To: [email protected]
Hi there—This scarf (with the pink and green Peonies) has very special meaning to me, it was truly one of my favorites. A couple of years ago, I left mine in a NYC taxi and it was never recovered. Would you consider adding a Buy-It-Now to your listing? I would be greatly appreciative if you could help me to get this design back in my collection, especially considering the near-impossibility of finding the older Hermès designs in the States. Cordially, Grace
From: “michael”
To: “GraceoftheGarden”
grace, thanks for your email and interest in my auction. i’m not too enthusiastic about adding a Buy-It-Now, however, would you like to make me an offer? michael
At $225 a pop, I couldn’t help wondering how many scarves this woman had in her collection. These scarf people really were serious. Whatever. I was content to help assuage their burning desire to spend suitcases full of money so long as some of it landed in my wallet.
I checked on my auctions. There were no bids yet. However, there were a dozen or more “watchers.” A “watcher” is basically someone who is worshipping your listing from afar, but afraid that expressing their interest through a bid will cause others to notice how pretty it is too. Bad news (sort of ) for me, but good news for Grace. Since there were no bids on the Peonies scarf, I could legitimately end the listing. I had a hunch her offer would be fair, maybe more than fair.
My instincts were good.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Thank you for your kind reply. If the scarf is truly pristine and new I would be comfortable with an offer of $350. Grace
From: “michael”
To: “GraceoftheGarden”
grace, it’s a deal. i like knowing that it’s going to a good home.
michael
p.s. I will need your details for shipping, are you okay with sending a check?
I was still adjusting to the weird brand of intimacy that eBay necessitated. I had not yet met face-to-face anyone whom I had sold to, and I didn’t know if I ever would. (Obviously, geography played a part in this—many of my buyers lived half a world away.) But even though I couldn’t pick them out of a lineup, the whole process of buy-and-sell often offered me little tidbits of information in passing. For example, I knew which women had to hide their Hermès habit from their husbands (they usually paid by money order) and which ones had no such concerns (they paid by check or credit card). I had a feeling this woman was sure to be the latter.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Michael, lovely! I will post a check to you today and all of my information will be on the check. You are most kind indeed. Grace
p.s. Are you receptive to some constructive criticism?
Bingo. This woman hid nothing, it seemed…(including her opinions, apparently). I was actually superinterested to hear what she had to say, since I had no clue how I was doing this whole eBay thing so successfully. It was a no-brainer, making money like this—why was I the only person (practically) doing it on such a large scale? Maybe my girl Grace had some insider info.
From: “michael”
To: “GraceoftheGarden”
constructive criticism??? sure…why not. michael
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
I’ve reviewed a number of your auctions, both current and previous, and you’ve sold some exceptional pieces…however, your descriptions are quite bare bones and not terribly informational. You should also include more photos than you have been. This is especially important if you are going to be showcasing more scarves to serious buyers. Do you indeed have more scarves? Grace
Okay, judging by her eloquence and formality, Grace probably wasn’t exactly a “girl.” More of a barrister, maybe, or CEO of a Fortune 500. Either way, she was definitely more scarf-savvy than I. I briefly worried about eBay espionage (maybe she worked for Hermès?) but decided I was probably being a wee bit paranoid. It wasn’t like I was the keeper of the goddamn Hermès Holy Grail or something. And, really, she had the sweetest e-mail address in the world. As if that actually ensured she wasn’t a spy, but—GraceoftheGarden? It didn’t exactly have the ring of dishonesty. (I pictured a kindly woman in a field of lilies, Hermès scarf over her gray hair, “My Favorite Things” gently playing in the background.) At any rate, she was so incredibly polite I couldn’t help but like her. Indeed.
From: “michael”
To: “GraceoftheGarden”
grace, I must be honest and tell you that I know nothing about Hermès scarves, except that they are silk and cost about $225.
I’M GREEN. Michael
I bet the only thing green about Grace was her garden.
She definitely had an expert’s approach to this whole eBay scarf scenario. I went to the kitchen to brew up another pot of tea. It was thinking time—Sherlock had his opium pipe; I have my Earl Grey. I reread the e-mail while sipping, and the most salient point Grace was oh-so-gently trying to make leaped out at me: don’t come off as a scarf schmuck. This was serious business here, and I needed to upgrade. These people obviously were deeply committed to this brand, and if I was going to find “serious buyers,” as she called them, I needed to be a serious seller.
From: “michael”
To: “GraceoftheGarden”
grace, wow! i had no clue…i thought they were just 3 foot squares of silk (albeit pricey ones). in all honesty i would LOVE any and all information/help.
your new student, michael
From: “GraceoftheGarden”
To: [email protected]
Michael, after helping me reunite with my beloved Peonies I feel I will be forever in your debt. No, seriously, I would be more than happy to help you. Grace
p.s. an Hermès scarf is NOT three feet square, it is 35.4 inches square. (or more accurately, 90 centimeters, it’s French, after all.)
For once Mom was wrong. Apparently, when you stepped in Spanish shit everything came up peonies, not roses. Through no fault of my own, I had miraculously stumbled upon what was proving to be an incredibly lucrative commodity. I had always known about coin collectors and philatelists, but silk-scarf aficionados? Never would have guessed it. Bizarrely enough, I might even be in the exact right place at the exact right time for supplying the demand—apparently, some of these scarves were easier to find in Europe. And, to top it off, I had formed a burgeoning e-mail friendship with an amazing potential mentor. Did this aptly named Grace have some sort of PhD in Hermès? She was so well versed in this stuff that I thanked my lucky stars we had crossed paths. If my orange-tinted visions of the future weren’t too far off, I wouldn’t be getting back out of my pajamas anytime soon.
8
Le Monde d’Wish Lists
A month later, I didn’t have my Hermès doctorate yet but I was well on my way to earning my bachelor’s. I did get out of my pajamas (sometimes), but mostly just to go to correos (the post office). Of course, I was still enjoying the nightlife. However, I had realized that no time clock at my workplace also meant no water cooler. Somehow, it wasn’t the same to go out and get drunk if you had no one to commiserate with over your hangover. And frankly, I wasn’t all that great at sleeping in—I was like a little kid with these auctions.
I marveled at how different my life here truly was. Not that I had been mired in a nine-to-five at any point, but still, this was over the top, freedomwise, even for me. I could work a lot or a little; I could work at noon or midnight. Some days I made no money, other days my bank account swelled by thousands. And I realized that as soon as I got a laptop, I coul
d even choose where I worked. I envisioned sitting on the beach later that summer, margarita at my side, watching my auctions over the tops of my Trussardi sunglasses. As much fun as Labor Day in Ptown had been, this time I’d actually be getting paid to bask in the sun. Maybe I would even buy an Hermès towel.
Subsequent trips to the Hermès shop in Barcelona had yielded nearly two dozen scarves, which netted me a sizable profit. On my last visit, the salesman handed me a copy of Le Monde d’Hermès (The World of Hermès). Nestled amid glossy photographs and consumer-oriented vignettes, this luxe catalog contained a directory of all the Hermès stores worldwide. A few weeks later, my Le Monde was already as dog-eared as my teenage copy of Catcher in the Rye. I worked the phones. I was determined to find as many of the items from my clients’ wish lists as possible. On a couple of occasions, my trips to the Hermès shop in Madrid proved fruitful. Then I discovered Andorra.
Andorra is a tax-free principality, tucked in the Pyrenees Mountains, between France and Spain. It’s a tiny country—California’s Yosemite National Park is nearly seven times larger. More important, an Hermès scarf costs $30 less in Andorra than in Barcelona, and that savings alone made it worth the two-hour drive. It was also here that I learned the valuable difference between a franchise Hermès store and a “regular” Hermès store. Because the franchise stores like Andorra’s didn’t ship their scarves back to Paris at the end of a season, their backroom was a veritable wish-list bonanza. Being able to find the older, out-of-production designs coveted by serious collectors was the name of my eBay game these days. I lived for the bidding wars a highly-sought-after scarf could incite. All in all, I probably bought close to a thousand scarves there.
All of my earlier sarcasm about Hermès U aside, it turned out this whole scarf thing really was almost indescribably complicated. I had learned in my tutorials from Grace that Hermès issues two new scarf collections a year, often by several different designers. In addition, there are reissues of older scarves, recolorations of preexisting designs, and, naturally, any number of “special edition” scarves. (Examples of those included the Mozart scarf, only available at the Salzburg store, and designs the company had issued to commemorate the Olympics—1980 Lake Placid, for example.) A true collector also knows to look for certain telltale hallmarks of authenticity and condition—such as copyright symbols (only on scarves issued after 1976) or care labels (which needed to be intact if, like me, you wanted to command top dollar). Although, I have to admit, as complex as the whole market was overall, for me it was pretty simple. If my clients put it on a wish list, and I found it, I bought it. Then I sold it. End of story. And in Andorra, I found a lot.
Business was booming! The months quickly vanished and, with them, the scarves. With fifty or sixty eBay auctions running round-the-clock, it was not unusual for me to sell twenty or thirty scarves on any given Sunday. With Grace’s help, I had “graduated” (magna cum laude) and had magically become the reigning online Hermès scarf mogul. Before too long, Grace was tipping me off to scarf designs that were hot among the collectors. I now knew firsthand how brilliant this woman was, and she hadn’t steered me wrong yet. If she so much as murmured the name of a scarf, it got quickly added to my pile of rapidly growing wish lists. One such scarf was the “Kachinas”—designed for Hermès by a postal worker/artist from Texas, with the unlikely name of Kermit Oliver. This scarf featured American Indian dolls and had quickly sold out in the United States. Europeans, logically enough, had little interest in Kachinas; hence, this scarf was readily available anywhere in Europe. (Good luck finding one now!) To me, Kachinas sounded an awful lot like $ka-ching$. I made a profit of anywhere between $100 and $200 on every one I sold.
Besides the scarves, there was one other fun little way Hermès helped me make a buck or two. One day, when I bought a scarf, after the saleswoman finished wrapping it up in the ceremoniously ornate way that they do, she pulled out this little bitty book. (Need I even mention it was orange?) Full of photographs and simple line drawings, this book gave you every conceivable option on how to tie a scarf, and then some. As odd as the concept initially struck me, on further consideration, I realized it was pure genius. You see, if you had two hundred of these things, it was inevitable that you would eventually run out of ideas. And it was free for the asking, although customarily given with a scarf purchase. Once I knew about them, I made sure to ask for one whenever I checked out. I started auctioning these as a sideline. People would pay around $30 for them, and I didn’t have to be a CEO to calculate that particular profit margin. I figured it was my version of a business perk.
My guest room had transformed into Scarf Central. Piled around the armoires were hundreds of bright orange boxes, each of them housing a wish-list treasure. With no exaggeration, at that point, serious scarf collectors visiting Barcelona would have done better to swing by my apartment than the local Hermès store. (Especially since I had already cleaned those guys out.) I felt bad for anyone actually staying in my guest room, since it was now my shipping and receiving department. I definitely would have to do a major cleanup before my parents visited; Mom had implied they might make the trip over sometime soon. Next to the boxes were precarious stacks of the how-to-tie-a-scarf book, cartons and cartons of padded envelopes, and roll upon roll of packing tape. The only bedside reading material was Le Monde d’Hermès. Not exactly fodder for a spread in Architectural Digest. On the whole, though, I was exceedingly pleased with my new lifestyle. Fingers crossed, pretty soon I would be able to spring for a couple of pairs of those snazzy Hermès boxer shorts. But I still had to pull in the reins on buying those stuffed horses—maybe next year.
9
The Pyrenees Passing
I was drowning in silk by the time I realized I was in uncharted waters. I had figured out one of the reasons I was so wildly successful was that Hermès didn’t have a Web site yet. I figured this out around the same time that I became the world’s first accidental workaholic. I bought the goods, sold the goods, packed the goods, shipped the goods…my lark was becoming an aviary. I guess the soul mate search was going to wait, unless I was destined to end up with a scarf fanatic. At any rate, the time had clearly come to diversify my wares. Enamel bracelets, playing cards, Ulysses (leather notebooks), desk accessories—if it had the “Hermès Paris” logo, it sold. I could see why the CEO’s dictum was rumored to be “Hermès should never make anything ugly, because someone might buy it.” My dictum was “Get it while the getting is good.” And at Hermès Andorra, the getting was always good. I never had even the hint of a problem, until one particular afternoon.
My trips to that store were like clockwork—three or four times a month, I made the two-hour trek over the mountains in my Hertz rent-a-car (due to my upgrades, almost always a Mercedes, thank you kindly). I was now largely financially dependent on my Hermès eBay earnings—I was essentially a small business owner, and these trips were my version of warehouse deliveries. So it was more than a small hitch when the credit card machines were down that one day. I was bleakly contemplating the $10,000 worth of merchandise I’d have to leave behind when the owner, Carmen, suggested I just pay her on my next visit. (Carmen had employees who were less reliable than me.)
Initially overwhelmed by relief, I was halfway through my journey home before it really hit me. I grabbed my cell phone.
“Mom, you’re not gonna believe what just happened.” (Although probably, at this point, nothing about this Hermès saga would have surprised her.) I spilled the entire story, ending with my grand exit in a Mercedes crammed full with over ten Gs of unpaid-for merchandise. While I had her on the phone, I gave her more good news. This month I had become a Platinum PowerSeller on eBay, which meant that I was regularly surpassing the $25,000 mark in monthly sales. Like the supportive mother she was, she oohed and aahed in all the right places, and couldn’t wait to get off the phone to tell my dad.
I never even contemplated ditching my Andorra tab. That would be like shooting the goose that laid the o
range egg. Besides that, I would never get a decent night’s sleep again, regardless of my high-thread-count sheets. Ever since my mother had made me return a stolen half-eaten Heath bar to a supermarket cashier (at the ever-so-impressionable age of four), the idea of stealing anything was psychologically insurmountable. Well, as complexes go, that one has served me well. It went right along with the idea of selling anything inauthentic—that would be the same as theft to me. No knocking over and no knockoffs, and that’s final. On a more practical note, inured as I usually was to the lure of Hermès products, every once in a while that Andorra store would yield up something I wanted for myself. (This was partially owed to their franchise status. Remember, they never sent anything back.) They should have had a docent, considering the Hermès museum their back room was. I was back there, idly touring the exhibits one day, when I found a set of teacups I loved. They were cobalt blue and gold, made of an eggshell porcelain so fine that light passed through it. The design included flourishes of ribbon, in representation of the prize bouquet given the winning horse of the Prix de Diane. Win, place, or show, I knew my Earl Grey would taste better from one of those cups. I had to have them. I piled them on top of the rest of my loot, and Carmen started wrapping everything up for me. She picked up a cup and casually commented that Hermès no longer produced the china pattern Cocarde de Soie (Ribbons of Silk). I now knew enough about Hermès that I perked up my ears at even the mere insinuation of rarity. I ended up leaving that day with enough Cocarde de Soie to host a holiday banquet for Harvard’s Equestrian Club. Tempting as that would be, I just couldn’t say no when some guy in New Jersey offered me twice what I paid for the entire lot. (I kept the teacups, though.)
Bringing Home the Birkin Page 4
