The Privé Porter Customer Won't 'Grovel' to Hermès Anymore

Even for consumers for whom money is no object, the luxury world teases and entices with scores of items that simply cannot be had. Did those $2,200 Dior Air Jordans catch your eye over the summer? Sorry, all 4,700 pairs sold out in minutes. Do you have $13,000 for a new Rolex Cosmograph Daytona watch? Great—your local store will be happy to put you on its waiting list. Did you hear that Jaguar is celebrating the 60th anniversary of the E-Type this year by restoring and selling these classic roadsters? Better hurry: They’re only releasing 12 of them. But when it comes to a coveted luxury item notorious for its sheer unavailability, even the examples above cannot hold a candle to the Hermès Birkin handbag. Made of exotic hides like crocodile and lizard, and priced anywhere from $40,000 to half a million dollars, Birkin bags (along with their close cousin Kelly bags) are the Amur leopards of the purse kingdom. Hermès makes only 120,000 of them a year, and reserves most for preferred clients such as Victoria Beckham, who reportedly owns 100 or so. As for ordinary rich people, good luck. Stories are legion of women waiting years for a bag while simultaneously spending a fortune on other Hermès goods simply to get into the Paris atelier’s good graces. For those with the means, however, a potential solution awaits inside Suite 128A at 701 S. Miami Ave. Access to this recondite opulence is in the form of a store that opened in November within Miami’s Brickell City Centre. It’s called Privé Porter. And if the Centre's website is to be believed, the store promises the heretofore impossible. Shopping grandeur beyond dreams Within the walls of this 1,250-square-foot boutique, “you will find more current Hermès Birkin and Kelly and other collectible handbags than you can possibly dream [of],” promises the site. Hold on—is this another one of those high-end thrift shops? No. Another of those luxe-resale platforms like The RealReal or Vestiaire Collective? Well, a little—except that Privé Porter is a physical store inside one of the country's most prestigious shopping centers, and holds itself to a marked standard. “All our goods are current season, unused,” the web copy continues. “What we don’t have, we can source in 48 hours.” Privé Porter is the brainchild of entrepreneur Jeffrey Berk and his wife Michelle. He has a background in sales and finance; she is a self-taught handbag shark. The Berks have no relationship with Hermès. But since Hermès’ own stores rarely appear to have bags to sell, the couple is probably better off without it. “The Privé Porter woman is coming to us because she knows blue glycine is a new color for 2020,” Berk said. “And her own store doesn't have it.” Privé Porter's 1,250-square-foot store keeps company with the likes of Kiton and Chanel. From Instagram to Main Street The Berks have some experience with this sort of thing. Eight years ago, a shopping trip to Europe yielded what Jeffrey Berk terms “a lot of stuff” (read: Hermès bags). They knew there was money to be made by flipping them. However, they were turned off by the hassle of building and running a website. So, instead, the Berks turned to Instagram, where they began listing their Kellys and Birkins. And women snapped them up. Between 2012 and 2020, the couple notched $130 million in online sales. Still, a home-based business has its limitations (“there's just so many hours a day that we could work,” Berk said). So, the only logical growth outlet was a staffed, brick-and-mortar store. At Brickell City Centre, Privé Porter’s neighbors include the likes of Chanel, Bally and Kiton. Even so, Instagram is still very much part of the picture—a critical one, in fact. Privé Porter depends on consumers who can access new Hermès bags and are willing to sell them, and Instagram furnished them with that network. “We have offers coming in to sell bags from 24 time zones. We have requests to buy bags in 24 time zones,” Berk said. “Everything to date has been off our Instagram, organically grown.” A sleek supply line You're probably wondering: Where do these bags come from? If Hermès regulates its supply so tightly, how does Privé Porter even get them? Understandably, Berk isn’t eager to reveal all of his sources. But the essence of it is this: The Birkin bags generally come from the lucky few women who have managed to buy one at Hermès, but don’t like the ones they wound up with. It’s important to know that, on those infrequent occasions when an Hermès store has a bag to sell, it’s frequently just that: one bag. It may not be the exact color or style the customer wanted. But the odds are that she’ll buy it anyway out of fear that a second chance will never come. “It’s a game that [Hermès shoppers] need to play,” Berk said. “You’re too afraid to say ‘no.’ Because there’s this invisible black check mark you’re gonna get that everybody knows about.” Which means that many Birkins get bought, taken home, and left in the closet. In a sense, then, Privé Porter functions as a kind of handbag exchange. Women can part with a Kelly or Birkin in an unloved color even as she nabs one that she actually likes. Birkin bags like these gold and rainbow ones command prices upwards of $50,000. The price of a passion What’s more, she’s willing to pay a premium for it. And unlike much of the resale business, Privé Porter marks its goods up, not down. For instance, a Kelly bag that leaves Hermès with a $13,000 price tag might sell at Privé for $18,000 or even $23,000. Last year, the average Privé customer spent $59,000 with the brand; Berk projects that his boutique could hit $18 million in revenue this year. If anything, the pandemic seems to have helped business. After all, even many of its wealthy clients have had to put off travel plans or the purchase of houses or cars these past several months. As a consolation, they're happy to indulge in a little purse buying. “We’re doing just as much as an Hermès store would be in Denver, or Houston,” Berk said. Indeed, the fact that Privé Porter is not Hermès is part of its draw. The stress of trying to buy a bag at an Hermès store, the fear of rejection, the perception (realistic or not) that Hermès will only sell Birkins to customers with a long prior purchase history (the so-called “pay to pay” system)—all of it, Berk said, has engendered the kind of fatigue and dread that he’s all too happy to capitalize on. “The Privé Porter customer,” he said, “is not going to grovel at Hermès anymore.” Privé Porter's bags are all pre-owned, but you'd never know by looking. Paris is not pleased It’s anyone’s guess what Hermès corporate thinks about Berk—or, indeed, any of the other resellers that trade in preowned handbags. Hermès did not respond to Adweek’s requests for comment. But if any ordinary mortal has a read previous expressions about how Hermès thinks, it’s a man named Michael Tonello. In the early 2000s, Tonello—a stylist and beautician by trade—stumbled into a homegrown business after he began buying Birkin bags around the world and flipping them for profit on eBay. Dubbed “a Robin Hood to thousands of desperate, rich women,” Tonello spent so much money on Birkins (at his peak, $2 million in a six-month period) that, inevitably, Hermès caught on. “They definitely did shut me down,” Tonello told Adweek. He's referring to a fax from headquarters (complete with his photo) that went out to Hermès stores the world over with instructions not to sell him any more handbags. Tonello later recounted his shopping adventures in a book titled Bringing Home the Birkin, which became a bestseller. But while it’s easy to assume that Hermès dislikes the resale trade, Tonello actually isn’t so sure. “Hermès loves to say that they hate resellers,” he said, but, “I think that’s completely PR.” The truth, he continued, is that used bags sold at a markup only boosts the value perception of the brand. Seen this way, Privé Porter is essentially doing Hermès’ own marketing for it. “If Hermès wanted to really put an end to these stores,” Tonello said, “they could do it literally in one day. All they would have to do is open a store called Hermès Heritage and encourage their customers to come in and resell their bags back to them. Hermès could go into the resale business [on its own].” As Adweek reported last year, luxury handbag brand Mark Cross (“the American Hermès”) has done just that by adding a “Vintage” page to its website. Introduced in 2019, Fauborg bags like these now command six figures. But Hermès hasn’t made that move. And, so long as it doesn’t, resellers like Privé Porter are happy to thrive in the legendary atelier’s shadow. Berk plans to keep selling Kelly and Birkin bags and, once the pandemic finally ends, he also plans to open more stores. The one thing he knows he won’t be doing is shopping at Hermès. The company, he says, has banned him. “My wife and I are literally unable to shop there,” Berk said. “They call it the ‘Do not fly list.’”