels now. Growing a luxury brand depends on connecting with audiences there, especially in spaces where storytelling defines the brand experience.

Part of that trend springs from a youth movement. Bain reports that Gen Z will account for up to 30% of luxury market purchases by 2030. Some 43% of this demographic is expected to spend more on personal luxury goods in the coming year. 

Digitally native Gen Zers have grown up with the internet. No longer impressed by products alone, the modern luxury brand has become just as much about personalized experiences and exclusive perks as it is about product. 

Experiential retail—appointments, private showings, popup boutiques—separates the usual brands from something more upscale. It’s why luxury experiences maintained faster-than-average growth last year, as Bain reports consumers prioritized spending on travel, social events, and wellness activities over traditional product consumption. 

4. Personalization and experiential luxury evolution

In many customers’ minds, one bad experience can ruin a luxury brand. Some 70% of consumers will stop buying from a brand after two negative interactions. Almost a quarter will leave after just one. 

Hyperpersonalization and advanced clienteling strategies deliver the feeling of luxury—not just a luxury product. That could be anything from tailored invitations to launch events for new product drops to bespoke styling recommendations based on a customer’s purchase history.

But without centralized data, plans for satisfying loyal customers become more difficult. How are you going to make each customer feel special if your back-end data can’t support it?

Take Diane von Furstenberg, for example. With their previous setup, assistant store manager Joanna Puccio said: “We weren’t able to deliver a personalized clienteling experience or access customer insights as easily as we wanted to. We couldn’t see our clients’ online and store purchase history in the same place, which made it hard to cater our service to their preferences.”

In their search for a platform capable of unifying this data, Diane von Furstenberg found Shopify. Every customer who shares their phone number or email address has a unified customer profile created, which collects:

• Previous purchases (both online and offline)
• Items they’ve returned 
• Typical sizing and color preferences
• Notes made by retail associates during a store visit

Joanna says: “We can segment our customers by their shopping behavior or order history and proactively send them messages by text or email—whichever they prefer—to let them know when a product they’re interested in is back in stock, or when we have private pre-launch parties.”

5. Operational efficiency and technology integration

Stitching together different solutions doesn’t always strike luxury brands as a problem. And why should it? Those problems aren’t always obvious. 

The ecommerce systems might work. The point-of-sale (POS) systems might work. Customer loyalty, organizing clientele—it all works. But collectively, siloed solutions can create drag on the entire operation. Gaps can cause delays in data transfer, leading to missed opportunities or the lack of personalization that luxury consumers expect. 

This is vital when just over 0.1% of the total luxury customer base accounts for 23% of all purchases. For example, what happens if a client advisor doesn’t see that a VIP just made a major online purchase before walking into a store? It can be difficult to tally up all these hidden opportunity costs.

A composable and modular architecture offers robust native capabilities while allowing for extensibility and customization to create bespoke luxury experiences.

The platform needs to facilitate:

• Seamless omnichannel shopping, allowing staff to recognize a VIP customer and access their purchase history regardless of the channel. 
• Real-time inventory management across all channels, allowing for accurate product availability and enabling cross-selling from other locations or web stock.
• Unified order management that funnels orders from all channels into a single view, ensuring smooth fulfillment and flexible delivery options like buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS). 

Platform considerations for luxury trend implementation

High-margin businesses like luxury retail can lose a lot of opportunities when they have to license multiple vendors, maintain custom integrations, and pay for engineering overhead—using resources that could go to improving the luxury experience. In one survey, the average negotiation with one vendor took an average of 2½ months.

And it’s not just a matter of technical know-how. Poor customer experiences weigh especially hard on luxury brands, where customers expect a smooth experience. That’s why competitors with unified platforms are more appealing—and, often, more successful.

Integration requirements for luxury experiences

With a unified commerce strategy, online, in-store, social, and experiential retail can all work through the same platform. One source of truth, one seamless infrastructure.

For this to work effectively, the system must integrate smoothly with existing:

• Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems
• Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms
• Social commerce platforms
• Email marketing tools 
• Payment processors
• Order management tools
• Warehouse management platforms
• Point-of-sale systems 

💡Did you know? Shopify’s Global ERP Program can connect your commerce platform to leading retail ERP vendors like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, NetSuite, and Brightpearl. 

Pool your inventory, sales, and customer data collected from any Shopify sales channel (including POS, ecommerce sites, and marketplace profiles) with the ERP to get a complete view of your retail performance.

Scalability and international expansion needs

A mismatched commerce stack might seem to work on the surface. But luxury brands that rely on product drops and exclusive promotions—for example, during the holiday season—often experience tech issues when traffic spikes. Just a few minutes of outage can result in significant revenue losses. 

To avoid outages, ensure your unified commerce platform can deliver stable performance and seamless checkout processes throughout peak periods. Ask for the vendor’s uptime reports and service-level agreement (SLA) before committing.

But it’s not just “being online” that’s critical to luxury ecommerce growth. Your infrastructure should also facilitate rapid international expansion with localization features like:

• Translating website copy for each customer’s native language
• Dynamic pricing in their preferred currency
• Enabling their preferred payment method at checkout
• Compliance with global regulations, including tariffs, sustainability reporting, and data privacy

💡Tip: Shopify Managed Markets supports international growth by creating localized versions of your ecommerce website. No need to develop individual storefronts for every market—the site automatically adapts based on your visitor’s location. 

“Shopify’s international sales tools have been a game-changer for us,” says Joel Johansson, CEO of Nufferton. “Now it’s easier to hone in on new global audiences, and to customize the setup to suit our business.”

Calculating total cost of ownership (TCO)

Your luxury tech infrastructure must offer the agility to adapt quickly to changing market dynamics and consumer behaviors, allowing for the rapid deployment of new features and iterative testing, preventing technology from becoming a barrier to innovation within your brand.

But many vendors mismatch their feature sets. Basic plans don’t include essential commerce components. By the time you’ve customized the setup, costs become a multiple of what the vendor originally quoted.

Reducing tech overhead and total cost of ownership (TCO) is essential for brands focused on growth initiatives like market expansion. Calculate TCO before sinking extra money into a custom setup.

Future-proofing luxury retail with unified commerce

If you’re looking for the lowest-risk way to expand your luxury brand globally, it begins with good technology. The latest digital trends—like augmented reality shopping or expanding into new geographies—evolve alongside the platform, making it easier to stay ahead as trends shift.

With the right infrastructure, you’re free to tell richer stories across channels. You can scale globally, cultivate loyalty on a local level, and make every customer feel like a VIP. 

Shopify helps future-proof luxury brands, whether heritage or new entrants to the market, by providing a single, globally scalable platform that delivers the flawless, high-touch service that luxury clientele expect. Shopify invests billions annually in R&D, compliance, and further innovation to remove the burden for luxury retailers of having to do the same. 

In other words, you won’t have to handle integration maintenance or worry about regulatory changes. Shopify does it for you, so you can focus on your customers.