Client: Luxity
Period: April 2022 to March 2025
Approach: Corporate communications, media relations, executive profiling
The Challenge
Luxity buys and sells pre-owned luxury goods — handbags, watches, jewellery and sneakers from Hermès, Rolex, Chanel and Louis Vuitton — bought from South Africans and resold online and through its stores. Founded in 2016, it is the largest business of its kind in the country, and nothing reaches a shelf without being authenticated first. Luxity could guarantee any single item it sold. It could not guarantee the category it sold in.
The global pre-owned luxury market was on track to double in size by 2025, and South African buyers had every reason to stay out of it. Up to 70% of designer listings on social platforms were counterfeit. More than 26,000 counterfeiters were trading on Facebook alone. One in three items handed to Luxity for evaluation came back fake. The business was rigorous. The category was not, and the category’s reputation had become the ceiling on Luxity’s growth.
The Hook
No brand outruns the reputation of the market it sits in. The solution was to stop defending Luxity and start repairing the category, on the basis that the leading business in a trusted market wins by default.
That reframing moved the brief out of marketing and into corporate reputation. The barrier was never price, availability or awareness. It was trust, and it belonged to the entire sector rather than to any one company.
Rather than issue more counterfeit warnings, HLS set out to own the conversations the market was already having, with the co-founder as the voice carrying them. Social listening identified three gathering simultaneously: handbags and watches as an alternative asset class, the circular economy, and sneaker collecting as a serious market segment.
The same research surfaced an asset the business already owned and was badly underusing — an annual State of the Luxury Report sitting on the website as a blog post. Messaging was then built five ways: education and reassurance for cautious buyers, the asset class argument for investors, curation for fashion audiences, data and expert commentary for top-tier press, and material credible enough for influencers to attach their own names to.
The Line
Phase one laid the foundations through consumer education, unpacking how to identify a counterfeit and making the investment case for a Rolex.
What accelerated everything was commercial. On Thursday 21 July 2022, the Reserve Bank raised the repo rate by 75 basis points, and the country spent the day working out what it meant for their bonds. That same day, a Hermès Fjord Birkin 35 sold on the Luxity site for R280,000, eight minutes after it was listed. HLS had the story with media before the day was out. One snippet became 32 Tier 1 placements.
Phase two rebuilt the State of the Luxury Report as an annual media moment rather than a document, running it three years consecutively. Its data carried a story pipeline for months at a stretch, including a comparison of luxury spending habits in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Content widened into sneaker culture and circular fashion to reach a younger buyer.
Phase three ran on a standing news monitoring operation. LVMH results, Richemont’s sale of YNAP, Prada’s performance, Rolex’s departure from South Africa after 76 years, Amazon’s arrival in the local market and Gen Z spending power all became commentary opportunities, turned around within hours. By this point, requests were arriving unprompted from CNN, Business Day, eNCA, 702, Kaya FM and SABC, and the programme secured a feature on CNN’s African Voices Changemakers.
HLS also supported the opening of the V&A Waterfront store and the growth that followed it. All three years ran with no paid media, no influencer fees and no production budget. Every result below was earned.
The Sinker
79% increase in annual sales, against a 35% target.
- 288 media placements, 93% of them in Tier 1 titles
- R15.4 million in earned media value
- Audience reach of 820 million across three years
- Retail footprint grown from three stores to five, including the V&A Waterfront flagship
- Ranked by the Financial Times among Africa’s Fastest-Growing Companies for a second consecutive year, and named the fastest-scaling e-commerce player in South Africa
- Gold for Best B2B PR Campaign at the 2025 PRISM Awards
Luxity started as a well-run business inside a category nobody trusted. It ended as the organisation the country’s media calls when it wants to understand that category at all. Sales grew 79% against a 35% target, with the Financial Times putting absolute growth at 297.61% and headcount up 169%. The retail footprint went from three stores to five, and the business now owns a founder who is a standing source for CNN and Business Day, an annual report that generates months of coverage without being pitched, and inbound media demand it no longer has to create.
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