Birkin for a Living

Remember Sex and the City’s Samantha trying to get an Hermès Birkin bag — one of those coveted purses with a two-year waiting list and the five-figure price tag — by claiming it was for Lucy Liu? Well, makeup artist Michael Tonello takes such trickery a few steps further. In his peppy, addictive memoir Bringing Home The Birkin: My Life in Hot Pursuit of the World’s Most Coveted Handbag (available April 22), he details the comical lengths to which he’s gone to snag hundreds of Birkins, which he then sells (with a steep mark-up) on eBay.

Setting off from his flat in Barcelona, Tonello scours the globe for the goods. When a store in Athens sells out, Tonello pretends to be one of the buyers, calls up, cancels the order, and swoops in to land it himself. “Fortune favors the bold (Birkin buyer),” he writes. Indeed. What started as a chance online auction (he listed an Hermès scarf for quick cash) transformed him from novice to ruthless reseller.

Details of Tonello’s other tricks, like crashing store openings and sweet-talking salespeople to bypass the waiting lists, are so in-demand that, according to The New York Post in February, an advance copy of Birkin sold on eBay for $1,000 — more than 38 times the original price. Tonello, no doubt, is smiling with pride.

Bringing Home The Birkin is available April 22 from William Morrow/Harper Collins.