The vase, the bowl and the $1,000 trainers
Turn over a Le Creuset bowl, a Gucci trainer and a Delft vase and find three different answers to the same question — what are brands really selling?
Mark Sage - 7 min read - 07/10/2026
I'm writing this from Delft, where I watched a woman paint pottery by hand. She'd spent eight years learning to do it, and when she'd finished, she signed the bottom.
Yet Delftware began as a knock-off — and that complicates everything we think we know about provenance.
In the early 1600s, Chinese blue-and-white porcelain was arriving in Europe and causing a sensation. It was white, delicate, translucent — unlike anything Europeans were making. They wanted it, and they didn't know how to produce it. So Dutch potters began experimenting with local clay and glazes, trying to reproduce both the appearance and the decoration of the Chinese product.
Over time, imitation became expertise. Delft developed its own techniques, designs and visual language. At its peak there were more than 30 potteries in the city.
Today, just one remains. Royal Delft has been making Delftware since 1653.
You can still walk around the factory. You can still watch pieces being painted by hand. Every hand-painted piece carries the painter's initials on the bottom.
I bought a small vase.
Not simply because I was in Delft. But because it's hard to stand where something is made by hand and not buy it. Provenance was not a story I was told, but something I saw.
Brand stretch
I guess it's similar to the reason I bought some bright yellow bowls from Le Creuset.
I like Le Creuset. I like the colours. I like the weight of it. I like the Frenchness of it. And somewhere in my head sits an image of heavy cookware being cast in a French foundry by people who have been doing it for generations.
Then I turned over the bowl.
Made in China.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. China is perfectly capable of making an excellent bowl. Mine is an excellent bowl.
Which is precisely why the moment interested me.
What exactly was I buying when I chose the one with Le Creuset moulded into the side?
The story in my head isn't fictional. Le Creuset still makes its famous enamelled cast iron at its original foundry in Fresnoy-le-Grand in northern France, where it has been producing it since 1925.
But that's not where my bowl came from.
Nor is it where everything else carrying the Le Creuset name is made. Over the years, the brand has stretched across stoneware, non-stick cookware, stainless steel, silicone, tableware and more.
Nothing deceptive has necessarily happened.
The brand has simply stretched further than the story that originally gave it meaning.
Gucci leans in
In September, Gucci launched the Drip, the first sneaker designed for the house by Demna.
It costs around $1,000.
But turn it over and you find something historically unusual for Gucci footwear.
Made in China.
Again, that's not a criticism. Gucci says it selected the Chinese manufacturer because it had the technological know-how and capabilities required to produce the design.
Quite possibly, China was simply the best place to make the shoe. And that creates a much more interesting question than whether luxury products should be made in China.
If China has the expertise to make the better Gucci sneaker, what exactly does Made in Italy mean to Gucci?
For more than a century, Gucci has accumulated meaning around Florence, Italian craftsmanship, Italian fashion, design and cultural relevance.
One Chinese-made sneaker doesn't make any of that disappear.
But it does expose something that's happening much more widely.
Capability has globalised.
Meaning hasn't.
And the further the physical reality of a product moves from the story customers associate with the brand, the more work the brand itself has to do to justify the difference.
The brand balloon
Imagine a brand as a balloon.
Companies spend enormous amounts of money making the balloon bigger.
Advertising. Distribution. Flagship stores. Sponsorship. Celebrity ambassadors. Collaborations. Influencers. PR.
That's fame. And fame matters enormously.
You want people to know who you are. You want to enter the consideration set. Better still, you want people asking for you by name.
But making the balloon bigger isn't necessarily the same as making the brand stronger.
Because what originally filled it may have been something else entirely: a distinctive product, a place, skilled people, a design philosophy, a way of making something, a community, experiences and a reputation earned over time.
Those things created meaning, and marketing made the meaning famous.
Once the brand becomes famous, though, something very tempting happens.
You can monetise the fame.
Extend the brand. Increase distribution. Outsource something customers probably won't notice. Raise the price. Put the logo on more things. Find the celebrity of the moment.
Each decision can make perfect commercial sense.
And the balloon gets bigger.
The danger comes when we mistake making the brand bigger for putting more inside it.
Luxury has been testing the limits of that distinction.
Between 2019 and 2023, more than 80% of the growth in the luxury industry came from price increases rather than increased volume. The physical product hasn't suddenly become 80% more important, the industry has instead asked meaning to increasingly carry the growth.
Again, that's not inherently wrong. Craftsmanship, provenance, scarcity, design, heritage, service and status have real value. That's partly what luxury is.
But there must be some limit.
The further price moves away from product, the more work meaning has to do to justify the space between them.
Eventually, somebody presses on the balloon.
And consumers are pressing
For years, weakening luxury consumption in China has been discussed through the language of 消费降级 (xiāofèi jiàngjí) — consumption downgrade.
Economic confidence falls. Consumers become more cautious. They trade an expensive European brand for a cheaper Chinese alternative.
There's clearly some of that happening.
But it may not explain everything.
Another Chinese expression is increasingly useful: 国潮 — guochao, literally "national tide."
It describes the growing appeal of Chinese products and brands connected to Chinese culture, roots and producers.
The shift has been remarkable. In one McKinsey article, it highlighted that the proportion of surveyed Chinese consumers saying they would choose a local brand over a foreign one rose from 15% in 2011 to 85% in 2020.
But the interesting part is why.
McKinsey cautions against explaining it simply as nationalism. Chinese brands have also become better. Better products. Better design. Better innovation. Better understanding of their customers.
The old halo surrounding the foreign brand has weakened at exactly the moment the local alternative has strengthened.
And that's happened while luxury brands themselves have been pushing prices higher. Bain has specifically identified repeated price increases with limited product innovation as one reason Chinese consumers have become more rational about luxury spending.
Perhaps some of what we've been calling consumption downgrade is actually something rather different.
A reassessment of value.
Former Richemont executive Xia Feng recently described visiting Chinese sneaker brand Pane in Shanghai. The store was busy. The shoes cost around RMB900 — hardly bargain-basement footwear — and she was struck by the attention given even to details on the bottom of the shoe.
She posed a much better question than whether Chinese consumers are trading down:
Is luxury solving an affordability problem or a desirability problem?
Because those are very different things.
If I used to want the €3,000 European bag but can now only afford the €500 Chinese one, I've traded down.
If I can afford both and prefer the Chinese one, something much more significant has happened.
I've chosen differently.
The spending hasn't necessarily disappeared. Some of it has moved.
Affordability can recover.
A transfer of desirability is much harder to reverse.
Meaning beats history
This is where brands such as Songmont become interesting.
The Chinese handbag brand was founded little more than a decade ago. It doesn't have a century of European luxury heritage to draw upon.
So it's building its own.
Its proposition draws on contemporary Chinese design, its own cultural point of view and a production story connected to Chinese craftsmanship.
Rather than presenting itself simply as a cheaper alternative to European luxury, it can offer a different expression of it.
The old hierarchy was easy to understand:
European original. Chinese alternative. Lower price.
But what happens when the choice becomes:
European expression or Chinese expression?
Now price isn't necessarily the defining question.
Meaning is.
And there's a lovely historical symmetry in that.
Four hundred years ago, Delft's potters looked at Chinese porcelain and tried to work out how to reproduce it. They learned. They adapted. They developed skills.
Eventually they created something recognisably their own.
Nobody seriously argues that Delftware has no authenticity because its distant inspiration came from China. The authenticity lies in what generations subsequently created.
Why should the journey work in only one direction?
For decades, one model of globalisation broadly looked like this:
European creativity + European brand + Chinese manufacturing.
Increasingly we are seeing something much more fluid.
Chinese brands can develop their own design languages and build their own provenance. European brands can turn to China when Chinese manufacturers possess the better technical capability.
The old hierarchy starts to dissolve.
Authenticity isn't geographic purity. It's alignment between the story a brand tells and the reality you find when you look behind it.
Heritage can be inherited.
Meaning has to keep being earned.
Put something inside the balloon
Brand is what I recognise.
Reputation is what you've earned.
Provenance gives me evidence for believing it.
And brand equity can be spent.
The factory becomes a supplier.
The craft becomes a story.
The story becomes a campaign.
The campaign becomes an ambassador.
Eventually the ambassador becomes the reason to buy.
The balloon keeps getting bigger, but there's less and less inside.
This week, in Delft, I bought a little vase.
Its design exists because Europeans once encountered something extraordinary coming out of China and decided they needed to learn from it.
Four centuries later, the initials on the bottom still link my vase to a specific person — an artisan who spent years learning a craft, and whose name is now attached to what they made.
But perhaps we've spent too long thinking about authenticity as where something comes from. Place hasn't stopped mattering, but globalisation has made it more complicated. What still matters is meaning: the people, the art, the materials.
Hollow that out and there isn't much left inside the balloon.
The real test is whether the story survives when you follow it back — to the product, the people and the place.
Follow it back far enough, and you find out what's actually inside.
You still need to make your brand famous.
But just make sure there's something inside it when people look.