[GENESIS X SEMAFOR PERSPECTIVES] THE NEW SCARCITY: MONEY, ACCESS, TIME AND EXPERIENCE

A corporate futurist predicted it fifteen years ago, when much of the world was buying a second phone. At Genesis House this month, four executives from four different industries described the shift she saw coming.

Amy Marentic was sitting in a conference room roughly fifteen years ago when someone told her what luxury would become.

"We were meeting with a woman — her job title was corporate futurist," the Chief Marketing Officer of Genesis Motor America recalled at Genesis House in New York earlier this month. "Now, what an incredible job that would be, right? I tell the future."

The futurist was mapping scenarios ten, twenty and thirty years into the future. One stood out.

"One of the things that she said was, luxury will be disconnection."

Marentic paused on the timing.

"Imagine saying that 10 to 15 years ago, when everybody was adding their second cell phone and they were connected 24/7."

At the time, the prediction seemed counterintuitive. It doesn't anymore. Over the course of an evening of conversations hosted at Genesis House, spanning beauty, coffee, fashion and automotive, four senior executives reached much the same conclusion. None of them were asked the same question. All of them arrived at a similar answer.

When Traditional Advantages Stopped Being Enough

Jonny Bauer, founder and executive chair of FundamentalCo, sees the shift in straightforward terms.

"Ten years ago, a brand could win through controlled distribution, a recognizable identity, and consistent communications," he said. "But that's no longer the case."

He believes the change is long-term rather than temporary. "Production and access now are abundant."

Lisa Sequino, President of Global Makeup Brands at The Estée Lauder Companies, described the same shift from inside the supply chain. In her view, the pandemic permanently changed where products could be made.

"What COVID did was it allowed packaging and manufacturing to have a much more global footprint," she said. "So when you travel the world, you can go to Brazil or China or India and see a lip product that's just as high quality as something that you would have seen manufactured in another European country 10 years ago."

The result is that competition has risen across the board.

"So the competition has really increased," Sequino said. "That's why I think a lot of brands need to make sure that they're adding other elements to their product — because anybody can enter the market. You and I can start a beauty company tomorrow. So the stakes are much higher."

Semafor Media Editor Max Tani summarized the situation from the moderator's chair.

"Just make an AI, go on TikTok, sell it without even having a product yet."

The data points in the same direction. In its spring 2026 update to the Luxury Goods Worldwide Market Study, produced with the Italian industry association Altagamma, Bain & Company found that roughly half of luxury consumers now use artificial intelligence somewhere in the purchase journey. About one in four use it to discover brands, while two in three use it to compare options before making a purchase. Around half also consult the secondhand market before buying something new.

Discovery, comparison and validation have become easier and faster than ever. Brands no longer control these stages the way they once did.

Sequino has watched the transition firsthand. Influence, she said, has moved away from models and beauty advisors and toward ordinary consumers sharing their own experiences.

She does not view that as a positive development.

"I think it makes our job harder," she said, "because you have to make a great product that people can easily speak about."

From Money and Access to Time and Experience

If those traditional signals are now commonplace, what does a luxury purchase communicate today?

Bauer described a progression. Luxury once signaled that someone had money. Later it signaled taste. Then it signaled access.

"And now I think it's also just a little bit more of, 'I have time,'" he said, "to really choose where and how I spend my time, and who and how I'm with, and what the composition of my existence becomes."

He stopped short of arguing for a single global definition.

"Those things have evolved at the same time in different markets, with different levels of development," he said. "There are some markets where it's still a luxury to signal, I have the money to be able to afford this, or I have access."

His view is that markets are moving in the same direction, though at different speeds.

"Some markets are catching up to other markets, but it's all heading in that way."

Marentic pointed to data showing the same pattern. Consumer sentiment toward experiences, she noted, is growing roughly 1.5 times faster than sentiment toward tangible goods.

Bookings for dining, leisure and entertainment rose 30 percent year on year, while travel beyond traditional destinations increased 20 percent. Consumers are placing more value on experiences than they did just a few years ago.

"So people are thinking more, especially high-net-worth, thinking more about luxury experiences, about travel, about culinary experiences," Marentic said. "So we absolutely are seeing it in the data."

The Appeal of Vitality

Bauer expanded on the idea through research he conducted with ultra-high-net-worth consumers. The research focused on a simple question: what types of brands and experiences genuinely resonate with this audience? The answer was remarkably consistent across markets.

"It was experiences that could deliver a real sense of vitality to them," Bauer said.

He broke vitality into two parts. "The first thing you can do is to make them feel important," he said. The importance comes from social standing rather than possessions.

"It's not just what are you experiencing, but what's the group that you're experiencing it with? And how can I really signal that I'm chosen to be part of this important group?"

The second element is physical. "The second part of it was feeling physically well."

Bauer condensed the idea into a simple principle. "So: make me feel important, and make me feel well."

That principle leads to highly specific services. "Wellness doctors coming with you on travel, things to stop you getting jet-lagged, how to make the travel experience faster and cleaner."

Neither side works alone. "It's the combination of both of these two values being built into their experience that adds up to this broader concept of vitality."

Bauer then applied the idea to the room around him. "So how do you infuse that sense of visceral vitality into these beautiful cars around here, or the driving experiences connected — surrounding how you pick them up?" Bauer asked. "You go and pick up a Porsche, you get to drive it around Germany and then put it on a boat and come back."

His point was not that products no longer matter. Rather, value increasingly comes from everything that surrounds them: the people, the setting, the service and the memories created along the way.

Across the evening, executives from four very different industries arrived at a similar conclusion. Access is no longer scarce. Information is no longer scarce. In many categories, even quality is no longer as rare as it once was.

What people are searching for instead are experiences that feel meaningful, personal and worth their time.

But that raises a different question: If luxury increasingly lives in the experience, how much does the product itself still matter?

Reporting drawn from Semafor's Business on Luxury, hosted at Genesis House, New York. Market data from the Bain & Company–Altagamma Luxury Goods Worldwide Market Study, spring 2026 update.

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