Price Watch
Why the Birkin premium fell
Bernstein’s tracker shows the markup on Birkin and Kelly bags shrinking since 2022. The reported reasons have less to do with the bag than with how many are for sale.
The Worth the Bag team, 31 Oct 2026
For years the neatest trick in fashion was a bag that cost more the moment it left the shop. The trick still works. It just works less well than it did, and the people who know why mostly agree on one word: supply.
The numbers, and what they measure
The figure usually quoted comes from Bernstein’s Secondhand Pricing Tracker. The Fashion Law reported in August that average auction resale prices for Birkin and Kelly bags stood at about 2.2 times retail at their 2022 peak and roughly 1.4 times by November 2025.
Note the small print, which most retellings drop. That is two bags measured together, at auction. It is not “the Birkin”. We have not seen Bernstein’s notes ourselves, so every multiple here reaches you through the press, and we name the outlet each time.
Look closer and the picture splits by model:
| Measure, per Bernstein as reported | Earlier | Latest |
|---|---|---|
| Birkin and Kelly, average at auction | about 2.2x in 2022 | about 1.4x in November 2025 |
| Birkin 25 | about 2.6x at the 2022 peak | about 1.7x in the third quarter |
| Birkin Togo 30 | 1.9x in 2018, 1.7x in 2022 | about retail by late 2025 |
The first and last rows come from The Fashion Law, the middle one from Reuters in October. These measures are not interchangeable, and a 2.6 cannot be compared with a 2.2. But they all lean the same way, and they show that the question “what is the Birkin premium?” has no single answer. A size 30 in Togo has reportedly lost almost all of it, while a size 25 has not.
Individual sellers give a sharper picture. Antoinette Hunter of the reseller Lilac Blue told Reuters that an unworn black Birkin 25 has fallen by about £4,000 since 2022, to around £24,000. Hermès sells the same model in Britain for £9,390. So this “fallen” bag still asks about two and a half times its shop price. Keep that in view whenever someone tells you the market has collapsed.
The “fallen” bag still asks about two and a half times its shop price.
The reasons, as reported
More bags for sale. Reuters interviewed nine Birkin resellers. Six said resale prices had fallen over the past year as more bags became available, and five reported softer demand. UBS, which downgraded Hermès shares to “sell”, estimates that listings worldwide are six to seven times higher than before the pandemic. Fashionphile says its own Birkin listings have grown 32-fold in 15 years, though a platform that has grown will show that in part for reasons of its own.
UBS’s concern is the one that matters to the house: that a growing second-hand supply “could weaken the brand’s scarcity-driven business model”.
Fewer people at the door. Six resellers told Reuters that access to a Birkin is tied to spending on scarves, clothes and shoes, and two put the usual figure at $10,000 to $20,000 first. Two equities analysts and two industry consultants said demand for clothing, silk scarves and perfume is cooling, which may mean fewer customers reach the level at which a Birkin is offered. That point is about the shop, not the resale market, and it is the softest claim here.
Professionals stepping back. Cai Baochun, a London reseller, told Reuters he has stopped stockpiling Birkins. His reason needs no interpretation: “I don’t want to lose money.”
Who disagrees
Not everyone sees a slide. Sarah Davis, founder of Fashionphile, told Reuters that Birkin prices on her platform have stayed firm and even risen slightly this year. She credits renewed attention from the handbag collection of Erling Haaland, which is not a sentence anyone was expecting from a price report.
Hermès declined to comment for the Reuters story. Chief executive Axel Dumas said in July that output depends largely on the number of trained artisans and the supply of high-quality leather.
What this does and does not tell you
A multiple has two moving parts. It can fall because the resale price drops or because the shop price rises, so a smaller number does not always mean a cheaper bag. The reseller figures above suggest some real falls on top of that.
None of this tells you where the premium goes next. It may keep shrinking or it may recover, and we print no guess. It tells you nothing about whether the bag is worth wanting, which was never a question for a spreadsheet. A Birkin is not a financial product, however often it has been described as one.
For our own running figures, see the value index, where every number carries its sample size and data window. The Birkin’s page shows what that means for true cost (ad: that page carries affiliate links).
A premium is the price of skipping a queue. On the evidence reported this year, the queue has got shorter.
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