As affluent consumers grapple with uncertainty, the objects retaining meaning are no longer the ones that signal a moment. They are the ones designed to outlast it.
A booming market for watches and jewellery is quietly rewriting the rules of desire. Consumers are choosing permanence over performance, and the balance sheets are beginning to reflect it.
Driven by three forces from custodianship over consumption, to the rise of the new heirloom, to a secondary market that now rivals the primary one in influence, the shift is structural, not seasonal.
Read the full story featuring insights from global economist Bryce Quillin at the link in bio.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Each week @beyond_btb looks at the data shaping culture and commerce and interprets the insights between the lines.
This week’s chart from the AP Economic Insights report via Retail Asia examines projected luxury spending across Asia-Pacific in 2026 by market, and where the real growth is coming from. Key insights include:
- India is the market accelerating fastest, with 20% projected growth to $22.6 billion, quietly becoming one of the most significant luxury frontiers in the world.
- Japan, long the region’s benchmark for luxury taste and consumption, is projected to grow at 0% in 2026, a flat performance that signals a structural shift rather than a temporary dip.
- Discretionary spend among older consumers is moving toward elderly-friendly travel, entertainment, and wellness, categories that most luxury houses have yet to fully build for.
- Emerging markets including Thailand ($3.3 billion + 11%) and Indonesia ($3.1 billion + 12%) are growing at double-digit rates, suggesting the next wave of luxury demand is forming well beyond the established centres.
Follow BTB for more luxury meets business insights, only at the link in bio.
OFF THE RECORD: Seven years after her last @isaloniofficial , @bschlippe returns to Milan to find both a city and industry in transition.
From labyrinthine pink installations inside Baroque palazzos to furniture sculpted from seashells and ocean-recovered plastic, Milan Design Week 2026 revealed a world moving beyond aesthetics alone. What emerged instead was something more layered. Design as emotional infrastructure, hospitality as storytelling, and luxury as a question of meaning rather than excess.
Somewhere between the endless queues, the Metro rides, the archive revivals, and a Singaporean dinner party that ended with strangers dancing to ABBA around a flaming fish, another truth surfaced too, the best design still creates what technology cannot: presence, memory, and human connection.
Read the full story now at the link in bio.
Held across continents, XI:XI is a ritual of alignment. Eleven names, curated, shaping what comes next. One table. An evening built by intention. The room outlasts the night.
This May, the ritual lands in Singapore—at one of the city's defining addresses. Circolo and Beyond the Boardroom, in collaboration. What it sets in motion rarely stays small.
Circolo: A global studio for legacy experience design.
Beyond the Boardroom: The editorial home of luxury leadership.
Eleven seats. Exclusive. By invitation.
Follow @circolo.life and @beyond_btb for what follows.
Another year, another #MetGala has come and gone. The couture, the mythology, the grand procession up the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and with it, the familiar question of what the evening is really for, and who it truly serves.
This year, that question had a name. The 2026 Gala was honorarily co-chaired by Jeff Bezos and wife Lauren Sánchez Bezos, with reports suggesting the Amazon founder contributed upwards of $10 million to support the evening and the Costume Institute.
In an age defined by labour scrutiny, wealth inequality and deepening public distrust of billionaire influence, the response was swift. Protest posters papered New York. Labour unions staged alternative fashion shows and anti-Bezos messaging was projected across buildings linked to the billionaire.
In this op-ed, BTB Editorial Director @rahat.kapur unpacks the backlash and asks whether modern patronage still preserves culture, or whether culture has simply become the last thing money still struggles to buy.
Read the full story at the link in bio.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Luxury travel has emerged as the sector’s primary growth engine, accounting for nearly 40% of expected global growth, and almost double that of beauty, according to @deloitte ’s Global Powers of Luxury Goods 2026.
Global travel and tourism spend reached roughly $11.7 trillion in 2025, contributing over 10% of global GDP, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council, as consumers look to move more decisively away from accumulation and towards time, access and memory.
While much of luxury may have a place in the wardrobe, an increasing share of it is now being experienced elsewhere.
Marketing leaders across Asia-Pacific are chasing better teams. But the real constraint isn’t talent. It’s leadership.
The challenge isn’t how to build high performers anymore, but how leaders manage complexity, alignment and constant pressure from all directions. Because today, performance is driven less by managing down, and more by managing across and upwards.
So what happens when leadership itself becomes the bottleneck?
When senior leaders gathered behind closed doors in Singapore for a dinner hosted by @wearemakerlab and @beyond_btb , one theme kept surfacing. The gap isn’t capability. It’s how leadership is designed.
From stakeholder overload to the erosion of thinking time, the cost of misaligned leadership is already showing up in teams.
Better teams don’t come from better hiring alone. They come from better leadership.
Read more at the link in bio.
OFF THE RECORD: At a moment when women are leaving an undeniable mark on business, culture and leadership, many still struggle to fully believe they belong in the rooms they have already earned the right to occupy.
That was one of the clearest themes to emerge at the co-launch of @hermark_world with @beyond_btb , a photography and advocacy initiative founded by @annahomodea , @naomipg2026 , Severine Vauleon, @gerri.hamill and @hinotijoshi , which celebrates the women shaping the marcomms industry by placing them in front of the camera, on their own terms.
Research suggests that as many as 75% of women executives experience imposter syndrome at work, with many also feeling overlooked. The issue is no longer whether women deserve a seat at the table. The challenge is no longer hesitating to pull out the chair.
Read the full story at the link in bio.
Story: @bschlippe
As consumers spend more of their lives in algorithmic feeds, luxury is finding itself in an increasingly uncomfortable position. TikTok, AI and endless scrolling have flattened many of the distinctions that once separated the aspirational from the ordinary.
A $20 hair clip can now generate the same cultural conversation as a $20,000 handbag. A fast-fashion dress, a couture gown and an Amazon impulse purchase can all occupy the same screen, subject to the same logic of immediacy, virality and endless comparison.
Which is perhaps why luxury never really abandoned print.
As the wider media landscape becomes faster, cheaper and more disposable, print has become slower, rarer and more deliberate. Less a channel, and more an object in itself.
So in 2026, why are luxury brands still investing in magazines, catalogues, books and collector’s editions, and why aren’t you?
Read the full story at the link in bio.
Story: @rahat.kapur
📷: Unsplash
India has always understood the power of celebrity fashion. But as South Asian designers from @sabyasachiofficial , to @gauravguptaofficial to @prabalgurung continue to dominate global red carpets, the people behind those moments are becoming just as important.
Speaking to @thetyagiakshay , creative director, consultant, costume designer and celebrity stylist, it’s clear that Bollywood’s fashion stylists are fast becoming the quiet connoisseurs of marketing and brand. Sitting between the celebrity, the designer and the luxury house, shaping the cultural moments, viral looks and visual identities that travel around the world.
Story: @rahat.kapur
📷: Via Sabyasachi for Met Gala 2024
OFF THE RECORD: What happens when the leadership tool designed to solve your problems ends up killing the way you think?
Co-founder of @beyond_btb and Publisher-at-Large at @voguesingapore@bschlippe reflects on an unexpected gift from her husband: a digital notebook that promised efficiency, organisation and searchable thoughts, but failed almost instantly.
What follows is a meditation on why old rituals still matter. From Marie Curie’s notebooks to Gen Z’s revival of vinyl, film and print, von Schlippe explores what analogue methodologies reveal about how we think, remember and protect the luxury of our attention in a world built for distraction.
Read the full story at the link in bio.
@peterdiamandis has spent decades betting against scarcity.
From private space travel to AI to the @xprize , he’s built a career on the belief that what begins as expensive and exclusive rarely stays that way for long. The wealthy may get there first, then the price curve does its work.
Now, he believes longevity is next in the pursuit for abundance.
In places like Singapore, where the average lifespan is 83 but the average health span is 73, the question is becoming less about how long people live and more about how well they live. Diagnostics, genome sequencing, preventative health and biological optimisation may feel like luxuries today. Diamandis argues they will not stay that way.
But can abundance really become universal? Or will the future remain reserved for the few?
Read the full insights at the link in bio.
Story: @rahat.kapur
📷: Getty Images
