How the luxury food industry is taking cues from fashion’s playbook

Sign up to receive the Vogue Business newsletter for the latest luxury news and insights, plus exclusive membership discounts. Last Thursday, fashion insiders descended on East Hampton to celebrate the opening of Flamingo Estate and Mytheresa’s Railroad Racetrack pop-up, featuring an ‘Inconvenience Store’ of curated Flamingo produce and apothecary products alongside luxury clothes, bags and shoes from Mytheresa. At a dinner to follow, a Hamptons hotelier asks what event the patrons had come from. “It was luxury fashion meets luxury food,” an attendee says. Luxury food is right. At 9 Railroad Avenue, everything from high-end olive oils and spices to soaps and candles sit alongside a mint green Balenciaga City bag and raffia Loewe tote. Guests eat Flamingo Estate wild honey-drizzled lemon sorbet as they wander around the racks of designer goods. (Last year’s inaugural pop-up was a marketing activation with less inventory. This year, everything’s for sale.) The brands have collaborated for almost two years now, with dinners and pop-ups in both Los Angeles and New York. When they first met, they were shocked at their almost-identical mailing lists, Flamingo Estate founder Richard Christiansen says. “The people that were buying our vegetables, that had Flamingo Estate products in their kitchen and bathroom, had Mytheresa products in their wardrobes.” This is key, says Heather Kaminetsky, North America president of Mytheresa: “The Flamingo collaboration works so well for us because it’s complimentary, not competitive.” The revamped space is a sign of a shift in the fashion-food tie-up. In recent years, luxury fashion has used food as a method of reaching Gen Z consumers. But more often, brands are flipping this strategy on its head. Instead of aligning with luxury fashion to bridge the gap, food and apothecary brands are linking up with these players to elevate their own offerings, as they, too, are luxury brands. “Grocery has a lot of headroom for growth in the luxury sector,” says Fiona Harkin, foresight director at strategic foresight consultancy The Future Laboratory. Foods are gaining traction as status symbols, she says, leaving space for food and apothecary brands to position themselves as their own form of luxury house. Flamingo Estate offers a blueprint for just how to do so. The brand was founded by Christiansen during the pandemic in 2020. Using his luxury marketing expertise (he founded communications agency Chandelier Creative), Christiansen has evolved Flamingo into a fully fledged luxury offering, from pantry to body products. “I like to say that Mother Nature is the last great luxury house,” Christiansen says, without a hint of irony. “As the world gets more technical with artificial intelligence and algorithms, the greatest luxury is an amazing meal and a hot bath, and things made by hand.” This slow down is at the heart of the Inconvenience Store: it’s all the products that are the hardest, and take the longest, to make. “In a world that’s drunk on innovation and efficiency, what a luxury it is to do things the slow way, the old way — the way perhaps we’ve forgotten.” Christiansen refers to the length of time it takes to make olive oil; the trees are 100-plus years old, and the oil takes a year to make and bottle. “More time goes into that than goes into making a bag,” he says. From status snacks to luxury food It taps a growing desire for luxe foods, Harkin says. “The key trend to note is how consumers are seeking out ‘status snacks’. The phrase ‘you are what you eat’ is taking on new meaning in the face of hype groceries, hipster bakeries and niche memes.” It’s an outlandish-seeming development in the context of a cost of living crisis, she says. “But they reflect the desire for quality indulgence in grocery, as such items are more affordable indulgences than dining out,” continues Harkin. Consumers are, after all, almost three times more likely to treat themselves to food or drink than to personal care, per Deloitte. A $80 spicy strawberry fruit snack will set you back less than a multi-thousand-dollar handbag. But this is where brands such as Flamingo Estate depart from the ‘status snacks’ label to that of luxury food. By positioning the products alongside luxury bags — rather than as an alternative to them — Flamingo Estate goes after an ultra-luxury customer that’s less likely to feel the impact of the crisis at all. The East Hampton consumer can likely afford to walk out with a yellow Mytheresa package and a basket full of Flamingo Estate goodies. And they’re the ones less inclined to baulk at said $80 spicy strawberry fruit snack. (Last year, Kaminetsky says, someone bought a Porsche that was on display out the front of the pop-up.) Just up the road, New York City’s Erewhon equivalent, Happier Grocery, takes a similar approach: it’s stocked at The Row’s new Amagansett outpost on Main Street. Passersby aren’t going into The Row just to buy juice. But they might walk out with a couple for the walk home, alongside their new Margaux bag or jelly sandals. Beyond the positioning on the shelves, it’s Flamingo Estate’s decidedly fashion-adjacent brand-building strategy that elevates the product beyond a hype snack. “I think that one of the reasons Flamingo has done so well is because we put that luxury lens on food,” Christiansen says. “No one really had done that in terms of the photography and the branding and really treating food like a luxury good.” This manifests in this summer’s pop-up with Mytheresa. Now in its second year, it was inspired by an Hermès pop-up at Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, a car show in California. “All these people were obsessing over beautiful vintage cars, and then a fashion house had a pop-up,” Christiansen says. “It makes sense that design-obsessed car enthusiasts would have a design-obsessed fashion brand there as well.” This focus on top players — and, by proxy, top spenders — gets at why Flamingo Estate’s collaboration strategy has met with success. “The right design partner will always matter to luxury brands,” Harkin adds. Since launching in 2020, Flamingo has collaborated with top players in the luxury space from an array of industries: fashion brand The Elder Statesman (on a cashmere blanket), Italian architect and designer Gaetano Pesce (on a $3,000 limited-edition ice bucket), and art and design atelier Campbell Rey (on a set of bronze gardening tools). Christiansen appreciates that Mytheresa is willing to do things beyond marketing products. “It’s really rare to meet a brand that takes risks and has fun, especially in the luxury space,” he says. Mytheresa can afford to play. It’s on track to achieve double-digit growth in the remaining two fiscal quarters. Plus, CEO Michael Kliger knows the value of these experiences. “We try not to be just e-commerce,” he told Vogue Business in May. “You really want to be a community for luxury lovers and to be a community, you need to have the speed and the convenience of e-commerce but you also need to have these personal moments.” Christiansen agrees: “We need theatre, we need escapism. There’s no innovation going on here — which is maybe the most innovative thing in the world.” Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com. 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