Fifteen years of conversations with the people who run luxury retail have left me with one consistent observation: the executives generating the most interesting results are almost never the ones who waited for the market to move first.
For most of its history, the relationship between a luxury brand and a shopping destination was straightforward – the brand paid rent, the destination provided footfall. The arrangement held when luxury demand was concentrated in a handful of cities, the customer base was predictable, and the physical store was the only channel that mattered.
None of those conditions are held today. Luxury demand has dispersed across three continents. The customer has digital and physical options that did not exist a decade ago. And the luxury destinations generating the most compelling results – in New York, London, Mexico City, São Paulo, Dubai, Bangkok, and Seoul – have moved well beyond the landlord role. They have rebuilt the brand-destination relationship from the ground up, as genuine commercial partners.
The shift is structural. It represents a fundamental rethinking of what a retail destination is for, and what the commercial relationship between brand and operator must look like if both parties are going to capture the growth on offer. The operators that grasped this earliest, years before it looked like the obvious move, are the ones generating results worth studying.
The geography has changed. The model hasn’t. Yet.
The case for urgency starts with the numbers. The GCC personal luxury market reached $12.8 billion in 2024, growing 6 percent while global markets contracted by 2 percent. The events of recent weeks are a reminder that the Gulf’s long-term growth story is being written against a backdrop of genuine complexity – but the operators and brands committed to the region are doing so with conviction that structural drivers of growth are more durable than any period of turbulence.
India is on a trajectory to reach $26 billion in luxury and premium fashion by 2028. South Korea leads the world in luxury spending per capita at $325 per person. Thailand’s luxury brand sales are growing at 20 percent annually. Brazil’s luxury sector grew 30 percent between 2018 and 2023, with a further 50 percent projected over the next five years. Mexico’s market, at $7.28 billion today, is forecast to reach $9.25 billion by 2031. And the United States – still the world’s largest luxury market – is mid-reset.
These are the markets where the next era of luxury retail will be won or lost. And in most of them, the operators who got there first did so by offering something the old landlord model could not: a genuine, commercially aligned partnership with the brands they carry.
The CEOs navigating these markets are unambiguous on one point: the brands they most want to work with are the ones that show up as partners, not tenants. That distinction, once abstract, is now the deciding factor in where the best global brands choose to open.
Three integration models remaking the industry
What I find consistently in conversations with the leaders I most respect in this industry is that the ones generating the most compelling results made a single decision early – often years before it looked like the right move – to treat the brand-destination relationship as a genuine partnership. Three models have emerged from that decision, each reinforcing the others.
Model One: Experience as joint investment
The physical environment must justify the physical journey in an era when every transactional element of retail can be completed digitally. The operators who understood this earliest stopped thinking about their luxury destinations as containers for brands and started thinking about them as reasons to visit in their own right.
Chadatip Chutrakul conceived ICONSIAM as a 750,000 square metre riverside landmark — with its own indoor floating market, river museum, and ultra-luxury ICONLUXE wing — designed from the outset as a national landmark. Since 2018 it has welcomed 115 million international visitors. Over 50 global brands chose it for their Thai debut or flagship. Combined with Siam Paragon, it accounts for 75 percent of Thailand’s total luxury retail revenue. The investment justified itself not because footfall was guaranteed, but because the destination was built to earn it.
Shinsegae’s Gangnam branch — built over two decades by Chairwoman Chung Yoo-kyung into the most rigorous luxury brand environment in Korea — surpassed 3 trillion won ($2.3 billion) in annual sales in 2024. Foreign customer sales surged 70 percent year-on-year in Q4 2025. Shinsegae is now constructing The Heritage: a dedicated luxury centre housing the largest Chanel and Hermès stores in the Korean department store industry. El Palacio de Hierro’s $300 million transformation of its Polanco flagship — 55,000 square metres designed around Mexico City’s own cultural references — generated $1.47 billion in revenues in H1 2025, up 12 percent, with net profit growing 19 percent. Emaar invested AED 1.5 billion expanding Dubai Mall into The District; the destination recorded 111 million visitors in 2024, the most visited on earth for the second consecutive year.
The logic is consistent across all four. Co-investment in the physical experience is now table-stakes. The brands generating the strongest results are the ones sitting at the design table from the outset.
Model Two: Commercial alignment
Fixed rent tied to occupancy is an artefact of a model where the operator’s job ended at the lease. The partnership model assumes the relationship begins there. Two operators have taken commercial alignment further than anyone else in the industry.
Scott Malkin built The Bicester Collection on a royalties-on-sales model rather than fixed rent — the only commercial structure in luxury retail where operator income is directly tied to brand performance. L Catterton’s acquisition of a 42 percent stake at a £1.5 billion enterprise value is a precise measure of what that alignment is worth to the world’s most sophisticated luxury capital.
“It’s a partnership, it truly is. We are legitimately able to talk to the brand for three reasons: one, we are retailers; two, we are sharing their success and their risk; and three, we are investing hugely in global and tourism marketing.”
— Scott Malkin, Founder, The Bicester Collection
El Puerto de Liverpool went further still. Its $6.25 billion all-cash acquisition of a 49.9 percent stake in Nordstrom in May 2025 is the most radical expression of this logic: when commercial alignment between operator and brand is imperfect, removing the structural separation entirely may be the answer. The capital driving global luxury retail is no longer concentrated where it once was.
Model Three: Shared intelligence
The most valuable asset in luxury retail today is behavioral intelligence – who the customer is, what they are buying, what they did before they entered the store and after they left. Brands operating in destinations without shared data architectures are flying blindly, while their operators sit on intelligence that could transform commercial performance. The winning model is one where brand CRM and destination analytics function as a unified layer, surfacing insights neither party could generate alone.
Saks Global, bringing Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, and Bergdorf Goodman under unified ownership in a $7 billion platform, is the most consequential structural bet in American luxury retail in a generation. Geoffroy van Raemdonck, its new CEO, is building on the premise that a unified intelligence layer across the three most recognized full-price names in the US unlocks something none of them could generate alone: a complete picture of the American luxury customer, and the infrastructure to act on it.
André Maeder’s Selfridges Group, operating Central Group’s 40-store network across 7 European countries with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund as strategic partner, is the most complex test of all three models simultaneously. What that network is building next, and what it means for brand partnerships across Europe, is a conversation we will be having with André when he speaks in Milan on June 4th.
Chalhoub Group has been building the partnership model for seven decades, and Michael Chalhoub has been direct about what the next chapter requires. The group is simultaneously deepening its Saudi platform with a new regional fulfilment hub in Riyadh and executing disciplined diversification across Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa — reducing reliance on any single region while reinforcing its position as the GCC’s definitive luxury operator.
“We need to disrupt ourselves before we get disrupted. We constantly try to reinvent ourselves, to reinvent our customer journey, to reinvent our staff needs and skill sets.”
— Michael Chalhoub, CEO, Chalhoub Group
Iguatemi, the gateway operator for international brands entering Latin America, from Louis Vuitton’s first regional store to Comme des Garçons, reported R$6 billion in portfolio sales in Q3 2025, up 22.5 percent year-on-year. Its loyalty program, Iguatemi One, counts over one million active members with curated cultural access: relationships designed to outlast any single transaction.
What comes next
The three models compound. The operators pulling furthest ahead, Siam Piwat, Shinsegae, Chalhoub, are executing all three simultaneously, each reinforcing the others. The ones treating any of them as future considerations are falling behind in ways that will be difficult to reverse. The mall-as-landlord model served its era well. The industry has moved on.
When we convened the inaugural RLC Fashion Summit last September, I was struck less by the poll results — the Middle East first, Latin America second — than by the conversation that followed them. The room had been waiting for exactly that forum: operators, brand directors, and investors in the same space, with the shared recognition that none of them win without the others. That appetite has not diminished. If anything, the complexity of the current environment has sharpened it.
The 2026 edition takes place June 3–4 at the Four Seasons Hotel Milano, built around four structural themes: the new geography of growth, the reinvention of desire, the new economics of luxury, and the innovation frontiers opened by AI. André Maeder joins a lineup of operators who are building, not describing, the models above.
The geometry of this industry, the alignments between brands, destinations, and the customers they share, is being redrawn now, in the decisions being made this year. The shape of the next decade will belong to those who draw it deliberately. We look forward to doing that work together in Milan.
