Podcast: Luxury’s Transparency Challenges

Traceability in the luxury sector was the topic of the latest Rapaport Diamond Podcast episode, which featured two experts from the field.

Margot Stuart, chief operating officer and cofounder of OriginAll, a platform that helps people distinguish fakes from genuine products, and Felicitas Morhart, vice dean and professor of marketing at the Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC Lausanne) in Switzerland, joined Rapaport’s Joshua Freedman to discuss the subject.

They also talked about OriginalLuxury, an initiative the pair have been working on that provides information and events to help the sector improve transparency. They discussed luxury as an emerging academic discipline, the role of diamond companies, and the challenges brands face — including the fact that mystique is at the heart of many labels.

“When you think about luxury, you think about a dream, you think maybe also a little about a black box or a mystique,” said Morhart on the podcast. “There’s a lot of secrets about how things are being done and where things are coming from and how they are made. This is the opposite of what you expect from traceability.”

Stuart and Morhart also spoke about OriginalLuxury’s recent Luxury Roundtable in Lausanne, at which diamond companies joined other luxury groups to talk about sustainability, technology and more.

Listen to the full episode here: