The Hermès Stores Most Likely to Offer You a Birkin
A Panel of Three Hermès Experts Weighs In — and They Have Eleven Things to Tell You
Nobody tells you the rules for buying a Birkin because there aren’t any — or rather, there are, and they change depending on the country, the city, the store, the sales associate, and possibly the barometric pressure that day (okay, I made that last part up). So I assembled a panel of three people who know more about this than anyone I could find: one of the top current Hermès resellers in the world, who has moved hundreds of millions of dollars in Hermès inventory and won’t tell you their name for reasons that will become obvious, Michael Tonello, one of the top former resellers who wrote the book on this (literally — his memoir Bringing Home the Birkin is published in 13 languages), and I brought back Noëmie Leclercq, a Paris-based investigative journalist who covers Hermès and knows the luxury industry better than most people working in it. What follows is their collective intelligence on the six most accessible stores in the world to buy a quota bag, and eleven things you should know before you start building your travel itinerary around a handbag.
RPS’ Panel of Hermès Experts
Anonymous Famous Reseller
“I've sourced hundreds of millions of dollars in new Hermès handbags to customers in roughly 50 countries, and at any given time I have seven figures in inventory. I'm not going to say who I am, and if you understood how this works, you'd understand why. Hermès does not look kindly on the resale market. If they figure out who you are and what you're doing, they cut you off. They have blacklisted buyers for less. This whole industry runs on trust and relationships. I'm not a consignment business, so I own everything I sell outright and I move faster than anyone else. You would know my clients, but I don’t name names. But you would know a lot of them.”
Michael Tonello (@thatbirkinguy)
“From 2000 to 2006, I just might have been the largest Hermès Birkin reseller in the world, averaging several million dollars per year in sales. I’ve visited 141 Hermès stores and have 274 stamps in my passport. In 2008, I wrote the bestselling memoir, Bringing Home the Birkin, which is now published in 13 languages.
I write about [the Hermes buying process] in the early chapters of my book. Prior to 2008 Hermès, and specifically the Birkin bag, was famous for its “Waiting List”. Hermès, at the time, claimed that they couldn’t produce enough Birkins to keep up with demand, so they created the waiting list. If you walked into a Hermès store and asked to buy a Birkin a sales associate would put you on the waiting list. Depending on the year, the waiting list could be anywhere from two to three years long. Purely by accident I discovered that the waiting list was a fraud (didn’t actually exist) and I wrote about that discovery in my book. When the book was published in May 2008, the media flooded Hermès with requests about the waiting list and for the first month or so Hermès declined to reply (’No comment”). Then Hermès released a statement, something along the lines of, ‘We encourage clients to establish a relationship with one of our sales associates who will help them acquire a bag.’ Well that opened its own can of worms... ‘What does establishing a relationship mean?’
Anyhow, that eventually evolved to the current situation which is quite convoluted. The general consensus today is that you simply need to spend (a lot of) money in the store on clothing, jewelry, footwear, etc and then eventually they will offer (reward you?) up the opportunity to purchase a Birkin. Typically that opportunity to purchase a Birkin will be a Birkin of their choosing…not of yours.”
Noëmie Leclercq
“I’m Noëmie. A Paris-based investigative journalist specializing in the luxury industry. I currently write for Glitz, an independent, bi-weekly publication released in both English and French. The waiting list absolutely exists—but it’s elastic. If you’re doing well with your S.A, there’s a kind of fast pass: fewer hoops, shorter timelines, quieter conversations. And then there’s the parallel universe of the grey market, which exists precisely because not everyone wants to perform loyalty as a hobby. So yes, it’s real, but it’s also a bit of stagecraft.” (Ed note: Noëmie has her own newsletter Follow the Money here. It’s in French).
