The Birkin Was Never the Product

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]A man in China spent $20,000 at Hermes on dog beds, underwear, and saddles, but he never actually wanted any of it. His sales associate had told him over WeChat that this spending would qualify him for a Birkin. This is how it works in China.

[00:00:18]They call it paywa. You have to buy non-bag merchandise at a ratio before you're even allowed to purchase the bag.

[00:00:26]In most boutiques, it's a 1:1 ratio. In Shanghai, Beijing, and Hongja, it climbs to one to 1.5 or even one to two. Spend $10,000 on scars and ceramics, you might be allowed to spend tens of thousands of dollars on the bag. The might is the entire product. The retail price of the Birkin is irrelevant. The actual price is everything you bought to get to the register, to get the chance to buy it. A Birkin retails for up to $38,000. Widely cited estimates put its factory cost around $1,400.

[00:01:05]But this doesn't really matter because past a certain point, Airmes isn't selling you craftsmanship. They're selling admission to a club where everyone agrees what the bag means. The chance to buy a Birkin never came for the man who spent $20,000. In July 2021, he stood outside the airmemes store in Beijing's SKP mall with a handlettered sign in a stack of empty shopping bags to protest what he saw as a form of fraud. But what he misunderstood was that his sales associate was offering the chance to have a chance to buy the Birkin, not the chance to buy a Birkin.