Buying A Designer Bag

I decided to do a series of posts on the various aspects of choosing, buying and using a designer bag. I did a lot of research on this when deciding on buying my investment bag and decided I might as well use all the information I have. Its best I start with the basics – understanding what is a designer bag or at least what I mean and understand by the term ‘designer bag’.

Designer bags mean different things to different people. By designer bags I mean the ones by the old-school fashion houses – Chanel, Prada, Louis Vuitton, Fendi, Celine, Chloe, YSL and so on with luxury gifts for women. I do not include high-value high street brands like Micheal Kors, Ted Baker, Coach, Mulberry and so on. We will talk about this in the later posts but your idea of a designer bag should correspond to your lifestyle and how you plan to use it. I differentiate between these different categories of brands – the high end ones like Chanel against the high-end high street ones like Michael Kors on the following basis.

• Price point

  This is basic. For instance, the price point of a Chanel is very different from that of a Ted Baker bag.

• Branding

  Chanel or Prada are usually referred to as fashion houses, not brands. They have been around for almost a hundred years as compared to the Michael Kors or Ted Baker that have been around only for the last 3-4 decades. A second differentiating factor is that most of the fashion houses are French or Italian with very few exceptions like Burberry and some others.

• Manufacturing

  First, these fashion houses usually make the own bags. The manufacturing is done within Chanel for instance instead of being outsourced to a factory somewhere else. This gives a higher degree of control on quality. The manufacturing is usually done in their workshops in France or Italy. Most high-value high street brands usually make their bags in mass manufacturing countries like China. I have to state there are exceptions here. For instance, Mulberry makes their bags within the UK. On the other hand, there appears to be a bit of an issue with some recent Prada bags being outsourced to China and this difference seems to be blurring.

  Louis Vuitton bag at the Series 3 Exhibit

• Access

  Its pretty easy to buy a Ted Baker bag online or just drop into the nearest John Lewis and pick one up. For most high end designer brands its a little more difficult than that. Most of these brands are not sold online, for instance, you won’t be able to order a Chanel bag online from the Chanel website. You will need to go into a Selfridges or a Chanel store. Also, the bag you want may not be available. This goes back to the manufacturing point – the materials required for the Chanel and Hermes bags may not be easily available. Also these are handmade bags which of course need more time than those made on the assembly lines on machines. In most cases there is a demand and supply mismatch for these bags. Of course, in some cases such mismatch is purposely constructed.

• Quality

  Needless to say the quality and lasting value of both these kind of bags are vastly different.

• Resale Value

  Needless to say you are not going to recoup the price of a Coach bag but you probably will for a Hermes or Chanel.

These are some of the fancy designer bags I love…

Hope you also saw my posts on high street copy cats for designer bags? These are great options if you are just not interested in blowing that much money on a bag!

I hope you have managed to have a look at our sari shop by now? They are selling fast and since theres only one of each please have a look and pick up the one you want asap!

– Anisha