When Marisa Coulson, her husband and daughter moved to Majorca from New York in 2019, she packed her collection of branded hotel items, including a sweatshirt from Sunset Beach Hotel on Shelter Island; a hat from the Dunmore in Harbour Island, the Bahamas; and an “ancient” sweater fraying at the seams from the Chateau Marmont, a West Hollywood hotel known for its celebrity residents and scandals.
Hotel merchandise “is an if-you-know-you-know-type thing,” she said.
“When you see someone else wearing something from a place that is special to you, it’s like you belong to the same club,” said Ms. Coulson, 44. “We both love the same thing and know the same place and experienced the same vibe and appreciated it.”
Branded clothing and other merchandise are nothing new. And from your corner cafe to the local mechanic, slapping a name and logo on a T-shirt or a baseball hat and selling them for additional revenue has never been easier. But over the past several years, some hotels — luxury properties, in particular — say they have seen greater demand for hotel memorabilia, with hats, T-shirts and towels bearing the insignia of properties becoming sought-after swag among the “stealth wealth” set.
Whatever the items might imply, actually staying at the properties is not required. “Nothing sells as fast as the great hotel merchandise,” said Brett David, who owns Spring Street Vintage, a company in New York City that sells secondhand hats, T-shirts and sweatshirts from $50 to $140 from places like the Beverly Hills Hotel and Chateau Marmont.
“When I get hotel stuff, it goes pretty quick, and I am not always able to get it that often,” he said, adding that he had two customers get into a bidding war over a particular sweatshirt from Chateau Marmont.
In the club
Desired items range from the hard to get — a hat costing 35 Swiss francs (around $40) from the Paradiso Mountain Club & Restaurant at Badrutt’s Palace in St. Moritz, Switzerland, which in winter, is reachable only by chairlift, ski or snowshoe — to the hard to afford, like the $18,645 chessboard from the Eden Rock hotel in St. Barts.
