Padel may be all the rage and Squid Games season 2 may have had a record-breaking debut, but there is no sport that has captured the minds of luxury connoisseurs quite like the game of snagging an Hermès Birkin. There’s even a Reddit thread dedicated to ‘The Hermès Game’ (because does anything truly arrive until it’s on Reddit?). The French maison, founded in 1837 has long held the mantle for making some of the world’s most covetable bags. But the holy trinity of their ‘quota bags’, namely the Birkin, the Kelly, and the Constance, which retail for lakhs of rupees, cannot just be bought by casually sauntering into your nearest store with a generous credit card limit. These bags, as it turns out, must be ‘offered’ to you. And yes, apparently there is a waiting list to even get on the waiting list.
Manifesting this eventuality has consumed countless suitors. The game plans, time, and resources they are willing to deploy in the pursuit of these handbags (or is it happiness?) are stuff of retail legend—everything from scouring resellers and auctions, hiring personal shoppers, or dropping lakhs on ‘pre-spends’ (‘Birkin bait’, as the seasoned pros think of it) to build their customer profiles, and on the rare occasion, even suing the brand on failing to secure said goods.
If all this Hermès speak is Latin to you, there are even tutorials on social media full of purported cheat codes to help you win the ultimate prize. While parody Instagram accounts (@husbandsathermes, we are looking at you) aren’t exactly new, and unboxing videos are a dime a dozen, this is a very particular category of Hermès-specific content. Cue: instructional, educational, and insider intel by avid collectors of the brand that’s targeted towards those still on this handbag quest. To find out how they do it, Praachi Raniwala chats with instructors, collectors, and experts who are outplaying Hermès at its own game.
