If I Gave You $100 to Invest in the Luxury Handbag Stock Market...
... and say “choooooooose youuuuuuurrrrr fighter!!!!!!!!!”
Slip into your stiffest navy suit and rehearse your ‘markets are crazy right now’ small talk — we’re headed to Wall Street babe.🧃📉
I often dream, “What if there were a handbag stock market” — and 6 months ago you put $100 into one of the most iconic bags? 📈 I pulled recent sales data from The RealReal, Fashionphile, and ReBag to build a quick 3-bag “portfolio” and track their resale performance like stocks.
So who are you picking?
- NASDAQ:HB The Hermés Birkin in size 35 because big bags are BACK (allegedly)
- NASDAQ:CCDF The Chanel Classic Double Flap in size medium, and lambskin because swoooooon
- NASDAQ:LVS The Louis Vuitton Speedy in size 30, canvas (monogramed duh)
(Or should the tickers lowkey be “EPA:” because they’re French........ whatever)
you whisper “but how did you build the handbag stock market?”
and I’m literally JUMPING out of my hunchback-inducing office chair to tell you. I started with my ~~proprietary (ooooohhhh)~~ data lake of +1M pricing data points for different luxury handbags and zeroed in on ones that had a lot of movement/transactions on the resale market.
- Each bag = a stock. Precise definition — same brand, model, size, material, and condition (grouped “Good” + “Very Good” for consistency and sample size). No mixing sizes or leathers.
- Prices = actual sold prices. I pulled sales data (not listed prices) from The RealReal, Fashionphile, and Rebag, and filtered out outliers.
- We used smart averaging. Some bags sell more often than others. To make the chart fair, I weighted each week equally (not just by how many sold), and gave more weight to recent sales using a time-decay formula — so last week’s prices matter more than prices from 4 months ago. (Is this too in the weeds? LOL)
- Timeframe = 6 months. I tracked 6 months of resale movement (May–Oct 2025). All bags start at “0%” — like $100 in a stock — and the chart shows how their average resale value rose or fell from there.
🥁 drumroll please!!!!!! 🥁
I nearly fell out of my chair. THE SPEEDY?!?!?! THE WINNER??!?!?!?!
- Miss Speedy-licious +9.9%
- lé Birkin +5.2%
- Coco’s Double Flap +2.5%
I’m not going to lie. This led to a few good hours of deep, deep rabbit hole debugging, rerunning and rerunning the numbers, writing test cases, losing myself to existentialism, the whole 9 yards. Because literally H O W could this be?
Embarrassed to say, I had one of those DUH moments. I pulled myself out of the code, leaned back in my chair (and actually sat up straight for once yikes) and realized % change DOESN’T TELL THE FULL STORY.
It’s dollars!!! It’s money!!! Think about it. Each of these handbags were starting from a different baseline resale price in March. We all know a Birkin costs >10x a Speedy!!! That was the aha moment. Cut to the numbers.
| Bag “Stock” | % Return | $ Change | March Baseline Avg Sold Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| LV Speedy 30 | +9.9% | +$111 | $1,120 |
| Hermès Birkin 35 | +5.2% | +$626 | $12,141 |
| Chanel Classic Flap Medium | +2.5% | +$145 | $5,809 |
And that’s when it clicked: while the Speedy had the highest percentage gain, the Birkin created the most actual dollar value. % change tells one story, but absolute value tells another.
Naturally, I got curious: why did the Speedy spike so hard ~May? A cursory hit to the Goog and I found a few articles/pieces of content (example, example, example) predicting, dissecting, pontificating on the resurgence of the Speedy. Not the most rigorous analysis, I admit. But I got tired by the end of the night so that was satisfying enough for now lol.
well this was capital F: Fun !!!
At least for me :upside_down_face: ... Look, I love mixing data and luxury, but this is NOT investment advice. Like srsly. Just a quick and dirty experiment with some numbers. Until next time xx
Posted Oct 30, 2025, 1:13 PM UTC