Live commerce has come for the rest of the premium economy.

A few years ago, the great luxury houses agreed on one thing. Selling through a livestream was not for them. The format was loud, the audience was young, the discounts were public, and it all seemed to belong to a different kind of business. Then the stores closed during the pandemic, spending moved onto phones, and a younger generation of buyers made it plain where their attention now sat. Within two years, the same houses that had refused were broadcasting on the platforms they had dismissed.

That reversal is worth understanding, because the pressure that produced it is now reaching a much wider set of premium businesses, including some that feel very far from a handbag livestream.

The customer changed first

The plainest reason the houses followed is that their customer was changing underneath them. According to Bain & Company, Gen Z and millennials together are projected to make up around 70% of the personal luxury goods market by 2025, and spending by Gen Z and Gen Alpha is set to grow about three times faster than older generations through 2030.¹² These buyers also start earlier than the generation before them, with Gen Z beginning to buy luxury at around fifteen, several years sooner than millennials did.² Asia is now the largest luxury region in the world by most measures, carried by a young population that is growing wealthier each year.

The harder part for an established brand is that this younger buyer does not behave like the older one. Bain describes Gen Z as more open but less loyal, judging brands on individual identity and lived relevance rather than on inherited status alone.³ A famous name no longer guarantees attention. The personal luxury goods market actually shrank by about 2% in 2024 even as spending on experiences grew, and the old loyalty programmes are losing their hold.⁴ A brand that leans only on its heritage is therefore more exposed than it looks, because the people who respected that heritage are slowly being outnumbered by buyers who want a reason to care now.

They changed because their audience had already moved, and they had to go and find it.

The trend is real, and it is growing

It would be easy to dismiss livestream selling as a passing fashion. The figures say otherwise. In China, the mature version of this market, livestream commerce surpassed one trillion RMB by 2020, according to KPMG and AliResearch.⁵ The growth has reached the top of the market as well. Roughly 73% of China's luxury shoppers were active on Douyin in 2023, according to the Douyin Luxury Industry White Paper, and the platform's luxury sales rose sharply year on year.⁶ Southeast Asia sits a few years behind on the same curve, with one research-house forecast putting social commerce in the region at around 47.6 billion USD in 2025 and projecting growth to around 186.5 billion by 2030.⁷

What the luxury houses do on these platforms is the part most often misread. They are not trying to close a sale during the broadcast in the way a cosmetics seller does. Louis Vuitton ran its first China livestream on Xiaohongshu in 2020, and the practice soon became normal for Burberry, Coach, Dior, Gucci and others.⁸ The aim is presence and attention rather than a transaction. Louis Vuitton's livestreamed shows on Chinese platforms have drawn audiences in the tens of millions and translated into substantial follower growth on the brand's official accounts. The value is in being seen, talked about and understood by the next buyer, in the place where she already spends her time.

Beyond the luxury houses

Most premium businesses are not Chanel or Cartier, and they do not need to be for any of this to apply to them. The same logic reaches a premium drinks label, a mattress maker, a watch brand, a clothing line, a tour operator or a charter company. None of them will sell their main product inside a livestream, and none of them needs to.

Two car brands make the point more clearly than another list of categories.

Tesla treats Chinese social platforms as a genuine part of its customer-facing presence rather than a marketing afterthought. The company has run product education, vehicle walkthroughs and customer Q&A sessions on Douyin since 2020, in a market where its buyers expect that brands meet them in the channels they already use.⁹ The point is not that buyers complete the purchase inside the stream. The point is that the brand is present in the channel where its audience now learns about cars at all.

BYD, now the world's largest electric-vehicle producer after overtaking Tesla on multiple measures in recent years, has gone further by changing the product itself to match the new buyer. It now offers two product families with deliberately different design languages, with the Ocean Series styled around flowing lines and positioned to younger buyers, alongside the older Dynasty Series with its more traditional cultural cues.¹⁰ A heritage Western marque that assumes its existing buyer is the customer of the next decade is competing against a manufacturer that has already split its showroom in two.

The strength of this pattern varies by category. It is sharpest where the product is visual, where taste is publicly performed, and where younger Asian buyers are a meaningful share of the customer base. It is weaker in categories where premium choices remain relationship-driven, such as wealth management, elite education or the most discreet end of private services. The lesson is not that every business looks the same, but that operators should know honestly which side of that line they sit on.

This is also where our own readership enters the argument. Premium hospitality, wellness and a growing share of premium property are not sold on a screen, but they are increasingly discovered on one. A restaurant, a retreat or a development is now found, judged and shortlisted through short video and personal recommendation well before a guest reaches the brand's own website or a booking platform. For these operators the lesson is the same as for the luxury houses, with one adjustment. The booking and the money still move through the usual places, so the work is not to sell in the feed but to be visible and trusted there, because that is where consideration now begins.

None of this comes free. Building a credible, sustained presence on these channels takes proper investment in content, in people, and in patience, and a token social account is worse than none. The brands that do this badly are easier to spot than the brands that do it well, which is exactly why doing it properly is a competitive advantage.

Why this matters more in Southeast Asia

The region makes the case sharper than Europe does. Its population is young, it is growing richer, it skipped the desktop era and went straight to mobile, and its social commerce is among the fastest-growing in the world. A premium brand opening in Jakarta or Bangkok is more exposed to this shift than the same brand in Paris, not less, because a larger share of its likely buyers already lives in these channels and forms opinions there. The young and newly wealthy buyer in Singapore deciding on a first serious purchase is not always reaching for the names that defined status twenty years ago. A brand that assumes otherwise may find its audience shrinking without ever being told why.

Two honest limits

This is not an argument that every premium brand should be broadcasting tomorrow. Two real exceptions deserve to be stated clearly, before any operator acts on the rest of the piece.

The first is that following a younger audience badly is worse than not following it at all. The clumsy attempt to sound young usually fails, as Tiffany found when its "Not Your Mother's Tiffany" campaign was rejected by the audience it was meant to win.¹¹ Burberry is the longer cautionary tale, often cited for chasing streetwear collaborations and aggressive social media positioning under successive creative directors, losing some of its older base, and not fully winning the new one, which is part of why the brand has since shifted back toward its heritage codes under newer leadership.¹² The task is to understand the new buyer, not to imitate her.

The second is that the genuine trophy tier lives on scarcity. For a small number of brands at the very top, whose appeal depends on being hard to reach, chasing broad reach can do more harm than good. Aman, Capella, Six Senses, and the ultra-discreet end of private aviation and yachting are not the businesses this trend is built for. Their work is to remain difficult to find for the wrong people while remaining easy to find for the right ones, which is a different game from the one most premium operators play. For everyone else, scarcity is an aspiration, not a moat.