Tonight’s the night. The drop is 8pm precisely. You’ve got your alarm set, but then you’re hardly going to forget about the prospect of owning a Hermès Mini Kelly II in the coveted shade of Craie, are you? It doesn’t matter that you’ll be paying way over the original retail price, which is, let’s face it, kinda steep in the first place.
But it’s all you’ve been thinking about since you first set your eyes on that pretty little piece of luxury leather real estate and now you’re so besotted you’re willing to pay £15,000, £20,000… You just need to make sure your fingers are limber because in this game it’s all about who gets to the checkout first. One minute to eight? Ready? Set? Go! Go! Go!
If you know, you know. And if you don’t know, well, welcome to the wild and fantastical world of luxury handbag resale, a place where high-end fashion dreams can come true. For a price.
If you associate the idea of resale with picking up a scuffed but massively discounted pair of designer shoes from eBay or engaging in furious DM argy-bargy with a stroppy seller on Depop, de-associate now. That’s not what we’re talking about here. Not grubby goods and certainly not bargains. No, what we’re talking about is the crème de la crème of resale: the exchange of highly desirable, 99.9 per cent box-fresh, premium goods at an even more premium price. And, mama, it is one hot market.
“At the moment, everyone loves the Chanel heart bags from the 22S collection. People went crazy for them and at the beginning of the launch they were re-selling for £12,000, which is insane given that they’re £6,000 in-store,” says Hanushka Toni, co-founder of London and Monaco-based pre- loved luxury platform, Sellier (tagline: buy now or cry later). “The next holy grail of Chanel bags is the Caramel. They introduced the colour about two years ago and it sold out. They brought it back for this collection. Caramel minis and classic flaps, I cannot tell you the premiums they are achieving right now. They are huge. Sometimes a colour will inexplicably become popular. Usually through an influencer saying they love it and then the premiums shoot up. Brown was a colour no one wanted in the past. Now suddenly it’s the thing to own.”
Hermès is the luxury brand with the biggest resale value. Birkins, Kellys and Constances can resell for £15,000-20,000 if they’re an untouched example. In May this year, after a battle of bids between two clients, Sellier sold a diamond crocodile Birkin for £68,000. “But it’s funny because we’re known for our competitive pricing,” says Toni. “The same bag sold with Christie’s four years ago for £179,000.”
Toni is something of a phenomenon in her own right. In 2019, she was the creative director of Brunswick Rose, a luxury digital marketing agency, advising brands like Rolls-Royce. She set up Sellier with her mother, Dina Ibrahimova, as a side hustle, a carefully curated, bricks-and-mortar designer resale store in Knightsbridge that hoped to take advantage of the weekend’s passing trade at Harrods. But when the global pandemic shut down retailers it put paid to that idea. At that point, Sellier had no online presence, a worrying position to be in. So Toni quit her job, got on her phone and started selling direct to Sellier’s then-small audience of social media followers.
“I’d grab a vintage Chanel bag off the shelf in the store and I’d show it to the camera on Instagram. I’d say, ‘Look, this is vintage Chanel and it’s a real treasure. You might not know this but prior to 2008 Chanel actually used real gold when plating their hardware. This is something they no longer do so it makes this piece even more special…’” Slowly, she started noticing an uptick in engagement.“After two months everything we were posting had around 20 to 30 people asking to purchase it. So, we came up with the hashtag #fastestfingersfirst to describe the concept of you having to be the first person to checkout on that product.”
“By that point, 90 per cent of all stock we were posting was sold by the end of the day,” she says. “But on the back end it was impossible because we were trying to reply to six or seven hundred DMs.” They brought the business online and Sellier now claims it has the fastest sell-through rate in the industry. Toni says that while other well-known luxury resale platforms might get 40 or 50 clicks a week from a prospective reseller of a good luxury handbag, Sellier’s direct posts to social media (it now has 107,000 Instagram followers) will garner from 15,000 to 30,000 views in 24 hours, driving a lot of traffic to the website, “which means our items sell fast.” She says a VIP consignor might bring a bag of products to them in the morning, “and by the evening I’ll be calling them saying, ‘Okay, I have £10,000 for you because I sold it all this afternoon.’ Usually, they think I’m joking. But we do offer that fast sell-through rate and immediate payments. Sellers don’t have to wait around.”
But what about the buyers? Why are they willing to spend more on a luxury piece than the original retail price? Well, for them it’s just about having the chance to get their hands on hard- to-access luxury goods. Chanel does not offer an online option for ordering bags. The only way to buy a brand new Chanel bag is through one of their boutiques and when Chanel drops a new collection of bags there is a queue of people outside the store, credit cards at the ready. Buying a Hermès Birkin or Kelly or Constance is even trickier. Yes, you can put your name down on awaiting list for the bag in a boutique, but that’s still not a guarantee you’re going to get one. The brand restricts its inventory and keeps the retail price under wraps. It also gives regular clients priority.
“There aren’t any Chanel or Hermès boutiques in Dundee or Grimsby,” says Toni. “But there are people all the way up and down the country who really want access to new season Chanel and simply can’t get to a store. So that’s one of the reasons why they are prepared to pay that little bit extra on resale.”
For these luxury brands this all adds to the allure – so much so that brands are increasingly restricting the number of units of leather goods they’re selling in-store for each collection. And for a certain kind of consumer, that leaves them close to bursting with desire.
According to the Financial Times, the global luxury resale market was estimated to be worth around £30 billion in 2021. Luxury resale was already on the rise when the lockdowns boosted this trend and it’s estimated that the secondary market is now growing four times as fast as the primary. The biggest operator in the sector, American company The RealReal (573,000 Instagram followers), saw revenue grow by a mammoth 56 per cent in 2021 compared to 2020.
And while sustainability, fuelled by fears about climate change, is a big reason given by consumers buying second-hand, the Financial Times states that having access to famous, and very hard-to-find, luxury items is the number one reason for sales. And often these items are not second-hand at all.
For a certain consumer, resale sites and luxury product procurers (or personal shoppers) are the only possible way to access that precious product they lusted after when they first saw it on the catwalk six months before. While vintage designer bags hold their own power and allure, a lot of the big sales are fuelled by limited edition products from the very newest drops – bought from the store in the morning and sold to a resale site a few hours later.
“Our consignment book is fairly large,” says Toni. “We have thousands of people selling with us and, every time a new collection launches, we’ll get at least 30, maybe 50 or 60 pieces from that collection going live because people have brought them to us. And then over the course of the collection we’ll do more sales as well.”
Sellier is of course just one of many new luxury resale platforms establishing themselves in this business. Threads Styling (653,000 followers on Instagram) is also well known to many. Founded in London by Sophie Hill, who used to work as a buyer at Arcadia, its motto is: “inspire, acquire, deliver”. Clients can DM its retinue of personal shoppers with lists of the goods that they are looking for which, at the moment, Hill says, is all about preloved Hermès bags.
“We’ve seen demand skyrocket in the last couple of years and prices with it. There are so few on the market, but the demand hasn’t slowed, hence the hike in prices.
“Our best-selling styles are both the Birkin and Kelly in 25cm. All colours and sizes sell well, but neutrals are always most popular. The Kelly 20cm is one of the most valuable styles due to its versatile size – it can be worn during the day with the long strap or at night using the top handle. Pinks, whites and neutrals sell at the highest prices. Four years ago, you could find one for around £13,000 but now you’re looking at between £20,000 and £30,000. Because white is the hardest to find it’s always the most expensive.”
Forget stagflation, this sector is driven by bagflation, and although the prices are excessive, they still represent a good investment says Hill.
“Limited editions from Hermès hold their value the most, like the Birkin Cargo or the holy grail of bags, the Faubourg Birkin. The Faubourg retails for £27,000 in store if you can get your hands on one.” You can’t. “Christie’s sold one recently for £225,000.”
It’s well known that personal shoppers are increasingly appearing in those snaking queues of people who line up outside boutiques when new collections drop. That’s understandable, when they can turn a profit in a day of several hundred pounds, at least, by buying a brand new hot model and selling it to a resale site in the afternoon. The luxury brands don’t like this, which is one reason why they have imposed restrictions on the number of products that individuals can buy in one season.
But if this sounds like a potentially appealing way to turn a quick buck as the cost of living crisis kicks in, be warned, says London-based Lottie Leefe, a wealth planner and founder of the financial well-being consultancy The Dura Society. “The exclusivity of these products has really commoditised them and people are making money, yes, but as an individual, from a financial planning point of view, it would be a gamble to get into it. You’ve got to think about how much you’re putting down initially and how much you’re getting back. A business has the cash-flow and the infrastructure to warrant that risk. But if the market responds badly or if a particular model is no longer desirable, then as an individual you’ve laid out a lot of money for a product that you could then be stuck with.”
But the nature of investment potential aside, some people are clearly just dreaming of a Chanel bag to call their own, at any price. If that’s the case, they know where to find it. Fast fingers at the ready.
Taken from Issue 69 of 10 Magazine – PEACE, COURAGE, FREEDOM – order here.