Client Context
A leading luxury resale brand needed ongoing insights to sharpen its competitive strategy and deepen its understanding of the consumers driving both sides of its marketplace.
The Business Challenge
The luxury resale market moves quickly, and the data to understand it deeply doesn’t yet exist at scale. Unlike traditional retail, this brand’s supply chain depends entirely on individual consumer decisions — whether to part with a luxury item, whether to consign rather than sell privately, and when. With no reliable precedent and a unique consumer base on both sides of the transaction, the team needed a rigorous, ongoing foundation for strategic decisions rather than one-off snapshots of their customers.
Capabilities Applied
- Brand Tracking
- Longitudinal Study
- Focus Groups
Approach
HawkPartners designed a robust tracking study measuring brand performance across both a nationally representative consumer panel and the brand’s own customer base, providing multiple layers of insights regarding brand performance. The nationally representative sample allowed the team to understand how the brand was performing among their target customer profile nationwide and competitively, while the customer base sample provided insights into how current members view the brand in response to activations, market events, and other factors.
The tracker segmented two critical audiences within each sample and incorporated flexible ad hoc modules in each wave to capture emerging behaviors as the landscape continues to shift. When quantitative data flagged an unexplained trend in one of those segments, HawkPartners layered in qualitative focus groups to surface the motivations, friction points, and decision-making logic of this audience that numbers alone couldn’t uncover.
Impact
The study delivered insight at every level — from broad resale market trends, to competitive positioning, to granular brand perception — giving the client a clear view of where shifts are occurring and which audience is driving them. The additional focus groups gave direct voice to the brand’s most engaged suppliers, uncovering specific experience gaps that were affecting retention but had not been explicitly identified. Since this segment is the engine of the brand’s inventory, this intelligence directly informed how the team prioritizes experience investment and operational support. The tracker continues today, and the client now operates with the kind of layered, continuously updated market understanding that turns strategic instinct into confident, evidence-backed action.
