The insurer is releasing a new product to help to boost its business from high net worth personal lines customers.
American International Group (AIG) has revealed its latest insurance news that the latest component of its strategy to increase its appeal to high net worth personal lines policyholders, it will be releasing coverage for high end designer clothing.
This will provide people with an insurance policy that goes above and beyond the standard homeowners coverage.
More specifically, the insurance news is about the “wearable collections coverage”, which provides additional coverage over and above the typical homeowners policy. While home coverage does technically cover items such as clothing, when it comes to more expensive designer clothing, many policies will fall short on being able to actually cover losses associated with those articles. The reason is that while jewelry can be included in extra coverage, clothing is lumped in with the rest of a home’s “contents”. That means that it’s subject to deductibles and various kinds of exclusion such as flooding and mold.
As this insurance news points out, though, designer clothing can be worth thousands upon thousands of dollars.
In fact, when getting into the haute couture range, it isn’t unheard of for pieces to reach a six-figure price tag. To AIG, this represented a coverage gap that was an opportunity for them to fill with a new type of insurance policy.
The inspiration for creating this new wearable collections insurance coverage occurred when the company was contacted by Doug Greenberg. He is the owner of the Garde Robe online apparel-storage firm. According to Greenberg, he found it worrisome when the majority of his customers had turned down the optional insurance policies offered by the store in order to cover the clothing stored there. Therefore, he headed to the underwriters at AIG in order to find a new solution to the problem
Greenberg explained that “They all feel that they’re covered by their homeowners’ insurance,” in an insurance news statement. For that reason, his customers never took out any additional coverage. Now, he’s hoping that customers in Texas and New York (the two states where the policy is available) will take out the added wardrobe coverage so that even if they don’t take out the extra insurance from his store, the homeowners policies will indeed cover their collections.