What’s in a name? (quite a lot, when you work in PR…)

We’ve spent four years doing PR for auction houses and collectables brands, and we still don’t know what to call it.

Which is embarrassing, frankly. We’re PR people after all: we like a neat, efficient definition (ideally an acronym) that we can make up one day, then chuck around in a client meeting the next, like it’s been around forever. 

It started with a football, a helmet and a teddy bear

It started with our work for BUDDS Auctions. Since 2022, we’ve supported the team on a whole range of projects, including auctions for incredible pieces of sports memorabilia – from the ‘Hand of God’ football way back then, to, most recently, an Ayrton Senna helmet that sold for a cool half a million pounds.

From there, the pattern kept repeating. For Rogers Jones, one of the country’s foremost fine art auctioneers, we secured widespread national and broadcast coverage last month for The Welsh Sale – including a historically important album of watercolours by eminent Welsh ceramicist William Weston Young, which sold for £20,000. 

For heritage brand Steiff, we launched the Queen Elizabeth bear on what would have been her Late Majesty’s 100th birthday – a limited run of 4,996 bears at almost £300 each. We marked the occasion by reuniting the bear with her old friend, Paddington. And most recently, US brand Danbury Mint asked us (working alongside our US partner agency) to promote a series of gifts marking America’s 250th year.

Different categories, same underlying product

So what unites all of this? Different categories, different price points, wildly different customers, but same underlying product: one-off or small-run premium items that people buy because they want to own them forever. 

There is nothing here that anyone needs, but it’s what people want – something to display, something to demonstrate a passion, a manifestation of who we are, as individuals. You don’t buy a Senna helmet because you’ve got a gap in the hallway. 

What the market data actually says

Here’s where I’d expected to write “and this market is booming”, but actually it’s more interesting than that.

Global art sales did return to growth in 2025, up 4% to an estimated $59.6 billion, according to the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report, the first rise since 2022. Public auction sales specifically were up 9%, to $20.7 billion. The UK remains the world’s second-largest market, at 18% of global sales.

But zoom out, and the picture is of a market steadying rather than surging. Knight Frank’s Luxury Investment Index, which tracks ten categories including art, cars, watches, whisky and jewellery, slipped 0.4% in 2025. That sounds like bad news until you realise that over the past decade, the same index is up 38.6%.

The really useful bit is where the money went. Knight Frank’s read is that strength returned specifically to those luxury market segments built on rarity, cultural significance and exceptional provenance, which attract a more disciplined, more selective collector who is perfectly willing to spend, but not willing to overpay for the merely nice.

In other words, the market isn’t booming so much as ‘narrowing’, and it’s narrowing towards the kind of object that has a story attached.

Which brings me to a theory. In a world facing a mountain of AI slop, social media bandwagons and the latest Netflix megashow, owning something entirely (or almost entirely) unique starts to look rather appealing. Are we starting to look for something more individual, something that expresses who we are as humans? Are we craving provenance over popularity? Do we feel a stronger need than ever to show the world who we are?

Genuinely asking, because I don’t think the data can tell us that bit.

Why these clients are a PR dream

PR wise, these clients are a dream. We can do what we do best – bring things to life by telling great stories. 

We find the human element of what our clients are selling, and help potential buyers to understand why they’ll care. It’s also, I’d argue, why this sector is relatively hard to serve with more generic marketing. You can’t performance-market your way to “this football changed the 1986 World Cup”. Someone has to tell people.

So, what do we call it?

Right. The naming problem.

There’s ‘collectables’, but I don’t think that does it justice – it makes me think of dusty ornaments on a mantelpiece. Passion objects? Unique Consumer Goods? AI has suggested ‘storied objects’, which is fully gross and actually sounds like we’re hiding some terrible truth. 

The wealth industry does have a term, in fairness. Knight Frank calls this category “investments of passion”, and it’s a decent effort. It captures the emotional bit and the financial bit at once, and it’s already understood by the sort of publications collectors read. But it also frames everything as an investment, which isn’t quite right either. Nobody buys a £300 Steiff bear expecting a return. They buy it because they loved their grandmother, or Paddington, or the Queen.

All thoughts welcome. Genuinely; send them. 

In the meantime, if you’re in the, erm, storied objects market and would like to chat more about how PR can help you, just drop me a line.