Not For You, For Everyone

The usual mechanism of a luxury bag is exclusion. Price keeps people out. A waiting list keeps people out. The difficulty of obtaining one is not an unfortunate side effect of demand; it is the product. You are buying evidence that you were allowed in.

Telfar Clemens built a brand on inverting that, and the inversion is more radical than it first appears.

The Telfar shopping bag is vegan leather with an embossed logo, in three sizes, at prices ordinary people can reach. It became so wanted that the public gave it a nickname: the Bushwick Birkin.

Sit with that nickname for a second, because you cannot buy a comparison like that. Somebody decided, without being asked, to measure a vegan leather shopping bag against the most exclusive object in the industry. That happens when a product means something specific to a group of people, and no campaign has ever produced it deliberately.

Then demand outran supply, which is the moment every brand in this subject reaches and where they diverge completely.

The standard response is to stay small. Let the scarcity build. Let resellers capture the difference between what you charge and what people will pay, and enjoy the resulting evidence of desirability. That is what Supreme did and it worked spectacularly.

Telfar did the opposite. The Bag Security Program opened a window in which anyone could pre-order any bag, in any colour and size, at the actual retail price, to be made for them.

Read what that does. It converts money that would have gone to resellers back into the brand. It rewards the customer rather than the fastest bot. And it honours the slogan, which is the part that matters.

It's not for you, it's for everyone.

A slogan is only strategy when it costs something, and this one costs a great deal. A brand with that level of unmet demand could charge more and produce less and make more money doing it. Choosing not to means accepting a lower price on more units, a harder operation, and giving up the margin that scarcity would have generated.

That sacrifice is exactly why people believe it. Customers have become extremely good at detecting values that are free to hold, and equally good at recognising the ones attached to a visible cost.

What makes this book worth reading as a pair, though, is that both answers are correct.

Supreme met overwhelming demand by staying small and letting the secondary market advertise it. Telfar met the same problem by opening the doors and taking the revenue itself. Both are internally coherent. Both built something significant. They point in opposite directions.

There is no rule that says being wanted has one right response. What there is, is a requirement to choose one and mean it, because the brands that get hurt are the ones that gesture at accessibility while quietly engineering scarcity, and are found out.