Comment by shmatt
3 days ago
Labubus peaking and falling doesnt really say much about scarcity and trends. Labubu is made by a public company, who's stock skyrocketed, and essentially decided to go all in and mass produce to meet the popularity
thats one option. But other companies sometimes choose to keep the scarcity and secrecy for years, even decades, and if they play their cards right it keeps working
Labubus fall is more about its makers decision to increase sales numbers instead of keeping them flat and generating more and more and more hype
Hermes can sell a $15,000 Birkin to everyone, im sure they can figure out the supply chain aspects if they really wanted to. and within a month everyone that wanted one would have one and sales would drop. Hermes will have a spike in sales, followed by a drop
Instead they force you to play years long games with their sales staff to get an opportunity to spend $15,000. And decades later people still opt in to spending thousands of dollars on plates and scarves hoping one day they will be offered one
This is just as true about a $40 Supreme, or Aime Leon Dore T-shirt, than it is for a $15,000 handbag. If you keep the scarcity going just right, it lasts much longer
That might be true of handbags, I am doubtful it is true of dolls. A handbag is a necessary accessory and has been for decades. The popular brands grew their way there slowly over many years. A company that explodes into popularity suddenly for a product people never knew they needed is likely to only stay in the spotlight for a short while and is best served taking advantage as best they can.
I agree that cashing in quickly before the fad faded was probably the right move for Labubu. However, there’s no world where Birkins (or other designer handbags) are a “necessary accessory”.
A handbag is necessary for many people to carry their thing. Whether they choose a more or less expensive item to fulfill that function is a separate question.
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> This is just as true about a $40 Supreme, or Aime Leon Dore T-shirt, than it is for a $15,000 handbag.
According to a more fashion and design orientated friend of mine, you can buy knockoffs of Birkin or any other high-end bag. And, guess what? Some of those knockoffs and their manufacturers have developed a certain cachet, and actually sell for quite high prices. So of course, those have spawned knockoffs too.
It's like the bit in Pattern Recognition, isn't it?
Knockoffs? please, we call them “reps” ;)
There are whole subreddits devoted to this, the most well-known being repladies, which went private after it got too famous due to an NYT article. People will spend $1000 or more for a really good Birkin knockoff with high quality leather and hardware. The bags are almost all made in workshops in China. Getting one is apparently (I haven’t done it myself) an interesting exercise in trust and reputation: how do you know the seller isn’t going to send you a cheap knockoff from China rather than a “real” $1000 knockoff? In practice there is a whole world of trusted Chinese middlemen with reviews etc. who have a strong stake in keeping their reputation high in the “reps” community (but you’d better make sure the reviews are real…).
> People will spend $1000 or more for a really good Birkin knockoff with high quality leather and hardware.
I'd bet you a coffee that there are knockoffs, or "reps" if you prefer, that are actually at least in some respects better quality than the original.
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> Hermes can sell a $15,000 Birkin to everyone
It's sad and petty I know, but if I were a billionaire edgelord like Elon Musk, rather than Twitter, I'd buy Hermes and sell their products in supermarkets. All the past limited editions too. Just to fuck with the kind of people who buy them.
Then again Hermes is worth 200 billion and upsetting an oligarch's sidechick might just get me killed so maybe not.
He probably couldn't buy it if he wanted. They built their stock structure to be resistant to takeover attempts and instead they are controlled by a family holding. I _guess_ if Musk slings his whole fortune at it he might get it, but unlikely. Hermes is a very interesting company, I recommend the Acquired episode on them, along with the one about LVMH.
All that would happen is the Birkin would lose its appeal and some other company would step in to fill the role, and people would empty their closets of orange boxes and fill them with some other colour box
> Hermes can sell a $15,000 Birkin to everyone
Wait hold on, what?
Like, I get that you were referring to the fact that they keep things scarce even for rich people, but you literally said “everyone”, so I just gotta check: Are you saying that everyday people would be willing and able to spend $15000 on a luxury handbag?
The sale of new Birkin bags is famously invite-only. In that context, to "sell" to "everyone" means making the bag available for sale to everyone. "Anyone" would have been a less ambiguous word choice, but it's a minor grammatical issue and the meaning is still clear.
I didn't read anything about the everyperson beung able to do this.
There was an implied ‘who is on the waiting list for a Birkin bag currently’ in ‘everyone’. They did not mean every single person on Earth, they meant Hermes could sell a Birkin bag to every interested buyer.