Rapha: weaving story strands of luxury

Glover, Catherine (2020) Rapha: weaving story strands of luxury. In: Understanding Luxury Fashion: From Emotions to Brand Building. Palgrave Advances in Luxury . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 243-273. ISBN 9783030256531, 9783030256548

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Abstract

British cycling company Rapha presents itself as a premium brand offering high quality apparel, concierge travel services, boutique 'clubhouses' and beautiful publications. Since 2004, it has enjoyed year-on-year growth and in 2016 sales increased almost 30% to £63 million (Wood 2017). This chapter critiques how we can know that and know how (Roberts and Armitage 2016) Rapha is a luxury brand – contrary to its labelling as 'premium' – and how this can be established through socio-cultural sense-making of the brand offerings, through critical textual analysis. This chapter interrogates how Rapha has developed a luxurious 'storyworld' (Abbott 2008) and charts how story strands of luxury are woven through its material artefacts, texts and environments, acting as a symbolic 'red thread' that cohesively binds the brand together.

Item Type: Book Section
Subjects: N500 Marketing
W200 Design studies
Department: Faculties > Arts, Design and Social Sciences > Design
Related URLs:
Depositing User: Paul Burns
Date Deposited: 06 Jun 2019 10:03
Last Modified: 30 Mar 2022 16:30
URI: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/39524

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