New York is alive: where a brand breathes the air

Dead for ever

At the height of the pandemic it was easy to read headlines like “2020, the flight from New York” or, the most shared on social media, “New York is dead for ever”. The argument was that the city was emptying. The numbers said otherwise: after years of growth of 0.3% a year, in 2020 the population fell by 0.07%, and within two years it was back above 2019. House prices picked up again after the first lockdown, and the developers I spoke to in Dumbo, Brooklyn's chic neighbourhood, were selling two-bedroom flats for $2.5 million and penthouses for $7.2 million without the customer seeing the finished product. When a market buys a home that hasn't been built yet on trust, it is not a dead market.

Why a brand has to be in New York

We opened our own showrooms in Milan and New York on purpose, and not only near the factory in Brianza. A brand has to breathe the air. Aspiration grows from the ground up if you are where the people you want as customers are. A client of mine, who ran a high-end American car brand, told me that the first thing he did on arriving from a German brand was move the offices from Detroit to New York: luxury has to mix with the city. Then he bought himself two kitchens, a main one and one for the bar, and five bathrooms. The reasoning was the same.

The New York showroom is on the tenth floor. Nobody has parking, and nobody cares: people arrive by Uber. In Milan, on the other hand, we chose Corso Matteotti partly for the car park under the showroom, because the Swiss and the Germans won't leave their supercar on the street. Every city has its own rules; a brand has to know them before signing the lease.

The New York customer

Our first big job in Manhattan was 180 bathroom units in a skyscraper. In her first emails the building manager spelt our name wrong, with a K, the way they pronounce it; after a few months of seeing the logo under every email, she stopped. That is the power of repetition, and it's also why Al Ries had us put the lower-case “i” in the brand: Americans have to be able to pronounce it.

Then there are private customers. People on the other side of the ocean who send us a $20,000 deposit by credit card for a kitchen they will see six months later, the time it takes to make it and ship it by sea. They do it because abroad, trust in a company that presents itself with a brand, photos, videos and a single price is taken for granted. And because they collect points on the card: American Express customers are the best customers.

What happens when something goes wrong

Trust, once earned, has to be defended. For one New York customer the haulier broke four crates while moving them from the container to the house, through no fault of ours: she had turned down our final delivery and installation. I went to see her, gave her a Gucci scarf and we remade the products. Had she posted photos of the wrecked kitchen with our name on them the next morning, it would have been a disaster. The American customer pays you on trust, but if there's a problem they want it solved even if you're in the right.

New York is alive and fighting alongside us, I wrote in 2022. I'd add: it fights alongside whoever is there. If you sell at the high end and your customer is there, sooner or later you have to be there too.

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