👋Hello there, I’m Angel, and welcome to this week's premium member-only edition of Ban Island’s Collection Guide. Each guide, I will offer my research and insight as I tackle members’ questions relating to our most coveted luxury handbags.
This is Part 1 of our Ban Island’sHermès Market Report where we gather and analyze ALL of the available Birkin resale listings and sold prices from around the world. We examine the sold %, and the rarity and availability of each of the sizes, colors and hardware options.
We've literally combed through 5000+ listings and spent over 2 months on this Hermes Birkin Collection Value Report. Whew! 😅
Send me your questions, and I’ll humbly offer actionable handbag buying and selling insight and advice.
This question was posted on my favorite FB group Hermes Addicted UK, and was the question that launched our obsessive investigation. Thank you Kate, it was a slippery slope. Now let's dive right in...
PremiumMember Exclusive: Hermès Birkin Collection Value Report
1. Let’s tackle sizes first, which Hermès Birkin size is most commonly available? 📏
The most common size available on the pre-loved market is:
Birkin 35, with over 40% of listings (That’s over 2000 of them!), closely followed by Birkin 30, with around 37.7%.
While Birkin 25 is very popular and in demand, there is a limited amount of them available (We only found 15.3% available which contributes to its higher collection value for sure!)
2. Gold, Palladium or Rose Gold? Which hardware? 🔐
Hardware is a bit of a style choice - personally I love gold hardware with warmer tones like gold and beige leather, while preferring Palladium with Gris Perle or Etain (cool tones) so this one might not come down to data and collection value, but style and personal preference.
Having said that, Palladium is more common on the pre-loved market with 58.4%, while gold is only 39.7%, and rose gold is even more rare at just under 2%.
And yes, anytime it’s rare and unavailable, the price does reflect, so you can bet that Rose Gold hardware fetches for more in the pre-loved world.
3. What about colors? Which Hermès color is most common?
While there are 100+ Hermes colors to choose from, Noir is in fact the most common colour found on the Birkin pre-loved market.
Interesting to see how many Bleu Electrique Birkins there are - this one stands out from all the colors. And of course, neutrals such as Gold, Etoupe, Etain and Craie are quite popular and common too.
4. Which Hermès color sells the most?
While there are a lot of Noir Birkin bags on the pre-loved market, don’t fret! There are also a lot of buyers; it sells fairly quickly with a high percentage selling too.
Colors do seem to sell slower, and thus more available on the pre-loved market.
Neutrals, understandably, have a high amount of inventory and buyers as they are considered classic and all-season.
5. Now let’s get to the best part, what are the actual Hermès Birkin collection value figures, by size and color?
There are many ways we can answer this question. The approach we took was to take away the lowest and highest price outliers, and average out all the actual listing prices for each size and each color (we also only take into account bags in excellent or new condition).
So basically we are NOT counting that ONE bag that lucked out and sold for a crazy high listing price, or a really beat-up bag that sold for a really low price.
These price listings were gathered from December 2020 or older. B25 collection values in 2021 have already risen to $19-21K USD. (Oh, and all currencies are in USD).
We were not able to include all 100 colors here, but feel free to send us a question if there’s a specific color, hardware and size you would like to see. Or if the demand is there, we just may paste the full table of all colors!
NOTE: For this and the next few tables, HSS and Exotic bags were excluded from these calculations.
6. So then, which Birkin bag size has the highest profit margin?
Just put it on your wish list if you haven’t already 😊
7. Which Hardware has the highest collection value? 🔐
As we saw from our previous analysis, rose gold hardware is much more rare, which makes sense as it fetches the highest collection value, followed by gold hardware in almost all sizes.
8. How common are Hermès Special Order/HSS bags on the pre-loved market?
No surprise here that only 4.1% of listings (~200) were Horseshoe Stamp/Special Order bags. Even more rare since they have various different color combinations.
About 100 SO bags are available and released per flagship store around April and October each year. Since the ultra lucky H lovers who get offered the special bag get to make it exactly they want it, there’s probably very little reason to resell it too. 😔
(Boo for us commoners. I guess we will have to keep waiting for that unicorn to surface on the pre-loved market!)
👋Hey, if you are planning your SO bag, play around with our visualizer (over 100+ colors and hardware options) here. It’s included with your premium membership - get the perfect bag absolutely right, the first time.
(If you missed last week’s post, exotic skins and SO/HSS bags were offered by 5% of the time and after about 5 to 6 years at a store.)
So, I’m both surprised and delighted to see that exotic skin Hermès bag are much more common in the preloved world. Around 14% of the preloved Birkin bags are in exotic skin.
Kate, I hope this answered your question. If you were looking at Birkin from an collection point of view, then a Birkin 25, Black with Rose gold would make the most sense profit margin wise.
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