@italic just launched a new membership program called Italic Black. In short, you pay $100 per year and get access to all of their luxury products "at cost."

I& #39;m curious what you think, Twitter?

Love it? Hate it?

Some personal thoughts, below:

First, here& #39;s an example the pricing they offer to members.

The first thing I notice are the "At Cost" prices.

Does it *really* cost them $200 to manufacture a Nylon Weekender bag? Seriously doubt it.

Personally turns me off but I& #39;m not their target, so I& #39;ll move on.

The second thing I wonder:

Is it possible to build a luxury brand on "value" based messaging?

I have some similar hypotheses around my own brand ( @getsupply) I& #39;m testing right now. I do believe it& #39;s possible - but extremely difficult.

This one feels risky though.

Another thing I wonder about is, why the pivot? They used to offer a similar program for $10 a month.

Obviously that didn& #39;t work or they wouldn& #39;t have pivoted. So why? Churn? Low margins? Something else?

The original offer when they launched less than 2 years ago:

I& #39;m a fan of the brand, and really interested in watching this. But I have to know - what do you think about it?

here& #39;s a direct link:

https://black.italic.com/ ">https://black.italic.com/">...

To be clear I didn’t intend for this to be a tear down on the program.

We recently launched something eerily similar and I really am curious what you all think.