Why Brunello Cucinelli is Quietly Leading the Content Wars
FSW analyzes Brunello Cucinelli's content strategy after the recent launch of its holiday campaign and considers what the brand's approach to content suggests about the future of luxury experience.
With much of the luxury industry slowing from the rapid rates of growth experienced during the post-pandemic supercycle, Brunello Cucinelli has been one of those brands that has continued to grow. Its July to September revenues were among the strongest in the industry (see below), while its first-half revenues were up almost 15 percent at constant exchange rates.
Most of the luxury fashion industry has been pulled down by weak growth in Asia, but Brunello Cuccinelli was among the few brands that powered past that trend. Its revenue growth in Asia, which comprises about a third of total revenue, was up over 14 percent, second only to growth in the Americas.
Of course, Brunello Cucinelli’s strong growth may not come as a surprise to its namesake founder even if growth at all costs is not the goal. After the brand experienced unprecedented post-pandemic growth in 2021, its owner, Brunello Cucinelli, told Vogue Business, “We do not wish to grow fast. Rapid, sudden growth isn’t rational and it isn’t sustainable. It creates problems.”
Suffice to say, Brunello Cucinelli is not like other luxury brands. It takes a strategic, purposeful approach to everything it does. In a time when luxury is starting to feel like a sea of sameness, Brunello Cucinelli does not work to keep up with trends or get ahead of them. Instead, it focuses on doing what it has always done: producing impeccably made, high-quality clothing.
What makes Brunello Cucinelli different has as much to do with the strength of its products as its unique brand strategy, which demonstrates a core commitment to taking a content-first, humanistic approach to marketing, communications, e-commerce, and, in turn, customer experience.
Cucinelli and Humanistic Content Strategy
Over the past few years, Brunello Cucinelli has quietly unveiled an innovative holistic brand content strategy that deeply resonates with its commitment to luxury brand storytelling. While other luxury brands grapple with how to build an integrated approach to content across platforms, the phased implementation of Cucinelli’s content strategy represents an on-brand, well-thought-out plan that perfectly shows how content and technology can work together to bring a more authentic approach to digital customer experience. It is a perfect example of what luxury customer experience strategist Natalia Jaramillo calls “humanistic luxury.”
In May 2023, Brunello Cucinelli launched its new corporate website during a three-day symposium on artificial intelligence (AI). This event marked the brand’s first public step in integrating AI into its overall brand and content strategy.
The second step of this longer-term content strategy came in July 2024, when the Brunello Cucinelli team unveiled an experimental AI website platform, BrunelloCucinelli.ai, a project that has been three years in development. Powered by Solomei AI, the brand’s bespoke tool, this unique site uses AI to blend hand-drawn visuals and high-quality content into an immersive story-driven experience.
From a user-experience (UX) perspective, the site design of BrunelloCucinelli.ai is guided and directional, functioning as a continuous scroll, rather than a more traditional componentized or modular site architecture. Users can create their own experience, traveling through micro-stories or vignettes related to the brand’s vision and the story of Brunello Cucinelli’s life. On the site, users can also ask questions to a pretty sophisticated chatbot supported by in-depth AI content.
As Cucinelli told Vogue Business, “We didn’t want to have any pages. We just wanted a website that would follow you as if you had a tailor-made dress, basically. And we wanted this mix of handwork and artificial intelligence.” Admittedly, BrunelloCucinelli.ai is intentionally more inspiration than function, but it does have meaningful connection points to the brand’s e-commerce site, which has undergone significant updates since its initial 2017 launch.
From a customer experience perspective, Brunello Cucinelli’s e-commerce site executes some of the best content strategy in the business. Without diving into the complex array of opinions about shopping and mega-navigation menus, the brand’s e-commerce site is clean with a high findability and ease-of-use factors. The site is also deeply narrative and innovative, offering users creative, interactive campaigns encouraging discovery.
Cucinelli’s “The Holiday Ball” and the Magic of Content
The most precise illustration of Brunello Cucinelli’s content strategy in action is its holiday campaign, “The Holiday Ball,” which launched across channels last week. Unlike the make-one-video-and-be-done style of some brand holiday ads, the Cucinelli campaign content is comprehensive, interactive, and appropriately attenuated to each channel. On YouTube, the brand posted the full creative campaign, offering different moments and clips on Instagram Reels, TikTok, and the homepage of its e-commerce site.
On the Brunello Cucinelli e-commerce site, the clever part of “The Holiday Ball” campaign comes when you click “Discover the Campaign.” While interactive online shops are now commonplace thanks to the metaverse craze, Cucinelli’s “Hotel of Dreams” provides a well-designed, fully-guided experience that provides content and directions when users need it but does not inhibit findability or discoverability. For an innovative shopping experience, it is understated and fun to use.
The storytelling within the “Hotel of Dreams” is rich but simple. Before you enter the virtual hotel, the landing page for the project sets up the narrative, answering the “who,” “what,” and “when” right down to the characters and their motivations. At almost every step, it is easy to go from creative content to product and back again, though the on-page navigation to scroll down to move around within the experience is sometimes confusing.
While many luxury brands are saving their innovation budget for Roblox or have backed away altogether, Brunello Cucinelli has leaned into technology but in a lean, strategic way. Through well-placed, high-quality content, the brand’s immersive virtual hotel adds magic to product discovery and brings joy to the shopping experience.
In FSW’s holistic definition of content as “anywhere your target audiences encounter your brand messaging,” content strategy becomes an essential business tool for luxury brands to concomitantly communicate creative vision, sell products, and meet consumer needs. Yes, product-focused branding matters. Yet, Brunello Cucinelli’s magic, at least in a marketing or creative communications sense, is due to its masterful implementation of contextualized, content-first branding. If your cashmere lasts a lifetime, then the stories it tells should be unforgettable.
This is fascinating! Seems a bit buggy for me but the concept is spot on: I was at Web Summit the week before last and one of the key topics was reimagining e-commerce experiences driven by AI. Definitely see it shifting to a dialogue-based experience.