Like everyone else who works in luxury industry forecasting, the team at It’s A Working Title, LLC is updating our models, mostly to the effect of downgrading our start of the year expectations for small, though positive, growth in H1. With most of the January to March earnings data now released, we regressed the first quarter of 2026 revenue growth (mostly organic, where available) with the 2025 numbers.
As a general empirical observation, brands sitting above the regression line did better in the first three months of of this year than you did in the same period last year and the same goes for below the line. So some brands did well with Coach’s explosive 30 percent growth almost blowing up our y-axis. But, things also turned around for Burberry, Zegna, and even LVMH’s watches and jewellery division.
But, some of the brands that had sustained growth even during the luxury recession have finally fallen back to earth, particularly Hermès and Miu Miu. So, things are not in free fall but are generally looking worse than a year ago. We are downgrading our H1 2026 weighted industry growth index from 4 percent to around 1.5 percent.