Bottega Veneta—A Hot Commodity on the Street Style Scene and in the Resale Market

The street style has been slow to trickle in this season, what with so few IRL shows. But if any trends have emerged, a preponderance of Bottega Veneta bags is one of them. Daniel Lee’s makeover of the Italian brand has turned its Pouch, a soft nappa leather clutch, available in a myriad of colors, into an It bag at a time when many have said that It bags are over.

The handbag reseller Rebag launched Clair, its luxury appraisal index, a year ago this month. Today, it’s publishing its first annual Clair Report to showcase the insights it’s gleaned, including stats about value retention. It’s no surprise that Hermès is the “unicorn” in this category—its Birkin bags on average retain 80% of their original value. But guess which bags have experienced the biggest jump? Bottega Veneta’s, of course. In fact, Lee’s recent creations are right up there in Hermès, Chanel, and Louis Vuitton territory when it comes to value retention. Another brand that enjoyed a big increase in this year was Christian Dior. ReBag founder Charles Gorra chalks it up to the popular Dior Oblique pattern, another omnipresent sight in our street style pictures.

Lyst and Google publish these sorts of indexes regularly, and they’ve become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, making fashion headlines not just for the products at the top of the lists but for the websites themselves, thereby generating more visits and additional clicks. Gorra wouldn’t mind something similar happening with Rebag, but Clair’s functionality—which allows users to instantly get a resale value of a bag by entering a few details about said item—has already increased submissions by a factor of three. “Every brand is always going to tell you it’s doing great. And you follow the trends, you have a sense of what’s hot and what’s not,” Gorra explains. “But only the resale market has the data points that actually prove the underlying demand. It’s really transparent.”

Another non-surprise? Resale in general has weathered the pandemic better than retail. Gorra reports that sales have been strong since the coronavirus crisis started (the addition of small leather goods and other accessories like sunglasses and scarves to ReBag’s offering no doubt helped). “We beat our best week three times in the last six months; we’re pretty much at our pre-corona business plan at this point.”