'Bringing Home the Birkin' Michael Tonello

'Bringing Home the Birkin' by Michael Tonello is a delightful story about his adventures traveling to the swankest places in the world in search of Hermes treasure. The story takes you from his life in Province Town to Barcelona where he finds his soul mate and then around the world to places like Paris, Luxemburg, and dozens of other luxurious places you’ve only dreamed of visiting. You’ll learn his ‘formula’ for buying Birkins in France versus Italy. You’ll laugh till you cry at the descriptions of the typical Hermes sales people. It isn’t all frolic and gallivanting though.

After cleaning out all the Hermes stores in Europe and Asia Michael finds that even traveling to the luxury capitals of the world to shop dine and visit the finest hotels can get old. His final trip to the beautiful Island of Capri (pronounced CAP ree) Italy is to recover after the loss of a very close loved one.

The story has adventure, humor, love and sorrow; all the ingredients for a great story.

All that Sparkles is Not Gold

“Fashion is made to become unfashionable.” - Coco Chanel

That’s the unspoken mantra of most ‘It’ brands today. Instead of timeless style, they give us new trends each season. Instead of exclusivity based on scarcity, we have exclusivity based on price. Instead of high quality handmade craftsmanship we have mass production from China with finishing touches in Italy or France to justify the Made in Italy or Made in France label. Luxury is available to the masses but luxury isn’t what it used to be.

At one time, our ‘It’ bag luxury brands were small family owned businesses catering exclusively to royalty and the very wealthy. Today most are brands owned by one of three conglomerates. Conglomerates focused on profits that have made their owners the richest men in France.

Bernard Arnault bought 43% of LVMH during the 1987 stock market crash. He wanted to add Dior perfume to his Dior clothing brand. Once at the helm, he led LVMH through an ambitious development plan acquiring luxury goods brands including, Louis Vuitton , Fendi , Celine , Donna Karan New York (DKNY) , Emilio Pucci , Givenchy , Loewe , Marc Jacobs LVMH is the largest luxury group and Bernard Arnault is the second richest man in France.

Bernard Arnault tried to buy Gucci but lost in a battle with PPR the second or fourth largest luxury conglomerate. Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, Sergio Rossi, Bottega Veneta, operate as brands within the Gucci Group owned by PPR.

The third largest luxury goods conglomerate is Swiss-based Richemont, which owns Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, Piaget, Baume et Mercier, IWC, Jaeger-LeCoultre, A. Lange & Söhne, Officine Panerai, Vacheron Constantin, Dunhill, Lancel, Montblanc, Montegrappa, Old England, Purdey, Chloé, and Shanghai Tang. Richemont focuses more on Watches, jewelry and writing implements.

Ten ‘It’ handbag brands owned by three very profitable conglomerates. Ten brands with the same tactics to maximize profits. Introduce a new trend each season, mass produce using the cheapest labor, market, market, market to create a need to achieve status. Tightly control distribution.

For fifteen years the results were phenomenal with double digit growth mostly from handbags and shoes. Luxury goods are usually insulated from economic downturns, but 2008 was a difficult year even for luxury goods. The economic slump is expected to continue through most of 2009. Consumers, still in a good position financially are careful with their purchases and are buying more traditionally designed bags that can be considered an ‘investment piece’. ‘In essence, frivolity is out of fashion – short-lived Champagne high - bad - long-lasting leather - good.’ Luxury brands that have stayed to the tenants of luxury have done well. Hermes, the only handbag brand that still makes their bags by hand, has done well in today’s difficult economic climate and announced better than expected profits in March 2009.

That may make them a target for acquisition. According to the Financial Times smaller weaker brands will be bought up the big conglomerates. LVHM is interested in Hermes and Prada. There may even be a merger of conglomerates as PPR and Richemont consider how to seize top position from LVMH.

As more and more ‘luxury’ brands are bought by conglomerates bent on profits one has to ask whether they really are luxury brands or well marketed mass produced fashion brands. The most sophisticated luxury consumers will seek out truly unique quality handbags from small designers. Like Fossati.

Startup Weekend Ann Arbor June 2008

‘Startup Weekend is a community building startup event.’ It’s like a mini Ycombinator, but 2.5 days instead of 3 months. And you get to go home at night. Local Ann Arbor businesses donated food and space. We were well fed and had 5000 sq feet to play around in.

Friday night, business ideas were pitched and then everyone gravitated into groups of their choice to work on an idea. 38 ideas were pitched that June evening from tracking and reclaiming stolen metals like copper to providing travel advice on an iphone as you visit a new destination. By Sunday 4 or 5 viable businesses launched. That’s amazing. Pitch an idea, form a team of talented motivated strangers and launch a business in 2.5 days.

It’s polite to bring something to a party. I brought homemade cookies and an idea to create a high end handbag business based on the threadless.com business model. I felt kind of like Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde. It was at Startup weekend in June of 2008 in Ann Arbor that Threadless for high end handbags was pitched to an audience. Not only did 6 people join my group but one guy stood up and said ‘I want to use the threadless model to make low end bags and if Cathy doesn’t want to then I’m going to.’ Hmmmm.

That made things interesting because I wasn’t sure whether people were joining me or him. As it turned out, most people had something in between a $30,000 and $10 handbag in mind. Something maybe around the $700 mark. Fortunately for me, this guy turned out to be a little Hitler, and the group shrank from 8 to 4. We became a much more productive team.

By July, a lot of those businesses had fizzled out. You have to wonder how viable a business is when it can be built in a 2.5 day weekend by a bunch of strangers thrown into a room together under time constrained pressure. It was a really great exercise in social and group dynamics. You got to see how people act under pressure really quickly. My team drifted away by late July too.

Startup weekend is where Fossati handbags began to take shape.