In 2025, which brand will retain its value better, Louis Vuitton or Hermès?

In 2025, Hermès retains and even appreciates its value far more significantly than Louis Vuitton (LV), with authoritative data from the global luxury resale market and top industry reports solidifying this gap irreversibly. Hermès has become the undisputed benchmark of investment-grade luxury in 2025, boasting comprehensive and sustainable value growth across its core product lines, while LV’s value retention is fragmented, limited to a handful of classic or collaborative styles and lacking any genuine appreciation potential for most of its products.

The most compelling evidence comes from Rebag’s 2025 Clair Report, the gold standard for luxury resale valuation. Hermès reclaimed the top spot with an average value retention rate of 138%—a 38% year-on-year surge—and eight of its core leather goods styles achieved resale prices above their original retail value. Iconic pieces set staggering new premium records: the Kelly Mini II hit 282% of its original price, the Sellier Birkin reached 183%, and the Constance hit 137%. A decade-long analysis in the report shows Hermès Birkin’s resale value has skyrocketed 92% since 2015, more than double the brand’s own 43% retail price increase over the same period; the 1984 Jane Birkin prototype even sold for over $10 million at Sotheby’s Paris in July 2025, cementing Hermès’ status as a collectible hard asset. In stark contrast, LV’s 2025 resale performance is highly inconsistent and underwhelming. Only a few limited-edition collaborative styles, such as the reissued LV x Takashi Murakami capsule collection, achieved a resale premium above 130%. Its classic Monogram canvas staples like the Neverfull and Speedy maintain a modest retention rate of just 75-85%, with most mainstream styles, including special leather iterations, seeing a 50% discount in the secondary market. Even the 8% price increase of LV’s Monogram series in 2025 only brought slight stability to its core styles, with no real appreciation.

The core reason for this massive disparity lies in Hermès’ uncompromising control of scarcity and its positioning as a luxury asset, versus LV’s scalable production and mainstream social symbol positioning. In 2025, Hermès further tightened its global quota limits for core leather goods while expanding its handcrafted production capacity in France with new workshops—yet demand still far outstrips supply. It owns over 50 top-tier tanneries worldwide, monopolizing high-quality raw materials and adhering to artisanal production where a single master craftsman spends 18-24 hours making each core handbag, creating an insurmountable scarcity moat. This scarcity, combined with Hermès’ status as an asset allocation choice for ultra-high-net-worth individuals, made its business highly anti-cyclical: its H1 2025 revenue grew 8% year-on-year, with the leather goods division surging 12%. LV, by contrast, leverages LVMH’s group advantages for large-scale production, with sufficient supply of its classic styles and a relatively low craftsmanship threshold for its iconic Monogram canvas. Targeting affluent middle-class and entry-level luxury consumers, LV’s products serve as social symbols rather than investment vehicles; its secondary market transactions are driven by cost performance rather than investment demand, and its resale prices even face significant regional disparities of 15-30%, undermining the stability of its value retention.

2025’s global luxury market trends further amplified this gap. As BCG and Vestiaire Collective’s 2025 report notes, the global second-hand luxury market reached $210-220 billion in 2025, with an annual growth rate three times that of the primary market, as global tariff hikes pushed up primary retail prices and more consumers turned to the secondary market for investment-grade luxury. Hermès, with its inherent scarcity, became the core investment target in the handbag category, while LV, despite ranking among the top three in second-hand bag transactions, only maintained stable circulation for a few classic styles, unable to capture the investment-driven demand of the market.

In summary, 2025 has widened the value retention gap between Hermès and LV to an unprecedented extent. Hermès’ value growth is comprehensive and sustainable across its core product lines, turning its handbags into "wearable hard currency" in the luxury market. LV’s value retention, however, is merely a sporadic phenomenon for individual styles, with most products lacking appreciation potential and even facing depreciation risks. For consumers pursuing long-term value preservation and investment, Hermès is the definitive choice in 2025, while LV only offers stable brand recognition with no real investment value.