Diasporas: The Untapped Growth Engine for Luxury and Premium Brands in 2025

Luxury’s Growth Engine is Stalling

After a post-Covid boom, the global luxury market is hitting the brakes. Bain & Co. reports that luxury spending slowed to single-digit growth in 2024, with LVMH and Kering posting their weakest quarters since 2020. Chanel flagged “fragile demand in Europe” and “slower recovery in Asia.” In short: the easy gains are gone.

But here’s the twist: luxury isn’t shrinking—it’s shifting. Growth is no longer driven solely by established UHNW hubs like Paris, Shanghai, or New York. The new power brokers? Diaspora communities.

The Diaspora Advantage

According to our 2025 China Overseas Report, there are 72 million overseas Chinese residents, projected to reach 80 million by 2030. They hold spending power higher than outbound Chinese tourists and maintain cultural behaviors that influence both local and mainland Chinese markets.

This is a lesson for all brands: diaspora markets aren’t side plays. They are the growth engine.

Why?

• Diasporas maintain strong cultural identity while adopting local consumer habits—making them dual-influencers.

• They’re digitally savvy and over-index on social commerce, KOL/creator trust, and cross-border ecommerce.

• They often become trendsetters for domestic markets back home (example: overseas Chinese live-streaming behaviors shaped adoption in China).

If you’re not building GTM strategies with diasporas in mind, you’re capping your growth potential.

👉 At Empowered Growth Marketing, we don’t do cookie-cutter globalization. We build diaspora-first GTM strategies that scale. Let’s talk about where your next market should be. - Book your Cultural Diagnostic