Can the Birkin bag survive the resale market?

The once-elusive Hermès bag is reckoning with its sudden availability

A Birkin 35 on display at a Christie’s exhibition of rare handbags and vintage clothing (Alamy)

Once upon a time, the Hermès Birkin could arguably have been called the rarest handbag in the world. Urban myths abounded about how to buy and who was allowed to buy, rumours of waiting lists were taken as gospel, and the lucky few able to acquire a bag guarded their insider status as if it were a state secret.

Then the fashion resale market took off.

On almost any given day, Privé Porter in Miami has a rotating lineup of nearly 80 of the newest Hermès Birkin bags, in pristine condition and all accessible with the click of a mouse or a tap on a mobile device.

In barely five years, Privé Porter, tucked away in the palm-tree-lined confines of southern Florida, has sold more than $60m (£46m) worth of the bags, the company says, to anyone who wants and can afford one, the vast majority of those sales taking place on Instagram.

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The digitally native company is part of the booming resale ecosystem, which has seen a growing number of heavily funded and highly trafficked businesses bringing luxury wares to the web, among them the $10,000-plus marquee bags of the 182-year-old Hermès empire. And Privé Porter is not alone.

Another digital player, the market-disrupting e-commerce consignment website the RealReal, has more than 300 Birkin bags available for purchase, including a shiny midnight-hued crocodile Birkin and a blindingly bright red Birkin.

StockX, the resale site known largely for its system of selling the buzziest sneakers as if they are stocks, has expanded its offerings to handbags, including the most coveted Hermès bags; it currently has 235 up for grabs.

Together with assorted other resale players, such as Rebag, LePrix, Baghunter and Vestiaire Collective, along with Hermès-specific sellers like Jane Finds, such sites have made it easier than ever for consumers to find what were once almost mythical accessories.

Luca Solca, a senior analyst for luxury goods at Bernstein, an investment research and management company, estimates that there are now more than 1 million Birkins in the market.

It sounds awfully good. But what does it really mean for an accessory whose image and allure is grounded largely in exclusivity and carefully measured supply, in an industry where perception plays an outsize role, not to mention for the people seduced by such rarity? Does it risk dilution and, even worse, devaluation of both value and allure?

After all, few brands have been as successful at positioning themselves at the apex of sheer luxury and creating ravenous demand as Hermès. It is a status symbolised by the Birkin, the virtually logo-less bag constructed from high-grade calfskin that debuted in 1984 after actress Jane Birkin met Hermès chairman Jean-Louis Dumas on a plane in 1981. (Dumas died in 2010.)

In 35 years, it has become as famous as an accessory can get, in part because of the difficulty of nabbing one.

Before the advent of the internet, this was said to involve a waiting list, on which one’s name would be placed after an enquiry about a Birkin in one of the company’s stores.

“There was a waiting list at one point, but because so many people wanted these bags, a list simply became unmanageable,” says a former employee, speaking anonymously because of the nondisclosure agreement he signed. Hermès refuses to comment on the method for bringing home a Birkin.

Jonathan Rimer, a former floor director at the Hermès flagship in Beverly Hills, California, attributes the bag’s elusiveness to a simple problem of supply and demand, as did Robert Chavez, the Hermès president and chief executive for the Americas, who announced at last year’s Skift Global Forum that “demand for the Birkin bag continues to be much higher than the supply”.

That is no longer necessarily the case.

Julie Wainwright, founder and chief executive of the RealReal, says her company has been able to offer these bags by “unlocking the supply of luxury goods in people’s homes globally,” a bounty that Bain & Co values at $307bn.

Jeff Berk, a founder of Privé Porter, says his company maintains a stock of the newest Birkins thanks to close ties with a global network of Hermès VIP customers, the big spenders with deep relationships with salespeople who reportedly offer Birkins as soon as they hit the stockroom.

Many of these women, Berk says, buy the bags immediately, regardless of whether they like the colour, size, skin or hardware, mostly because of Birkin Fomo. When a bag isn’t a perfect match, some of them turn to Privé Porter to trade, upgrade or sell the bag.

Industry insiders, like Wainwright, are adamant that resale sites can coexist peacefully with luxury brands, and even serve to bolster the luxury market by giving consumers a more affordable entry point to luxury goods as well as the confidence to invest in pricey handbags, knowing that if they tire of one, there will be a market for it.

This paints a pretty picture of a circular system of consumption, one in which resellers are not predators, but a vital part of a larger luxury symbiosis.

The principles of economics, however, seem to suggest otherwise. Scarcity, says Robert H Frank, a professor of management and economics at the Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management, is achieved only when “goods that are highly desirable are not broadly available”.

Flavio Cereda, the managing director of equity research, consumer and luxury, at Jefferies International, says the resellers are simply filling a void that was intentionally left open by stalwart luxury brands, many of which have been slow to adopt e-commerce and almost all of which have shied away from making their top-of-the-line products available on the web.

In the past, this allowed companies to control the distribution of their wares and maintain the hard-earned air of exclusivity upon which they – and their price tags – so thoroughly depend.

But now, Cereda says, “some of the most coveted accessories are available on your phone in seconds.” At any given point, these resellers tend to “have more Birkins in stock online than Hermès stores”, and such volumes are “game-changing”. Resale is, he says, “the one channel that brands are so far largely unable to mould in terms of either volumes or pricing – and that in itself is hugely disruptive.”

Solca agrees. “In theory,” he says, the rise of resale “could potentially increase the product and brand ubiquity.” But, he says, “If you compare the Birkin to the Rolex Daytona,” referring to the Swiss watchmaker’s premiere offering, which has also found its way into the resale market, “you wouldn’t conclude that Rolex has been suffering for this.”

According to Solca, the trick here is the watchmaker’s ability to “keep its most iconic creations alive by tweaking and improving them all of the time,” while also offering new products to keep consumers, particularly devoted fans of the brand, coming back.

As of now, demand for Birkins actually seems to be rising with supply. The RealReal says that consumer searches on its site for Birkin bags have increased more than seven-and-a-half times over the last three years with sales nearly tripling.

And the Hermès bottom line does not seem to be suffering. According to its recently released 2018 revenue report, it experienced a 10.4 per cent rise in consolidated revenue for 2018, topping $6.7bn.

At Privé Porter, Berk says, “More and more collectors are opting to pay us $19,000 to get the exact same – never used – bag” that they cannot get from Hermès for $12,000.

The individuals consigning these hard-to-get bags are often also the buyers, so the resale market is, Cereda says, “a happy loop of aficionados.” Then he adds, somewhat ominously, “for now.”

© New York Times