'The Birkin Houdini' Worked His Hermès Magic and Conjured These Elegant Espadrilles

Last summer, a stylish young lad from London walked into the Respoke store in Provincetown, Mass., in search of a pair of espadrilles. There was a tea dance that afternoon, the man explained, and he wanted something unique to wear. As a seaside mecca for well-heeled—and well-shod—members of the LGBT+ community, the Cape Cod summer commune has no shortage of places to buy spiffy shoes. But Respoke’s wares are unique in the literal sense of that term. The brand sews its espadrilles from designer silk scarves by the likes of Gucci, Pucci, YSL and Hermès (especially Hermès.) Most of the patterns, long discontinued, were limited editions to start with. And since artisans in Spain make all the espadrilles by hand, no two pairs are the same. Respoke founder and owner Michael Tonello knows a few things about selling luxury accessories to the affluent. Soon enough, the young man from London left the store with a pair of espadrilles. Tonello recalls what happened next. “The following day, three guys came in and said, ‘Oh, we saw some guy from London. We were chatting him up and he said he bought these shoes here.’” Within a few minutes, those three men left with Respoke espadrilles, too. The next day, the store’s phone rang. The caller was still another person who’d seen the young Englishman’s espadrilles. “It was his mother,” Tonello said. “She was calling from London. [Her son] had sent her a picture of himself wearing [the espadrilles] at the tea dance, and she wanted to order a pair.” From one 36-inch square silk scarf, Respoke can make up to three pairs of espadrilles. Luxury waits out the pandemic There’s an important lesson to this story—aside from the obvious ones that wealthy people like to buy nice stuff and word-of-mouth marketing still works. Consider this: Tonello’s customers were shopping at this same time last year—the height of the pandemic. First, there's the fact that consumers were willing to drop $495 on a discretionary item. The kicker is that consumers readily spent that sum on what is (no disrespect) a fancy pair of slippers. It all says a great deal about the luxury apparel market just now. Margaret Molloy, global CMO of branding firm Siegel+Gale, observes that affluent shoppers are as active as ever, but there’s been a shift in how many of them define luxury. “[Tonello’s] timing is exquisite,” she said. “Because we’re looking for ease—but elevated ease. This product to me is literally that. There's an elegance, there's a style, but there's an ease.” Wealthy consumers have been holed up at home for the past 18 months like everyone else, she explains, camped out on the sofa and living in sweatpants. As white-collar professionals make a tentative return to their commutes, many industry watchers predict that the old office dress code is gone for good. (As fashion historian Sonya Abrego told USA Today in April, “it’s going to be hard to go to older standards of formality now that people are so used to doing their jobs in more comfortable clothes.”) Where this trend benefits a brand like Respoke, Molloy said, is that affluent consumers will still want to wear luxury apparel—just not the confining and uncomfortable ensembles of 2019. “This market is the consumer who uses summer as a verb—it’s the folks who are reading Town & Country magazine,” Molloy continued. “[Respoke] provides ease, but with that desired style and elegance that the target market is looking for.” A bright spot in the apparel segment The confluence of a unique product and a unique period in history might explain why, at a time when so many apparel brands are struggling, Respoke is growing—both in terms retail infrastructure and sales. In addition to its Provincetown shop and a shelf presence at select Bloomingdale’s, Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus locations, Respoke opened a store on the island of Nantucket on May 21 and is preparing a third location to open later this year in Palm Beach. And through the independent boutiques and events he partners with, Tonello is selling espadrilles about as quickly as he can make them. (Respoke is privately held and does not release sales data.) Recently, a Houston boutique sold 49 pairs in two days. Tonello says he’s now moving several thousand pairs a year, a considerable number for a product that’s made by hand in Spain. “Business,” he said, “is booming.” Since Tonello's is using vintage and discontinued scarf designs, no two pairs of his espadrilles are the same. Plain Jane shoes from the 14th century Michael Tonello never expected to be saying that sort of thing. In fact, the enterprise that became Respoke began with little more than a trip to the beach. In 1999, an assignment in Barcelona convinced Tonello, a successful makeup artist from Massachusetts, to relocate there. When the job he’d lined up fell through, Tonello found himself reselling some of his own luxury accessories on eBay for cash to pay his rent. (It was a strategy that would eventually make him famous—even infamous—in the world of handbags, but more on that later.) Tonello learned the ways of the locals by spending his summers in espadrilles. First worn by Basque peasants, the simple canvas slip-on has been a Spanish staple since the 14th century. They’re inexpensive, versatile and comfortable. They were also, at least in Tonello’s view, boring. “Espadrilles have never changed,” he said. “They’re always the same solid color cotton canvas. If you’re lucky, they might do an awning stripe, but they never change.” Ana begged to differ The American expat put up with his plain-Jane espadrilles for years until finally, just to have something different to wear to the beach, he decided to find a company that could make him a custom pair. Most of the factories either ignored his inquiries or hit him with a required minimum order of a thousand pairs. But a woman named Ana, who ran a small workshop in the mountain village of La Rioja, said she’d be willing to make a one-off for him. Initially, Tonello picked out an old bandana to have her make the espadrilles from. But, he recalled, “as I was thinking about that, it dawned on me: If she can make espadrilles from a cotton cowboy bandanna, she can make me a pair of espadrilles from a vintage Hermès scarf.” Initially, Ana begged to differ. Espadrilles are sewn with heavy cotton canvas because toenails easily slice through more delicate fabrics like the silk. But over the course of several months, the talented shoemaker figured out a way to bond the silk to the cotton twill and eventually shipped Tonello his pair of espadrilles. Delighted, Tonello posted a few photos of himself on Facebook wearing his new find. The result was completely unexpected. “Literally overnight,” he said, “I must have had like 100 people who were like ‘I want a pair! Where can I get them?’” So Tonello partnered with Ana and, in 2018, went into (or, rather, created) the designer-scarf-espadrille business. Foraging for Hermès In a sense, he was on familiar territory. A decade or so earlier, Tonello’s experiences reselling luxury accessories on eBay had led him on a global odyssey of purchasing Birkin bags—the pricey purses whose limited availability has made Hermès notorious—and reselling them to rich ladies around the world. (For a time, he was known as “The Birkin Houdini.”) Eventually wizened to his game, Hermès put Tonello on a do-not-sell list, but not before he could turn his experiences into a bestselling book, Bringing Home the Birkin. But this time out, there’s no cloak-and-dagger measures needed, principally because (unlike Birkin bags) there are plenty of scarves to go around. “Hermès has been making scarves since the late 1930s, as have a lot of other companies like Gucci, Chanel and Emilio Pucci,” Tonello said. “So there are a lot of scarves out there in the world. And a lot of them are sitting in closets and in dresser drawers.” Tonello sources his vintage scarves from resellers and online auctions. He also goes to Paris and Florence yearly to buy new ones. The designer brand logos are carefully snipped off and are nowhere visible on the espadrilles he sells, and Tonello says he has “good relationship” with the designer houses. After all, in a sense, he’s doing their marketing for them. “We are very diligent about the fact that what we are making and selling is a bespoke product,” he said. “We go to great lengths to market our own brand name, create our own social media, our own branding, We don't want people to say ‘oh, I'm wearing Gucci espadrilles.’” Tonello doesn't worry about his silk supply running out. "There are a lot of scarves out there in the world," he said. The feel-good factor of upcycling And this construct, Molloy said, is an intrinsic part of Respoke’s appeal. In a mass-produced world where even high-end items can suffer from a certain sameness, the promise of having something that’s one-of-a-kind and yours alone is a compelling proposition. So is the feel-good factor of upcycling a product that would otherwise be neglected or thrown away. But the biggest selling points are nostalgia and authenticity. “Hermès, as the underlying asset he’s using to build the brand, has a tremendous story,” Molloy said. “It ties beautifully with his story because luxury, at the most refined level, is to know the maker. Hermès really tells the story of the artisans. And then if you take that story and you superimpose it on his story, there's a level of continuity there. [With] his presence and his personality, he becomes effectively a conduit for a representation of the makers.” Brooks Brothers and Fila Aim to Win Over Fans With Collaboration