Perhaps no modern branding has worked as well as the Hermes It bag mystique.
The much sought after Birkin Bag, and it's little sister, the Kelly, have been seen on the arms of celebrities and socialites alike for decades.
Many dream and long for a Birkin of their very own, believing the mysterious bag is well out of their sites.
The bags are beautifully made, that is irrefutable. But the price, which starts at $9000 for a plain brown bag is driven mostly by the well cultivated image of low supply and immense demand, not by actual manufacturing and marketing costs.
This carefully crafted image evolved out of the urban myth that there's a limited supply of the handmade bags, to such a degree that a wait on the Birkin master list takes more than 2 years. And while the lovingly designed, detailed, and crafted bags are indeed something to treasure, the myth of the long waiting list is just that, more or less fictitious.
Socialites and serious fashionistas love to regale fashion writers with lists of the various exotic Birkin bags they own as if to underscore how very special and apart from the crowd they are.
Now, Michael Tonello, author and intrepid Birkin buyer is poised to crack the Birkin wait list myth wide open.
Tonello, a beautician turned fashion buyer, spent several years visiting Hermes stores around the globe, buying up bags and reselling them (which seems to have curious legal implications to my mind).
"I would go into a store with a list in my Hermes Ulysse notebook and pile up scarves, shawls, bracelets, worth about $2,000. This made me seem a regular Hermes client," Tonello is quoted as saying.
"Once I had that pile ready to buy at the last moment I'd ask for a Birkin and they would usually produce one of the back room. In 2005 I bought 130 Birkins in a three-month period -- and you tell me there is a waiting list?"
Tonello, wrote the book "Bringing Home the Birkin," which releases this month. I could have told Tonello that he didn't need to go to such extreme measures to aquire a Birkin or two - of course his project involved reselling them at a markup, which further extended the myth to the customers he catered to.
A few years ago I talked with a the salespeople at various Hermes stores, who told me the waiting list myth was just that, a fiction that had evolved over time. Those wishing to aquire a Birkin just need to establish a good repoire with their local store, which basically involves showing up reasonably attired on a Friday, and asking for a Birkin. It's sort of a first come first served system to my understanding more than anything else. True, if you want special materials or have a specific color in mind, you will have to wait through a custom order wait list, as you would with any hand made luxury item. But your run of the mill Birkin brown is a relatively easy catch if you have the cash.
The cache of the Hermes label, Birkin or not, is nothing to sniff at. Every detail about a
customer's experience buying something as simple as a scarf from the company is impeccible - which is the reality a serious Hermes customer would never wish to miss. From the way the merchandise is shown, to the manner in which it's wrapped and finally presented, you'll enjoy every precious moment as though you'd been made queen for a day.
The interesting history of the company is detailed with no holds barred by New York Times writer Dana Thomas in her book Deluxe (shown in the left column).
No telling how seriously customers, fashionistas, and others will take Tonnello's book. I think the public likes to enjoy its image of the brand... the ability of being able to buy into the dream, or having to wait endlessly for it.
The book I would really like to read would be written by the Hermes people themselves. How the company went from its simple roots as a purveyor of horse tack to global luxury icon is the story that intrigues me. That is simply branding at it's best to a level rarely achieved in this day and age.
