Thomai Serdari

Biography

Thomai Serdari, Ph.D. is a strategist in luxury marketing and branding. She helps clients launch, grow, and successfully manage luxury brands. She is an expert on luxury and actively studies, values, and reports on companies or funds that operate and invest within the luxury goods market.

Prof. Serdari has been teaching at New York University since 2004. She has developed a variety of courses at NYU, among which: "Cultures of Excess: Product and Fashion Design through Modernity" and "Entrepreneurship in the Business of Art." She also developed the core courses for the Luxury Marketing specialization at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business, MBA level: "The Core of Luxury: Processes, Products, and Strategies through History," "Luxury Branding: Brand Thinking and Experience," and "Luxury Launch: Designing & Marketing a Luxury Product/Project/Enterprise."

Originally trained as an architect at the National Technical University of Athens, Prof. Serdari received her doctorate in Art History & Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2005. She also holds an MBA from the Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University, with a specialization in corporate and quantitative finance (2009).

Heavily drawing on her interdisciplinary training, Prof. Serdari heads Brand(x)Lux, a brand consultancy that uses critical, business and design thinking to help brands interpret culture, the questions that define it and the trends that will impact the future of business. She contributes opinion pieces to Luxury Daily and is the business editor of the first academic interdisciplinary journal on Luxury: History, Culture, Consumption published by Taylor & Francis.

Prof. Serdari is one of the main contributors to the LVMH Fundamentals in Luxury Retail: A CPC/Parsons Collaboration, an education program designed to train and provide a wide range of retail skills to Chinese-Americans.

Research Interests

• Luxury Marketing
• Entrepreneurship
• New Business Models in Fashion, Art, Media, and Entertainment

Courses Taught

• Luxury Branding
• Luxury Launch
• Luxury Marketing

Academic Background

M.B.A., Business Administration, 2009
NYU Stern School of Business

Ph.D., Art History and Archaeology, 2005
Institute of Fine Arts, NYU

M.A., Media Studies, 1997
The New School for Social Research

M.A., Architecture, 1994
The National Technical University of Athens

Selected Publications

Serdari, Thomai (2022)
The Role of Cultural Innovation in the Success of Luxury Startups
Journal of Strategic Change in Entrepreneurial Finance

Appointed Editor-in-Chief of Luxury (2021)
History Culture Consumption
Taylor & Francis

Serdari, Thomai (2020)
Rethinking Luxury Fashion: The Role of Cultural Intelligence in Defining Creative Strategy
New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Serdari, Thomai (2016)

Critical Luxuries: Art, Design, Media, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

Serdari, Thomai (2015)
STEIDL: Printer, Publisher, Alchemist: The Field of Luxury Production in Germany
Luxury: History Culture Consumption, London: Taylor & Francis