âHell hath no fury like a wealthy person being told no,â says Alex Pardoe, a Hermès superfan and TikTok creator, recalling the many times he has seen âgrown men and women having five-star meltdownsâ within the otherwise fragrant environs of the Hermès flagship store in Paris.
These tantrums, says Pardoe, are always sparked by the same conflict: a rich person walks in, asks to buy a Hermès Birkin â fashionâs most high-status handbag, which costs $10,000 or more â and is told that none are available. This happens a lot, because Birkins, according to luxury handbag lore, are not mere products to be sold over the counter like cans of baked beans. Buying a Birkin takes more than money, so the received wisdom says: deliveries are limited and sales associates will earmark them for their favourite clients.
Such stories have been reverberating around the internet for the past fortnight, after two California residents sued the French mega-brand after thwarted attempts to buy the bags. Their suit accuses Hermès of âunlawful tyingâ: getting customers to buy items such as scarves, jewellery, clothing and home goods to demonstrate âsufficient purchase historyâ, in order to prove themselves âworthyâ of a Birkin. Whether or not it is successful, the suit has raised questions about how Hermès cultivates an air of exclusivity in an age of resale, and it has shone a light on the extreme lengths some customers will go to to convince Hermès that they are Birkin material.
Though Hermès (which did not respond to requests for comment for this story) has not confirmed the âtyingâ practice, there have been complaints of the alleged system. In China, it is called peihuo. Jing Daily reported two protests outside stores during summer 2021, with one customer holding a sign that read, âRubbish Hermès. Peihuo but no bag.â
On US and European forums such as r/TheHermesGame â where shoppers swap tips and tricks and share their own try/fail cycles of Birkin acquisition â the alleged practice is called a âprespendâ. Debates about how much that âprespendâ actually is (some say $20,000-$30,000; others say itâs more important to show âappreciationâ of different merchandise categories), whether it exists, and whether it varies from store to store are all hot topics. Such forums offer other advice for would-be Birkin buyers: they decode the lingo (âquotaâ bags, for example, are the premier handbag styles, such as Birkins and Kellys, of which even favoured customers are only allowed to buy a maximum of two a year) and give tips for striking up meaningful relationships with sales associates (known as SAs) in the quest to attain what one Redditor called âthe Scientology of pursesâ.
A lot of the forum obsessives seem to enjoy the process, even when they admit to having spent tens of thousands on homewares they might not have really wanted, and even if that enjoyment is grudging at times. âThe thrill of the chase really gets people hooked, addicted, to the process of obtaining one,â says Pardoe, whose work as a celebrity hairdresser (he specialises in hair extensions for clients including Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton) funds his own Birkin habit. Roxana Voica, a software developer who saved up to buy a Birkin for her 25th birthday, says the appeal is âartificial scarcityâ. She was dogged in her quest, searching through Instagram for posts made close to the location of a Hermès boutique in Dubai, where she was going on holiday, to find an SA to DM before arrival. She says the SA advised her that she would need to spend $27,000 (100,000 AED, £21,000) to get a Birkin. On her first visit to the store, with another SA, she bought some sandals and a belt but was told that the store didnât âreallyâ have any Birkins âfor touristsâ. Then she reconnected with the original SA, whom she describes as âtruly a gemâ who told her that the brand was due a restock before the end of her holiday â and eventually she was successful. Getting a bag feels âlike winning the lotteryâ, she says. âItâs just like a game â itâs definitely psychological. Because itâs so rare and also very expensive, it is like becoming a part of a very niche group who âmade itâ. I donât think the hype and the resell prices would be so high if the bags were more easily available.â
Literally speaking, the Hermès Birkin is just a bag: trapezoidal in shape, with two handles, a bit of glinting hardware and a flap, only materially different from other luxury handbags because it is still handmade.
Scarcity has been essential to the Birkinâs appeal since it first shot to popularity during the It bag days of the late 90s and noughties. It was inspired by Jane Birkin, after a chance meeting between the singer and actor and Jean-Louis Dumas, then Hermèsâ executive chairman, on a flight. The bag was launched in 1984 but didnât become truly famous until a 2001 episode of Sex and the City, in which Samantha Jonesâs thwarted attempts to get a Birkin were a big plot point. In the episode, Jones explains that the bagâs appeal is not its design but its significance: âWhen Iâm tooling around town with that bag, Iâll know Iâve made it,â she says. On her first attempt to buy one, she is told there is a five-year waiting list. âFor a bag?â She balks, to which the sales associate replies:âItâs not a bag, itâs a Birkin.â
Michael Tonello wrote a 2008 bestselling book, Bringing Home the Birkin: My Life in Hot Pursuit of the Worldâs Most Coveted Handbag, about his own experiences flipping Birkins in the late 90s and noughties. His business began when the singer-songwriter Carole Bayer Sager contacted him on eBay (he was selling Hermès scarves at the time) to ask him if he could source a Birkin. He believes the allegations in the lawsuit reflect the reality of Hermèsâ business model, as he experienced it at the time, when the official line was that there was a waitlist for Birkins â something Tonello never quite believed. Ninety-nine per cent of the time, he says, âif I spent somewhere in the vicinity of $5,000 first, then asked for the bag, they would sell it to meâ. Tonelloâs impression was that the Birkin âwas positioned as a reward for being a good customerâ. Tonello was eventually put on the brandâs infamous âno flyâ list when Hermès got wind of his business. (The news was delivered with typically Hermès politesse: they sent a fax saying that they were cancelling his special orders âbecause there was a shortage of leatherâ, he says. âI was kind of like: this seems a bit fishy.â) He describes the Birkin-buying process as âa finely tuned ruseâ â a way to maintain a sense of scarcity about the bags while getting âpeople to buy all that other stuff that, pretty much, people donât buy at Hermèsâ.
Whether artificial or real (Hermès does not disclose how many it produces annually), it is a perception of scarcity that has helped Birkins endure, while other It bags of the noughties have long gone out of fashion. While the resale market has opened the market up beyond the stores, only high-rollers can access resale bags. Now perceived as an investment â bags bought in store often fetch double the price at resale; rare, diamond-studded iterations have sold for as much as $450,000 at auction â Birkins have been toted by every celebrity imaginable (Victoria Beckham has a huge collection; the Kardashians are awash in the totes; Kate Moss memorably used one as a nappy bag). Even rumblings of a turning tide in 2022, when Beyoncé sang that she preferred Telfar bags in the lyrics to Summer Renaissance (âThis Telfar bag imported, Birkins, them shits in storageâ) have yet to dent the bottom line. Last year Hermès reported â¬12bn ($13bn, £10bn) in annual sales; in April 2023, its market capitalisation rose to â¬210 billion ($228bn, £180bn), surpassing Nike despite the vastly smaller number of goods sold. This success is owed to the âquality and scarcity of its leather goodsâ, according to the Business of Fashion.
The way Jeffrey Berk, CEO of a major Miami-based Birkin reseller, Privé Porter, tells it, there are two kinds of Birkin buyers: those who are prepared to do the required âgrovelling at Hermèsâ, and the people who are not, who will come to him to buy Birkins for double the ticket price. His clients include Paris Hilton, Kris Jenner and a lot of rappers including Cardi B, Offset, Lil Baby, Gunna, Tekashi69, and âKanye West â unfortunately, before we realised who he wasâ. Many of these clients (âa Jordanian prince, a Saudi royal â¦â) are people âwho donât want to walk into Hermès and be told what to doâ.
Many customers are among the super-rich 2% of luxury customers who, according to Bain, drive 40% of luxury sales. Still, he says, his celebrity clients get turned down in Hermès all the time, though he wonât say it is ever about bias or snobbery. Rather, he claims, his clients donât want to play the game: they want âto get the exact colour size and hardware that they wantâ. They do not want to buty other Hermès products in order to be deemed Birkin-able. They have the affluence to buy âthe $25,000 desk, or the $10,000 bicycle â these are real prices â or the $45,o00 trash canâ from Hermès, but they are not prepared to be âstuck with a whole bunch of stuff that they donât wantâ. Or else they want more bags than Hermès will give them, he says, telling me about the day in 2015 that Kris Jenner walked into his pop-up shop in Aspen, Colorado, and told him that she and her daughters could not quench their Birkin thirst because âno matter how much they were spending, they could only get two bags a year â it was a hard and fast ruleâ.
Berk claims that 70% of his stock comes from Hermèsâ VIP buyers, who will sometimes buy bags in colors they do not really want if SAs offer them. By that point, he says, clients are âso invested with the SA and with Hermèsâ that they are scared to say no, worried they will get the Hermès equivalent of a ânegative Uber ratingâ if they donât gratefully accept. So they will email Privé Porter, to double check that the company would be interested in trading or reselling (they will write: âtheyâre really pushing me on rose petalâ, he says), before they make the purchase.
Clearly, a complex ecosystem has sprung up around Birkins that is making a lot of already rich people â customers flipping Birkins, Birkin resellers and Hermès itself â an awful lot of money. If the allegations are true, and lawsuit is successful, it could disrupt that ecosystem significantly. It seems unlikely that Hermès would flood the market with Birkins, given the brandâs dedication to scarcity. But it might have to find another way to cover the alleged loss of income from ancillary products, if clients suddenly felt less inclined to prove themselves as âloyalâ by buying things they didnât actually want, as the suit alleges.
The lawyers I spoke to felt the suit was unlikely to succeed. Rania Sedhom, a luxury specialist attorney at Sedhom Law Group PLLC, said: âI just donât think they can prove what they are complaining of â but even the complaint itself has some flaws. Itâs not just that I think theyâre going to ultimately lose it,â Sedhom added. âI donât think the case is going to move forward.â Danielle Garno, partner and co-chair of the entertainment practice at Holland & Knight LLP, agrees that the suit looks like âa very tough uphill battle for the plaintiffsâ in part because the plaintiffs would âhave to prove that Hermès has sufficient economic power in the market with the Birkin and Kelly bags to essentially shut out competition in the market of the other ancillary products (belts, scarves, home goods, etc)â, which they do not seem likely to be able to do.
Thereâs a another fly in the ointment: Berk tells me he thinks the lawsuit will fail because he canât see who would want to join the class action, given that the last thing most Hermès shoppers want is to risk being put on the blacklist.
Having covered the Birkin beat for decades, Tonello says he is still somewhat amazed by the endurance of these alleged sales tactics. They just seem âa bit rude. I have found it really odd that wealthy people that seem to be able to get what they want put up with this type of thing from a store.â He surmises that âthere are a lot of people with self esteem issues that buy into this whole thing â thereâs a whole psychology of this that Hermès has worked very well to their advantageâ. Perhaps the truth is that many of those customers, for whom so much else comes easily, are hooked on the game of Birkin-hunting, and enjoy perceiving themselves as the type of people who can navigate unwritten rules. Berk, who scoffs at the lawsuit, calls it âa game of kings. If people are suing because they are not a king ⦠Iâm sorry â itâs just the way it is. Itâs just reality.â