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.
“Branded hotel merchandise demonstrates a level of access,” said Sarah Wetenhall, 46, the chief executive and president of the Colony Palm Beach, which she and her husband bought in 2016. “It shows you are part of a certain social circle.” Along with popular hotel items already available, which include the Johnnie Brown baseball hat ($50), the Colony Hotel x Petit Plume women’s pajamas ($94) and the property’s signature scent candle ($65), the Colony this year plans to sell tote bags, custom-embroidered Saint James shirts and branded bathroom amenities.
Harsch Kumar Sood, a 39-year-old property developer in London, said his collection of hotel gear includes bathroom amenities from Dean Street Townhouse in London, ashtrays from Le Sirenuse in Positano, Italy, and seven or so robes that found their way into his suitcase after staying at the Leela Palace in New Delhi.
“We all take 3,000 photos a day now, but I don’t look back at old travel photos very often,” he said. “Travel merch is another way of remembering and thinking how lucky you are to have had experienced something.”
Booking not required
The draw is there even for those who haven’t been hotel guests. Jeff Lyles, 37, a D.J. and event coordinator from Napa, Calif., who works under the name D.J. Flamingeaux, often picks up merchandise from gigs at hotels. This includes coasters from the Peacock Room at the Kimpton Hotel in New Orleans and a sweatshirt for his wife from the 1 Hotel in Miami Beach.
For Mr. Lyles, wearing the merchandise also serves as a walking advertisement for his work. Someone who makes a connection with him over a hotel logo on a hat or sweatshirt “could become a friend and I can introduce someone to my music.”
When Brooke Palmer Kuhl, 46, the owner of RSBP, an events and public relations company in Tampa, Fla., graduated from college more than two decades ago, she started collecting beach towels from luxury hotel properties even though she had yet to travel to the majority of them. “I would ask people to bring me one back when they went somewhere,” she said. Towels came, then Christmas tree ornaments — “because not every hotel does a branded towel, believe it or not”— and tumblers.
Now, her merchandise collection (some 50 towels and two Christmas trees’ worth of ornaments) serves as a checklist of places she aspires to go and places she has finally visited. “It started as about 70 percent places I hadn’t been and 30 percent places I had, and now it’s probably the other way around,” she said. “Before I had been to the Gasparilla Inn in Boca Grande, people brought me tumblers from there. Then I had my 40th birthday there.”
In December 2022, Rosewood Hotel Group rolled out online merchandise sales for a handful of “pilot properties,” including the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris, Rosewood London and the Carlyle in New York, which sells items like the Gallery Afternoon Tea Set ($295), the Carlyle baseball hat ($60) and Bemelmans Bar cocktail napkins ($75). Marlene Poynder, the managing director of the Carlyle, said the hotel expected its overall merchandise sales to increase by 25 percent this year compared with last year.
Pamela Benger, 54, founder of the pet company Phantom Pooches, is a frequent guest at the Carlyle. She gave all of her loved ones Carlyle-themed candles and knit hats this past holiday season, she said.
“Because the property is my home away from home, it means something when I am giving that gift,” said Ms. Benger, who lives in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, but stays at the Carlyle so often she named one of her poodles after the property. “And it was very well received.”
Other properties, including the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood, do not sell items online, preferring to offer merchandise at the on-location gift shop or reserve it for guests.
“It shouldn’t be just anybody can buy it. It doesn’t make it feel special anymore,” said Jeff Klein, the hotel owner. “It’s really for our customers to enjoy.”
In the middle of December, the hotel posted on Instagram that new merchandise would be available at the gift shop the next day. The collection, which included sweatshirts and matching sweatpants with a picture of the Tower Bar’s famous sundae menu and T-shirts with the words “Rude Guests Will Be Eaten Whole,” sold out within an hour, Mr. Klein said.
Since then, items have been popping up on eBay, selling for more than double their original price. One sweatshirt, which originally cost $160, was listed for $850.
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