Comment by shmatt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shmatt | Hacker News Reader

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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.

A lot of designer handbags are truly awful at carrying things. In practice they are primarily used as fashion accessory rather than as a functional bag.

True, but this does not particularly apply to the Birkin, which was famously created for the actress Jane Birkin after she complained to the CEO of Hermes that she couldn’t get a bag big enough to hold both scripts and baby diapers. Sure, it’s not as good at carrying things as a backpack, but it’s not bad either.

It does delight me no end to see a whole thread on handbags on HN. I agree with one of the parent posters though, handbags are an unusual category with long-lived brand status (like cars and watches) and not really comparable to lububus.

> which was famously created for the actress Jane Birkin after she complained to the CEO of Hermes that she couldn’t get a bag big enough to hold both scripts and baby diapers. Sure, it’s not as good at carrying things as a backpack, but it’s not bad either.

I checked this out and was amused to see that wikipedia notes:

> Birkin used the bag initially but later changed her mind because she was carrying too many things in it: "What's the use of having a second one?" she said laughingly. "You only need one and that busts your arm; they're bloody heavy. I'm going to have an operation for tendonitis in the shoulder".

In my experience it's pretty common to carry stuff in backpacks. They put a lot of weight on your spine, which can take it. Jane Birkin's comment reminded me of the idea in Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need that frequent travelers are always on the lookout for luggage that can hold more than it can actually hold.

I always found the birkin interesting because of how working class it looks versus its price tag. I grew up fairly poor, and the birkin bags always remind me of the leather purses my aunts, grandmothers, and teachers would carry.

This seems to occur in high fashion a lot, an upscale rendition of something popular among the working class.

It happens in fashion going both ways for a variety of reasons, though with fast fashion it's all so intermingled.

Many rock bands with working class roots "bring up" styles (like the newsboy cap), but also lower classes try and "look" upwards which can give us the nouveau riche clichés. Celebrities trying to hid their identity in public started to wear large sunglasses and suddenly everybody would start to wear them.

It's the primary reason why brands have become so important - fabric quality can vary, but jeans are otherwise just jeans; slap Gucci or Prada on it and suddenly you're signalling conspicuous consumption.

> 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.

Oh, absolutely. Probably some of the best leatherworkers in China are making high-end handbag knockoffs: it’s where the money is.

Probably the same people who make the real ones.

> 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.

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