Is the Handbag You're Buying a Good Investment?
A couple of years ago, it made global news that buying an Hermès Birkin bag offered a better return on investment than going all in on the stock market. The e-commerce site Rebag has built a business on the viability of the luxury resale bag market, from Birkins and beyond, and now it’s taking things a step further with a new platform called Clair by Rebag.
Not unlike assigning a Kelly Blue Book value to an automobile, Clair (i.e., the Comprehensive Luxury Appraisal Index for Resale), which lives on the Rebag site, assigns a special code and market price for most high-end handbag models across a list of more than 50 brands and 10,000 styles, in real time.
A user accounts for brand, condition, size, and color on either the Rebag site or app, and gets a valuation, from which they can decide whether to buy, sell, or hold. Like any market you want to invest in, any brand of bag is subject to fluctuations, so Clair is regularly updated to look for changes in the market, including the sudden popularity or overexposure of certain styles. In other words, are you up for buying into some Fendi or Prada bag futures?
“With more and more consumers contemplating the resale value of their luxury purchases, we’ve created a taxonomy that provides a more transparent way for consumers to shop more wisely,” says Charles Gorra, founder and CEO of Rebag. “We’ve spent years gathering data and analyzing the luxury handbag market.”
Hermès, of course, comes out on top in terms of being a good investment, with Birkin and Kelly styles taking top spots—meaning when you leave the Hermès store, bag in hand, you are quite likely to make more or equal to what you paid for the bag, should you choose to resell it. Goyard and Chanel are next up in terms of being good investments, with Gucci, Saint Laurent, and Louis Vuitton trailing slightly.
Currently, Bottega Veneta has only about a 30 percent return on investment, meaning if you purchase a $2,000 bag now, it may be worth only about $600 if you attempt to resell immediately. With the increasing popularity of Bottega though, who knows where it will land on Clair’s scale in the next year or two. The better question is, do you make purchases based on love or money? In a perfect world, you get a little bit of both. And now there's a way to measure that.
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