As the financial crisis threatens to wipe out the global financial system, times are tough for Wall Street and Main Street alike. How is the crisis affecting the luxury goods industry? According to Bain & Co, while certain niches have seen a dip, the luxury marketplace as a whole remains increasingly strong in the face of economic collapse.

Moet & Chandon, for instance, views the current financial chaos as just a hiccup in the long history of political, social, and economic crises—all of which the Champagne house has survived. Luxury products, they argue, are the most desirable during times of distress, where people hit hardest need something to hope for while those of extreme wealth will always have cash to spare for indulgences.

Similar sentiments ring true throughout the luxury market. Another article points to stability of the luxury car, where interest in Ferrari’s new $250,000 car hasn’t waned a bit, and Bentley sales grew by 20% last year. Luxury car companies are also moving away from countries worst hit by the crisis, focusing on expansion into emerging markets like India, China, and Russia.

However, such optimism may be subdued if the crisis continues at this rate. Forbes predicts that while luxury retailers avoided the first downturn, they are “far from immune.” The article predicts that upscale chains (such as Sak’s and Neiman Marcus, who saw September sales fall 11% and 16%, respectively) may need to discount products up to 20% over the holiday season.

What does this mean for you? While the crisis may demand a closer eye on your wallet, don’t think luxury will go to the wayside—it may just be on sale.

As mentioned in a recent post, Bentley has come up with another limited edition invention, this time for luxury watch owners. Worried about damaging yours, Bentley have come to your aid, creating a unique safe box especially designed for your watch.

Rolex, Cartier, Patek Philippe and Piaget; the millionaires and billionaires would not been seen without one of these timepieces fastened to their wrist. They can complement your life, accessorize your wardrobe, or become a family heirloom to pass along to future generations.

High-end watches can have over 800 components, many of them handmade and hand assembled by trained watch makers. The luxury market begins at £500 pounds but many easily cost 30 times that, notes Andrew Block, senior vice president of marketing for Tourneau, one of the world’s largest high-end watch dealers.

However, these pieces of art should not be left on the bedside table or next to the sink, at risk of damage. To truly take care of your watch, Bentley has teamed up with Stockinger Safety First Class to create 400 unique, limited edition safe boxes. The Arnage is perfect for watch lovers and among its many features it contains Stockinger’s automatic watch winding system.

Dominik von Ribbentrop, owner of Stockinger, says:

Style, grace and security: A Stockinger safe will give you freedom and independence and will increase your peace of mind – in style and at all times. Stockinger’s passion is to enrich the grey world of bulky safes with a high-class product that is as secure as a bank, as precise as a master time piece, and as beautiful as a piece of the finest art.

The safe is available in the same exterior colours as Bentley cars and feature 10 interior leather colours and three wood veneers. Giving your timepiece this secure place to rest, you must put a deposit down ahead of time, as each safe requires several weeks to construct, taking 18 stages and 30 different teams. The price has yet to be announced but remember there will only be 400.

Does this seem a little extreme? We may lock cars in the garage, ourselves in at night and our money in the bank, however, a safe specially designed for your watch, to be kept at home; is taking this precaution to a whole new level.

The Bentley brand is associated with quality and for creating products that allow customers to travel in style. The luxury car manufacturer is now aiming to make cruising the information super highway a similarly extravagant experience for the select few who will own the new Bentley laptop computer.

Bentley’s new product, one of the most expensive on the market, debuted at the British International Motor Show in London in July and will be retailed globally in high-end stores in October – but only to the first 250 people able to splurge the £10,000 to get one of the limited edition laptops.

Featuring Windows Vista, a 64-bit processor, a 160GB hard drive and 12 direct access keys, each Bentley laptop is hand-built, and encased in leather with the same cross-over stitching detail seen on the car seats. The chrome carry handle is modelled after the trademark automobile’s door handle as well.

Bentley paired up with Ego Lifestyle, a luxury and lifestyle product designer, who specialize in creating customized computers, to produce the laptop. Though it’s not the first time high-end car brands have relied on their brand perception to launch into the electronics market, to date this type of pairing has been mostly the domain of sports car manufacturers, like Ferrari, Lamborghini and Koenigsegg.

Bentley’s newest addition to the market stands apart from the specialist designs created by the sports car manufacturers. These brands are associated with products that are sharp and fast, and promote the idea that the computers will have the same type of edge the sports cars evoke. The difference with the Bentley laptop closely reflects the differences in the brands, with Bentley emphasizing individuality and class. And while the sports car branded laptops retail at between £1,200 and £1,700, the Bentley laptop’s much higher price is a clearly distinctive point.

Bentley’s new product will appeal to luxury consumers of both the Lambda and Theta worldviews. Each PC can be moulded into a highly specialized look based on the consumer’s colour choice for the leather casing as well as the chrome interior, so there’s little chance of running into someone with the same piece and the same bespoke detailing, a plus from the Lambda perspective. On the other hand, the Bentley logo is clearly visible, and the laptop exudes the same sense of craftsmanship associated with the automobile brand, which will appeal to the Theta consumer.

With the Bentley laptop set to go on sale next month, it will be interesting to see how quickly the few available products will be snatched up. Success in this venture may see Bentley, like other luxury goods makers, continue to use its status as a trusted brand as a platform to hype existing markets.

Luxury can no longer be defined along the same lines as we grew up with, or whatever we learned at business school. Before the Rolls-Royce motor car brand fell into BMW hands, annual sales had dwindled: Bentley, once the poor brother of Rolls-Royce, was much more PC and less ostentatious. Even today, HM the Queen’s official car is a hand-made Bentley, an unforeseeable event at the time of her Silver Jubilee.

But in the travel market, I have noticed an opening up at the very top end. To date I still have not heard of a six-star hotel, but I have heard of seven-star ones.

So is this just the changing of the guard?

It can’t be that simple. Recessionary environments do cause a rejection of some luxury brands, but others preserve their niche, comfortably. Yet others extend downward in order to keep sales up.

But at the other end, what were everyday brands have acquired an air of luxury themselves. Levi’s was made for gold prospecting, not posing, at least not initially. Volkswagen was the People’s Car of the Third Reich, not the archetypal “quality” European automobile by which everyone, even Toyota, judges its small hatchbacks.

We have Hennes & Mauritz selling clothes in collaboration with Stella McCartney, then Viktor and Rolf, and now Madonna, just to make the old segments irrelevant, or at best, muddled.

Other forces at work have included the democratization of experiences: the James Bond lifestyle, once the stuff of fantasy, is no longer out of reach. Jet travel itself, indulged by millionaires once upon a time, can cost as little as £1 through some of Britain’s cheapest airlines.

It was in this world that Lucire branched into print in 2004, after seven years, having secured by the end of 2003 the position of the world’s leading online-only fashion magazine. The first problem was: if segmentation as we knew it was dead, then where on earth would this magazine fit?

And the second problem: even if we figured it out, and even if the customer knew, would the channels understand?

One reason I always felt at home in Scandinavia is the whole idea that luxury, or at least design excellence, should be available to all. It is a familiar principle to anyone who had studied the history of the Bauhaus Design School in Weimar; fortunately for the Swedes, they managed to keep those principles going in a fairly uninterrupted fashion through World War II.

Lucire was born in 1997, at a time when the notion of democratization was stronger than that of snobbery. It did not matter if a web site was made by a one-man band or if it were created under the auspices of Condé Nast; anyone, with the smoke-and-mirrors knowledge provided by design and typography, could play the luxury game. And so we did, with one eye remaining on the way consumers were changing.

And they were, rapidly. Luxury was about accessibility, not exclusivity. Premium is the new mainstream. Those words remained with us as 2003 became 2004, and Lucire’s future as a multi-media (the hyphen is intentional) property unfolded.

I still believe this. Quality can be had for $9.95 or $99.50, and in the fashion business, these sorts of differences are not unrealistic. We decided that Lucire’s price had to undercut some of the existing magazines, even though we were printing on a larger format page, based on the idea that consumers were moving away from the old divisions. We had to bring some of the internet principles into print.

We priced Lucire above the popular Australian-owned competitor, Fashion Quarterly, not to be confused with the same magazine from Canada. We would tread the middle of the road, for our own readers had told us that that was where their incomes lay. But we would spoil them with premium products, which many would buy, if some sales’ improvement figures of some of our clients are to be believed.

When the United States’ richest man, William Gates III, drove a Lexus, this strategy did not seem to be foolhardy. Rich people could buy us because rich people, as Mr Gates showed, like good value, too. Everyday people could buy us because we weren’t ripping them off.

Yet some channels in New Zealand, our first market, were still stuck in the marketing school world of the 1950s. Rich and poor. Premium and poverty. Hardly reflective of a nation that prides itself on being nationally middle-class, where tipping is unheard of and considered the province of less civilized nations that still looked at the world through master-and-servant eyes.

Lucire found itself in the nicest suburbs like Merivale, Christchurch, where it sold out in its first week; but equally, it would sell out in the student bookstores nationally. But we were not finding ourselves in the middle among retailers, where our readers were, and we were failing to crack the sales’ figures of our major competitors. That much I admit, publicly. Those middle-of-the-road retailers who stuck with us find we sell reasonably well and we were all rewarded.

My idea of luxury is probably in line with the consumers’. It is about accessibility, design excellence, and quality, but it is not about exclusivity. Everyone deserves to be spoiled from time to time. A luxury brand, and I do count Lucire as one, need not be so narrowly focused that only the rich buy into its world. Nor does it need to have every channel member indulging at the top end of the income spectrum. Luxury, ultimately, is a state of being, and that can be done at a variety of prices.

But try telling that to retailers, who have not branched out from their bimodal reckoning of the market-place.

The ideas of accessible luxury is not totally foreign in other regions, otherwise H&M would not even dare try its M by Madonna line. However, they do own their own stores, which should perhaps be our next move…

Jack Yan’s website is here.