Since January of this year, I’ve written over 110,000 words on the topic of luxury. While I’ve found much to admire, I’ve also found much that could be done better. And so I found myself wondering what I would do differently if I were starting up a luxury house today. I came up with a set of principles as a result—not the products I’d make or how I’d market them, but the fundamental ideas on which the house would rest.

What makes this interesting is that these aren’t just the principles I’d keep in mind if I were starting a luxury house today (I’m not); they’re what I wish for from existing luxury firms. They’re what I hope to find when I walk into a boutique or visit a site. That’s not the case as often as I’d like. In my personal experience, not one maison that I know of meets all or even most of them.

What point is there to having a luxury firm if you’re unwilling or unable to match or exceed the maisons de grand luxe on materials and construction? If you’re not asking yourself how you can strive for your luxury product to be among the best in the world at what it does, then honestly, you should be in a different business.

I don’t understand the idea of luxury maisons that charge luxury markups on items where the quality just isn’t there. I mean, I do understand it. It’s additional profit. But it betrays the promise of luxury. And every time a firm does that—ships a product with materials or construction that are less than they should be—they damage the industry as a whole, even if just a little bit.

A widely cited paper from environmental science is the 1968 paper “The tragedy of the commons” by Garrett Hardin. In it, he wrote:

Once you think about this enough, you start to see commons everywhere in the natural world: the atmosphere, the oceans, forests, you name it. But I see commons in even more places. For example, the goodwill of luxury consumers: our trust that the firms we buy from make high-quality goods that justify their prices. That’s a commons that’s subject to degradation just like a pasture.

Imagine a product category where a number of maisons have a long history of making high-quality goods. Perhaps a new competitor comes along, or perhaps an existing maison has a change of heart. Either way, they decide to make lower-quality goods but keep charging the same amount. In the short term, the firm makes more money, so it seems like a good idea. But as a seventeenth-century French writer put it:

Eventually it catches up with you. But the problem is that it catches up with everyone else as well. Every substandard product shipped by a maison that should know better destroys a tiny bit of the commons of luxury consumer goodwill. And we should all be angry about that.

If you’re unwilling to disclose every step your product took along the way from raw materials to finished good, then you shouldn’t put your company’s name on it. You may tell yourself your secrecy is for competitive reasons, and in a very few cases, I suppose that may be fair. But it’s probably more often the case that if you don’t want to talk about how you produced something, it’s because you believe your customers will think less of it as a result. That can’t ever be the right answer.

Any luxury firm, new or established, should be willing to name every supplier and workshop. They should conduct audits of their supply and production chains and disclose exactly what those audits found. And they definitely shouldn’t bury that information and then tell themselves that because it was somewhere on their website, they’ve done the right thing. Sometimes trying to discover where or how a luxury thing was made is reminiscent of the character Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy describing how he found the plans to demolish his house:

I’ve written two articles on this topic (part one, part two) and found that on a 3 000 € handbag, treating the workers who make it humanely might add 100 € to the retail price. If a maison is unwilling to do that, they’re telling us something about their values.

In my manifesto, I wrote:

If a maison de (grand) luxe isn’t using its substantial profit margins to improve the lives of everyone whom it touches—then it’s breaking the luxury promise.

People come in all shapes and sizes. Too often, luxury doesn’t recognize that fact or doesn’t care about it. This is something I feel personally as someone with wide feet. Go looking at maisons de (grand) luxe and see if you can find any that specifically offer shoes in wide sizes. With Ferragamo as a notable (and laudable) exception, it’s almost impossible for someone like me to find shoes that fit.

What I don’t understand is when maisons are selling shoes for $1,000–2,000 per pair (or more) and somehow can’t find the money to stock a larger range of sizes. For example, Hermès’ least expensive closed-toe shoe for men is $950; their most expensive not made of exotic leather is $2,625. At those prices, you’d think they could carry a few models in wide.

It’s not just sizes—it’s how people live. Let’s take backpacks as an example. Many of us put our backpacks down on the floor. If a luxury brand makes a backpack out of high-end leathers, they should provide protection on the bottom of the pack. Many of us get caught in the rain wearing our backpacks. If a luxury brand makes a backpack out of delicate materials, they should include a rain hood. This isn’t difficult.

In a previous article, I wrote that for a luxury item, an afterlife requires three things:

Design products with repair in mind, and keep parts and service available for decades and/or enable independent repair shops to fill the gap. Design products that are inherently valuable. Design products that are timeless, not faddish. Do these three things and your products can last for decades.

I wrote recently about an experience I had at a Las Vegas boutique of a major Swiss watch manufacture. I was interested in a model they didn’t have in stock, at which point the sales associate spun a tale of how there would be very few made again, how I should place an order with the boutique then and there if I wanted one, and how people who took their time and did their research would miss out on what they wanted. (Of course, I walked out of the shop, pulled up the manufacture’s website on my phone, and found I could order it immediately.) And I had previously experienced similar (though not quite so blatant) sales pressure at other boutiques of that same firm.

Writing this article, I’ve been thinking about the contrast between that Swiss watchmaker and the camera maker Leica. I’ve been to Leica boutiques in Australia, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the US. Never once have I felt treated like a transaction. Each time—both before and since I bought my first Leica camera—I’m treated as someone to be welcomed and educated. Each time I visit, I learn something new.

I’ve said it before: many of the most famous maisons de (grand) luxe could learn a thing or two from Leica.

The next time you’re considering a significant luxury purchase, ask the sales associate a few questions. Is it as good as the best competitive products? How was it made, and by whom? Were the people who made it treated decently? What happens when it needs a repair? How will it work with you and the way you live? Pay attention to how that associate responds. Do you feel like you know more about the product? Do you feel more confident in your decision?

How that associate—and everyone up the chain, all the way to the CEO—responds matters. A maison that welcomes your questions and gives you satisfying answers is giving you reasons to trust it.

As a luxury consumer, I want the pleasure of owning something beautiful to be matched by confidence in how it was made and how I’ll be treated after I’ve bought it. At the prices the maisons charge, that seems reasonable. After all:

We shouldn’t have to start a luxury house to find one that keeps its promises.