The business of luxury goods might seem distant from the mass-market retailing of your standard Stuffer Shack, but the rules of the game aren’t that different. The only difference is that exclusivity becomes a marketable attribute of your product, and the per-unit price of items becomes much more significant. It’s a more low-volume, high-margin type of business, which means each individual sale is that much more important.
Despite those differences, the basic rules don’t change. Knowing as much as possible about the clientele is still important, in order to determine what product you can get them to buy next. Remember that consumers aren’t just buying a handbag—they are buying special treatment. So while the calculations behind the scenes are pretty much the same, the delivery must be far more refined.
The venerable Louis Vuitton house of fashion continues to survive where others have fallen by uncompromisingly—some would say stubbornly—remaining exclusive. Other brands have fallen to the temptation of ever widening their client base, with the theory that the gain in market would offset lowered prices and sense of exclusivity. Unfortunately, what these brands failed to understand is that below a certain exclusivity threshold, the market simply viewed them as overpriced and nothing more. Louis Vuitton’s leadership has never faltered from their position that exclusivity is king, to the point of eschewing the luxury market’s common practice of discreetly liquidating surplus product through outlets and members-only Matrix sites. Indeed, Louis Vuitton destroys surplus inventory, rather than having to stoop to lowering prices and liquidating. In essence, Louis Vuitton would rather cut off their arm than lend (the wrong kind of) consumers a hand.
Nowhere is competition in luxury goods more ferocious than in Manhattan, UCAS. Uncontested citadel of the rich, the competition here between corporate ladder-climbers is an Olympic sport, where every little detail counts. The right suit, tie, dress, handbag, or stilettos identify you as a contender, someone to be seriously considered. The wrong attire merely flags you as a pretender. Every employee of Louis Vuitton’s Manhattan store is paid in the six figures, as everyone, from the manager to the cashier, has been handpicked. At least half are social adepts, with the other half being perhaps mundane but no less shrewd in their capacity to read and subtly guide the cutthroat individuals they count as clients toward the perfect purchase.
The staff is fed live marketing information from the store’s host. Individuals who walk in are scanned. The host first makes a micro-transaction to buy the prospect’s credit score and overall purchasing habits. Those with low scores are either ignored by staff or directed to smaller items like wallets and ties (which still cost hundreds of nuyen). For any prospect that flags as reasonably interesting, however, the host will then buy detailed purchasing historical data, as well as detailed psychological
profiles. Such information does not come cheaply, costing the store an investment of several hundred nuyen, but the store absorbs this as a cost of doing business. Staff is instantly fed this information, having been expertly trained in sales and psychology to know exactly how to put it to use. The dossier remains stored in the host once opened.
For customers who prefer the virtual experience, Louis Vuitton maintains a centralized shopping platform via the main corporate host, but the Manhattan store (like all branches of the company) can also be visited specifically. This helps ensure loyal customers continue to experience the personalized, white-glove relationship the boutique fosters with its local clients. As is often the case with many retail companies in general, the virtual Louis Vuitton store is a mirror representation of the physical store, though of course everything is a little shinier and polished.
Host Rating: 6
Normal Configuration: Attack 6, Sleaze 7, Data Processing 8, Firewall 9
Security Procedure: Patrol IC running at all times. There are no spiders monitoring the system.
Once alarmed, the host launches IC in this order: Probe, Scramble, Track, Jammer, Marker, and Crash. The system will always reboot Probe and Scramble if they are bricked before continuing down the line. A Standard Security Spider will arrive 3 + 1D6 Combat Turns after the alarm is triggered.
Louis Vuitton uses only “white” IC, focusing mostly on severing intruders’ connections via Scramble and/or Tracing the intruder and reporting them to the authorities.
Uses: Manhattan is the playground of subtle shadowrunners who know how to get things done discretely. It takes an especially brave hacker to tango with the local corporate hosts, as Black IC is usually the first thing that gets thrown at hackers. Corps jealously protect their secrets and their valuable assets (read: people). However, Louis Vuitton is in the business of selling expensive patent leather articles, not protecting data. So clever hackers thinking outside the box may be very pleased indeed at the relative ease of slicing into the Louis Vuitton Manhattan store’s host to find a little treasure trove of personal information on the clientele. A person’s future whereabouts—say, a person you plan to extract—can very well be extrapolated from their shopping habits. And, if that doesn’t work, there is the more direct route of planting false info in the host to lure the mark to the store, perhaps to act upon an “exclusive loyalty offer.”
Fashionable shadowrunners may also look for a way to redirect some top fashion elements their way, though due to Louis Vuitton’s very hands-on approach, it is likely store personnel would notice the discrepancy unless a physical con game is also played out.
R&D
Research and Development. Got your attention, did I? While R&D is not a significant slice of the overall market share pie for hosts, it is undeniable that shadowrunners find them- selves disproportionately drawn to them. It is the nature of the business, innit?
Well, much like the other business sectors so far, R&D can mean a lot of things. It is essentially the pursuit of better ways of making money, really. That can mean better products, or better ways to sell them. Every company does some R&D, but that’s not really what we’re looking at. Most businesses handle their R&D as a side thing, on their main hosts. Pure research corporations are a bit rarer. Universities are a good example of pure research, but all of the Big 10 also have hush-hush subsidiaries that work on pure research. The issue, essentially, is that it isn’t easy making money doing pure R&D. Most companies doing this are pretty much fully supported by some other existing income stream. Universities receive grants and charge tuition to students, while R&D arms of large corporations bleed out the money that comes in from the profit generated by other subsidiaries.
The obvious question, from a purely mathematical point of view, is why the frag would anyone bother doing pure R&D then? As shadowrunners, I’m sure you know the answer. It’s because every now and then, research projects produce game-changers. R&D leads to something new that nobody else has. Something so superior to other products that the things sells itself. Now, that advantage never lasts that long, as competitors are always just one step behind, but while it lasts, chummer, you can print your own money (well, corps already do literally print their own money, but you know what I mean). So in terms of numbers, R&D will be a money sink for a while, and then suddenly, BAM, it nets you a 500-fold return on investment.
Of course, occasionally shadowrunners such as ourselves show up with our little black hearts and our explosives and de- stroy the whole lab and steal all the research data and shit on everyone’s lucrative parade, but if they didn’t want us doing that, they wouldn’t conveniently forget to issue us SINs, would they?
Anyway, R&D is really quite similar to the Engineering sec- tor I already covered. R&D tends to be a bit more theoretical. It’s the idea that leads to engineering’s efforts to concretely deliver on that. Basically R&D is the sex and engineering is the giving birth part.
R&D hosts thus share a lot with engineering, in that realistic simulations are very important. Large volume processing can sometimes come up, if the R&D is based on crunching a lot of data to extrapolate new ideas. Hosts will always be specialized in the data they are built to deal with (one does not use a host optimized for magical theory research to come up with new drone pilot chips) and, much like bank vaults, will always be very, very securely protected. They contain data of value and are the number one target in our age, so you can bet your hoop they are going to take appropriate defensive measures. R&D hosts typically have a very small pool of authorized users that are intimately familiar with security protocols, so frying some- one’s brain at the first sign of deviancy is commonly accepted practice.
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