Pressman PR

How many designer handbags can one women possess? In the case of 41-year-old mother-of-three Gerry Campbell, the answer is several hundred at any given time. They crowd her plush Newton Mearns living room in a galaxy of star names: a Miu Miu fringed black leather bag, purchased in May for £795, a hugely fabulous chocolate brown leather Fendi Bubble bag whose price tag was £975, and a Louis Vuitton Triangle bag that cost £500. That is just to name a few. Gerry’s own favourite is a plum leather Balenciaga bag at £595.
Each one is exquisitely crafted, and remarkable for the smell of its top-quality leather, the hue of its colouring and the click of its closures. Most are roomy enough to carry the kitchen sink in, though they’re destined to hold not much more than a mobile, a credit card and a lipstick.
These bags are sheer shoulder candy - and, even in these straitened times, they’re being snapped up like hot cakes. Not, you understand, all by Gerry. Within hours, these and hundreds of other bags will be sold on to women throughout the UK at a fraction of their original price through bagnificent.co.uk, Gerry’s new company, and the UK’s only online designer bag store. The pre-owned Miu Miu, which is in spotless condition and used only once, will go on sale, online, for £425. The Fendi will sell at £695 and the Louis Vuitton will cost £295. Her own Balenciaga would have gone on sale at £395.
Gerry sells brand-new current season bags sourced mostly in Italy by a network of local agents who scour independent shops and boutiques which want to make room for the next season’s stock. She is about to patent her cutely-named “Loved” range of pre-owned bags, the part of her business that is performing best since its launch last year. These are designer bags that have been offered to her by friends, relatives, friends of friends and complete strangers who want to sell on their prime purchases in order to fund another. A “Loved” Mulberry Bayswater bag originally purchased for £495, for example, sold within hours of Gerry putting it online at £250. Even a Louis Vuitton “truly loved” bag - Gerry’s term for “trashed” - that was fraying at the seams and had loose handles was sold within the day.
“Women’s love of bags doesn’t seem to have changed, even in the economic downturn,” says Gerry, who launched bagnificent from her home last September. She sold 18 bags in the last week of October, a respectable tally helped along by a private handbag party and a charity lunch. Normally, she sells an average of 12 a week. Having paid her overseas agents an up-front fee, all the profit from the brand-new items is hers, while she splits the proceeds for the “Loved” range 65/35 between the donor and herself. She never sells new-season designer stock because she would be unable to discount it. Her own overheads are minimal.
Business is so good that Gerry, a management accountant who studied at Glasgow Caledonian University when it was called Glasgow College of Technology, and wanted a change of career when her three children came along, is convinced that discount bags have the potential to be very big indeed. “I make enough to keep me going without much promotion, and it’s more of a lifestyle business at the moment,” she says. “With more marketing, I’m sure it would really grow. But then I’d need more staff and separate premises, which is not what I want.”
What does she think is the attraction of handbags? “It can change your whole look without having to invest in a brand-new outfit,” she says. “The bigger the bag, the smaller you look - a good thing when people are so obsessed with size. At parties you see women looking at each other’s bag rather than each other’s outfit. Buying a discount designer bag can be cheaper than changing your wardrobe or going to WeightWatchers.”
Given the growing consumer interest in her business, it does seem that Gerry has tapped neatly into the new austerity zeitgeist. Even Anya Hindmarch, the luxury handbag designer whose company is worth a reputed £20m, recently announced that the days of spending £1000 on a designer bag are over - despite her “It” bags at upwards of £1295 being endorsed by the likes of Angelina Jolie. “I’ve always thought the really, really expensive bag, which then becomes completely unfashionable the next season, is a bit dishonest, and I think customers are more intelligent than that.” She prefers to market her more expensive bags as an “investment buy to pass on to the children”.
Gerry points out that she only gets access to the new bags because the shops her agents find them in have made so much profit from the people who will pay full-price they can afford to offload them. “The mark-up on designer brands in stores is huge because of overheads and because they stock new-season ranges,” she says. “A lot of the iconic designer bags only get slightly tweaked from season to season, like football strips, in order to keep turnover high.
The designers use celebrity endorsers such as Kate Moss and Sienna Miller to wear them, and get them photographed in Grazia, so that people want to buy them. But I do believe that some designer bags have become caricatures of themselves. I would never take a two-toned purple and red one because it wouldn’t sell. I like black, brown and tan because they’re safer.
“Women want a classic designer bag that won’t date quickly. I don’t like ostentation and a very obvious designer look. I prefer the low-key classic style. A classic Mulberry, for example, ages very gracefully.”
In any case, the new fashion trend is to mix and match a designer handbag with cheaper items from Zara, TopShop or Primark. Leigh Sparks, professor of retail studies at the University of Stirling, agrees that the lure of the label is losing its appeal. “Only a particular type of consumer will dress head-to-toe in designer gear these days,” he says. “It’s more acceptable now to wear non-label clothes than previously. So access to a discount designer handbag says a lot.”
Many people, however, are going one step further and renting their designer bag by the week, or the month. Renting has lost its humility to become fashionably hot, especially in the US, where New York-based Bagborroworsteal.com featured in the Sex and the City movie, though Las Vegas-based AllThatBags.com also does a rent-to-buy option on its Chloe and Hermes numbers. Another rental company, FromBagsToRiches.com, was founded by Kara Richter in the belief that “born into the soul of women is a secret desire to carry the bag of our dreams”.
In the UK, Erento.co.uk, the German online rental market place which launched in London in April this year, has seen a 20% leap in designer handbag rentals since September. A tan Prada carry bag, featuring a new push-fit closure in gold metalware, can be had for £30 a week, while a Dior Mono canvas number with white patent leather handles is available at £10 a week. Other bags are by Burberry Dior, Dolce & Gabbana and Prada.
Gerry Campbell has sold some of her handbags to handbaghirehq.com, the British rental company. But she says: “I wouldn’t like to hire a handbag, mainly because you have to hand it back when your time is up but also because it depersonalises the whole experience. In my experience, women prefer ownership, because they can’t help bonding with their bags.”