What a luxury brand is called, how it is drawn and what it promises

The name

In luxury the brand name is formed in one of these ways: the founders' first name and surname, or surname alone; an acronym made of their initials; an acronym of the brand's positioning; a description of the main product or of the company's heritage; an invented name unconnected to heritage. The last case is found above all in the United States and Canada, where heritage doesn't exist: the Declaration of Independence dates from 1776, while in those years we already had luxury brands.

How do I come up with the name of my brand? In 70% of the brands analysed the process was very simple: the founders' first name and surname, or surname alone. Simple things work. Giorgio Armani, Breguet, Chanel, Rolls-Royce. And the easiest ones are not necessarily the least successful: think of Giorgio Armani, Valentino, Dolce & Gabbana, much simpler than acronyms.

The second option is an acronym of names and surnames. B&B Italia, previously B&C, taken over entirely by the Busnelli family in the 1970s, became the acronym of Busnelli & Busnelli. RiFRA is the acronym of Rivolta Fratelli.

Rolex and Lexus

Third case: the acronym of the positioning. Could you tell me what Rolex and Lexus mean? Lexus is said to be the acronym of Luxury EXportation United States, and not by chance: it's Toyota's luxury brand, created in 1986 in response to Honda's Acura and Nissan's Infiniti, designed from the start to compete in the US market. The official version is more prosaic: an agency put forward 219 names and got from “Alexis” to “Lexus” because it sounded good. But the positioning was that, and its success led Toyota to widen the market from the US alone to much of the world.

Rolex was registered in 1908 by Hans Wilsdorf, who had started out in London and then moved to Geneva. Wilsdorf spent weeks working out what to call the company, testing how names sounded: he wanted a short word, pronounced the same way in every language, that would look good on the dial. An Al Ries before his time. That “horlogerie exquise” was also behind it is a reading that has never been confirmed, but the method is what counts: first the sound, then everything else. I talk about Rolex often because for years it hasn't put a foot wrong: everything it does is executed spectacularly.

Panerai and Bottega Veneta

When you land at Malpensa you first see Rolex, then a huge Panerai poster with the payoff “Italian design, Swiss technology”. They still use it today, in almost identical form: “Italian design and Swiss watchmaking”. It's a deeply wrong payoff. Either you exploit the Italian heritage or you exploit the Swiss heritage: you can't do both at once. You risk losing both the customers who want a Swiss watch and those who want to wear a symbol of Italianness.

I say this with respect, because I'm a customer of theirs and I care. But a payoff that tries to keep a foot in both camps divides customers.

Then there's the description of the main product or of the heritage. Coach New York is represented by the carriage: that's how they started. Poltrona Frau: the armchair (poltrona) is the main product, Frau the founders' surname. Bottega Veneta was founded in Vicenza in 1966 as Bottega Veneta Artigiana: in the Veneto the botega is the craftsman's shop, and the name evokes its origins and its woven leather. Acquired by Gucci in 2001 for 156 million dollars, with Tomas Maier as art director it created new products while respecting its heritage, and in 2019 it passed a billion in turnover for the first time. In 2025 it turned over 1.7 billion with 307 boutiques, celebrated 50 years of the intrecciato, which is a registered trademark, and changed creative direction again: Matthieu Blazy went to Chanel, replaced by Louise Trotter. The name and the weave, though, are still the same.

Finally, the hardest thing: if there is no heritage, the entrepreneur and their advisers have to invent a brand and bring it to life. Apple and Four Seasons used their imagination, and very well. But you could ask which came first, the chicken or the egg: is Apple Apple because it has this name and the bitten apple, or because it made extraordinary products, with a well-defined artistic mood and deliberately high prices?

The logo

The name has to come with a logo, the brand's visual. Across the same 200 brands, companies used: the founders' initials (GA for Giorgio Armani, AP for Audemars Piguet, D&G, B&O, Bentley's B, Jaeger-LeCoultre's JL, Coco Chanel's double C, Rolls-Royce's RR); a stylised iconic product (Poltrona Frau's armchair, which can never go out of fashion because it is the very symbol of the company, or our kitchen); heritage in visual form (Breguet with its watches, Coach with the carriage, the Hermès logo); a graphic rendering of the invented name (Apple's apple, Four Seasons' tree of the four seasons).

Audemars Piguet's is the perfect brand: the AP logo and the date, 1875, masters of watchmaking for a century and a half. They've even put in the time factor. Louboutin has no real visual in its brand, but its visual is the red sole: anyone who recognises it associates it with an astronomical price, and anyone who wears it does so partly to tell others they've spent that much.

Don't be afraid to have several versions of a logo. Ferrari has four: the vertical logo, the Scuderia logo, the prancing horse and the text logo, all used on the F8 Tributo. Maserati has four too, with the trident from Bologna's Neptune fountain. Porsche uses geography, with the Stuttgart mare and the colours of Baden-Württemberg; BMW the colours of Bavaria and the propeller, because it started out making aircraft engines.

The graphic rules

White on black or black on white is best. We have our logos in both versions, so we can use them depending on the photos and videos. Colour is fine if used intelligently: Tiffany with its blue box, Rolex green, Vuitton's dark brown. But colour is riskier: choose one, two at most, and hand them to a graphic designer of a certain calibre.

The typeface should be serif capitals: most of the logos analysed, apart from the American ones, follow this rule. An absolute no to cartoon graphics, Paint graphics, caricature and stylisation: all the improvised brands you see on Facebook are wrong, they give an impression of stylistic poverty and improvisation.

The payoff: how to make one that wins

For our payoff we went to the best in the world: when it comes to your company and your brand, better not to get it wrong. I got on a plane and went to Al Ries, who came up with a masterpiece that will last for years: Kitchens and Baths direct from Milano.

Everything Ries teaches is in there. It starts with the category (Kitchens and Baths), because people buy by category first and then by brand and product. Then there's the differentiating idea: what sets my company apart from the others? Direct, which has a double meaning: selling directly without intermediaries, and “direct from” a place. And finally the market segment: from Milano signals the high end, just as Lancôme Paris uses Paris to identify the high end of cosmetics.

Why not “Italia” but “Milano”? Because Italy can trigger both positive and negative emotions. If you have a region or a city to identify your brand with, use it; if you don't, refer to Italy. Ries also had us put a lower-case “i” in RiFRA: I didn't like it because it breaks the clean lines, but I accepted it. He explained that in America they have trouble with pronunciation and that I was lucky the name ends in “a”: his advice is to work on phonetics too, as the founder of Rolex did.

The proof came later. When we sold 180 bathroom units for a skyscraper in Manhattan, in her first emails the building manager wrote our name with a K, the way they pronounce it, and on the supplier list we were “rifka”. After months of seeing the logo under every email she stopped. Ries was right: a name Americans can't pronounce gets mangled until you teach them.

Other winning payoffs: BMW's “The Ultimate Driving Machine”, De Beers' “A diamond is forever”. And the Washington Post, which with “Democracy dies in darkness” took a very strong brand position and, with Bezos's work, went from newspaper to a brand that produces news: newsletters, an app, an article every five minutes, a membership-style subscription.

The story goes on, though, and shows the other side of the coin. In February 2025 Bezos changed the line of the opinion pages to “personal liberties and free markets”, at odds with that positioning: within days the paper lost 75,000 digital subscribers. In 2026 it cut 44% of the newsroom and lost another 60,000, with losses of around 100 million dollars a year. A strong payoff is a promise. When you change it, the customers who bought into it leave.

From my book Direct from Milano and my classroom courses. Figures and examples updated September 2026.