Social media algorithms know me better than I do. Who knew I’d get such joy from watching Love Luxury, a handbag reseller with a YouTube channel that typically features bereft women trying to sell Birkin bags gifted from former lovers? “It is just too painful to keep,” one says. “Oh, and the stickers are still on. … Can I get $50,000 for it?”
It is everything I want to see: beautiful and inaccessible fashion, romantic drama, and regularly updated economic lessons about artificial scarcity. What’s not to love?
Now I can even partake. Luxus, the aptly named asset manager, has a hedge fund that buys Hermès Birkin and Kelly bags on the secondary market and then flips them. The first round raised $1 million, bought 36 bags, sold them and claimed it earned a 40.6 percent return. There are plans to grow in 2026.
That return would’ve been even higher if the fund had bought on the primary market (in this case, a Hermès boutique). But it is nearly impossible to buy a bag that way, as I know from personal experience: You need a relationship with a sales associate who will advocate for you when a bag becomes available. If you then turn around and resell your bag, you could destroy your relationship and be shut out of the primary market forever.
So the fund buys and sells in the secondary market, where the bags are sold to anyone, at a high markup. It is the scarcity in the primary market that drives up prices in the secondary market.
Which is not to say that making money in the bag-flipping business is easy. One of the reasons is that it requires anticipating trends. The retail price at Hermès is based on material and bag size. On the secondary market, certain colors and sizes command a bigger premium, which changes from year to year; bigger bags and certain colors were less popular in 2025. Who knows what next year will bring. Maybe the mini Kelly trend has already peaked.
Fashionable women may rationalise their expensive handbag habit as an investment strategy, not decadent consumption, because they can see rising prices on the secondary market. The secondary market for luxury goods has exploded in the last decade, growing at more than 10 percent a year — more than the primary market — and is now worth more than $200 billion.
There has always been a market for collectables on the secondary market: watches, sneakers, art and the like. You would sell your high-end good to a dealer, but the prices were not as transparent and the market was much smaller. Once reselling went online and luxury secondary retailers gained the ability to verify authenticity, it achieved a scale that made prices more transparent and the market more liquid.
Now the secondhand-luxury-goods market is part of a larger trend affecting all sorts of markets and industries, which is the financialisation of everything. An actual fund that attempts to make money off the secondary luxury handbag market is the next logical step.
In some ways it is comparable to the market for options. The ability to observe and assign a price to stock options is what created the modern derivatives market, and it transformed all of finance. In theory, a large secondary market could do the same for retail goods. But the odds are against it. Consumption goods aren’t stocks. They go out of fashion for arbitrary reasons and they depreciate with each use, which normally lowers their value.
What’s feeding this Birkin frenzy is the bull market — in the stock market, which is up some 15 percent this year. People have more money and are more open to risk. Despite claims that Birkin bags are a good way to diversify your portfolio, the market for luxury goods tends to be pro-cyclical. A recession will probably lower demand for $30,000 used handbags. Most shoppers on the secondary market look for discounts, but owners who see their bags as an asset will expect to earn a premium.
Still, I do love watching those videos.
By Allison Schrager
