Since 19 July, large companies selling in the European Union have not been allowed to destroy unsold clothes, accessories and footwear, outside a narrow set of exceptions. Disclosure requirements already apply to large companies. From February 2027, a standardised reporting format will apply. This week Bloomberg set out why that bites hardest at the top of the market: luxury protects its aura by never being seen with too much, and the shredder was how the excess disappeared.
Nike made the same admission from the other end of the market. On its October earnings call, chief executive Elliott Hill said the company had "been oversupplying our iconic retro product," and that it will deliberately make fewer Jordan retros, starting in 2027.
Two very different companies, one problem. When scarcity is a decision, someone has to keep making it, and the cost of getting it wrong is a warehouse.
Wine's scarcity is a piece of ground
A great vineyard cannot be made bigger in a meeting. A grand cru is a fixed parcel of land, drawn on a map and written into law. In a generous year there is more wine. In a poor year there is less, and everyone in the trade knows which year was which, because the weather is public.
That is the quiet advantage wine has over every brand that manufactures its rarity. The limit is not a strategy that can be revised when sales slow. It is a wall around a field.
What a great estate does with a bad year
The test of any scarcity is what happens to the surplus, or to the year that does not measure up.
In 2012, after rain at harvest, Château d'Yquem announced it would release no Yquem at all. In years like that the estate sells the crop on without its name. Nothing is burned and nothing is hidden. The decision is made in public, and the absence becomes part of the record: collectors know there is no 2012 Yquem, the same way they know about 1992.
That honesty is what lets the name keep its value in the good years. Buyers trust the label because they have watched the estate refuse to put it on a wine it did not believe in.
Two kinds of scarcity
Manufactured scarcity needs a shredder and a press office. It has to be defended, and now it has to be disclosed.
Given scarcity only needs the truth, told early.