Quince’s Best-Kept Secret Isn’t Its Cheap Cashmere and Couches

Scrutinize a receipt from any recent purchase, and it might be hard to avoid feeling you got swindled. Since early 2020, the consumer price index has risen so quickly that what you could buy for a buck back then will cost you $1.26 now. In some categories, including groceries, electricity and car insurance, the price increases have been even steeper. Retailers such as Walmart Inc. and Dollar Tree Inc. are seeing more affluent customers raid their aisles in search of cheaper products. You might feel like you know where the extra money is going—tariffs, that cocoa shortage you read about, the rent hike at your favorite sandwich shop that made your Reuben more expensive. But a lot of prices seem just inscrutably higher. The cost of my dog’s kibble has more than doubled since 2020, and I couldn’t begin to guess why.

When Quince launched in 2019, the company couldn’t have known that Americans stood on the precipice of years of pricing chaos, but it nonetheless made for splendid timing. The San Francisco-based online retailer specializes in selling its own brand of low-cost “luxury” goods, the kinds of things designed to lessen the tension between your aspirations and your budget. The company is building its brand on a lineup of bougie basics—$50 cashmere sweaters and $184 European linen bedding sets—plus some designs strikingly similar to more expensive products from Bottega Veneta, Birkenstock, Coach and other brands. At first blush, the promise sounds familiar to those of us who shopped our way through the 2010s Warby Parker-inspired direct-to-consumer boom and its subsequent busts: Quince says it cuts out the middlemen, enabling it to sell high-quality goods at lower prices—a salve for the polyester-weary soul.