The Hermés Birkin bag is one of the most popular bags to this day, with prices ranging from $10K to over $2M with extreme exclusivity. Hermès only allows boutiques to purchase a select number of Birkins on a bi-annual basis and the style of Birkin bag delivered to boutiques is rarely known ahead of time. As a result, customers must either make do with the available Birkin bag offered by the sales associate or patiently wait for the style they want to become available. But how did this highly sought-after bag originally come to be?
In the 1980s, Jane Birkin was notorious for carrying a straw bag everywhere she went. In 1984, she met the CEO of Hermès, Jean-Louis Dumas, on a flight from Paris to London. When her bag fell out of the overhead compartment, Dumas commented how impractical the bag was. From there, the two began talking about what the perfect bag would look like. Birkin sketched her design on an airsick bag and described her vision to Dumas.
“Why don’t you make a bag four times the Kelly that you can leave open?’ Because girls like to have things on the end of their arm to put all their stuff in.”
In 1984, Hermès produced the first Birkin bag retailing for an average of $2000. Hermès is said to have paid approximately $40,000 in royalties to Birkin annually in exchange for the use of her name. Since then, the Birkin price has increased by 500% in the last 35 years, an increase of 14% per year, ranging from $10K to $2M.
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