I have a first class honours degree in fashion writing. I have a genuine, deeply-wired penchant for luxury. And the accessory I get stopped about more than anything else I have ever worn in my life is a $67 pair of daily prescription glasses.

Doctors. Nurses. Seven-figure CEOs. Mums at the school gates. Strangers in the street. They all stop me for the same frames.

Nobody has ever once commented on a Chanel bag I’m carrying.

I’ve been thinking about why that is, and I think it comes down to something really specific about what bags and glasses are each doing when we wear them.

A bag signals where you are. The changing bag says early motherhood. The backpack says studying era. The clean girl Coach bag says minimalist phase.

These are season markers, not identity markers, and people read them as exactly that. They clock it, file it mentally, and move on. The conversation ends before it can begin, because there’s nothing to connect to.

Status isn’t a conversation starter. It’s a conversation stopper.

Glasses work completely differently. Nobody picks a pair of glasses because it’s what everyone wants this season. They pick them because something in that frame reflects back something true about who they are. And then they wear them for years. I’ve had these frames for five years across three identical replacements, because my kids keep destroying them and I keep ordering the exact same ones back. I am never changing these glasses. They are mine in a way that has nothing to do with trend or season.

That’s the difference between a signal and an expression.

A knock-off bag is a tell from ten metres away, felt by both parties. Because the whole point of the bag is the name, and when the name isn’t real, the entire thing collapses. There’s nothing underneath it.

There’s a fascinating observation on this in the context of the iconic Burberry check by Alex Ma in this Reel on Instagram.

But a pair of glasses with genuine personality? There’s no knock-off version of that, because the personality is the point. It can’t be faked and it can’t be replicated.

When you build a brand that orbits entirely around luxury as its axis, around signalling expensive, you become the bag. Aspirational to some. Alienating to everyone else. Observed, noted, and scrolled past. The people who can’t afford you disengage entirely, and the people who can afford you file you away for later, because there’s nothing pulling them in right now.

When your brand has a genuine point of view, a voice, a way of seeing the world that’s distinctly yours, it becomes the glasses. And suddenly the price point becomes irrelevant to connection.

A doctor and a mum on maternity leave and a CEO scaling to eight figures can all stop you on the street for the same frames, not because they’re all in the same financial bracket, but because they all saw something they recognised in you.

People don’t need to be able to afford you to become your most devoted advocates. They just need to be able to see themselves in you.

Your future dream clients are watching you right now from a distance. They might not be ready. They might not have the budget yet. But if your brand has personality, they are already yours. They are already telling their friends about you. They are already coming back. And when the moment arrives that they can invest, you are the only name in their head, because you’ve been the glasses in their life for years.

Stop trying to signal expensive. Start letting people see themselves in you.

That’s what builds a brand that actually travels.

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The frames, since you’ll ask and I’m not a gatekeeper: Cathy001 by Firmoo in Pattern C5.