u/NOTAFAKESELLER

This post is intended for those who have just entered the field of Hermes reps. Here is the bare minimum of information you must know right now!

Key point of the discussion:
99% of all the sellers you will meet on Reddit are resellers. No manufacturers, no factories, no experts. They buy ready bags in wholesale in Guangzhou and then sell to you with the markup up to 500%. All they say about factories, European leather and Hermes craftsmen is marketing. This is a fundamental fact which makes everything simpler.

What model should you start with?
Birkin 25 or 30 in classic leather, Togo or Epsom. Classic colors like Noir, Gold, Etoupe. No seasonal colors, no rare leathers, no HSS. The reasons for choosing this way are explained in brief in another post by me. Classics are produced regularly and even average quality looks good. Rare models with average quality look bad. Recently u/RACE2CAKE wrote an extensive post on this issue.

What budget do you need?
First, note that the prices I will tell you are without huge markup of sellers. Let's call it a fair price. Below 600: low quality, Chinese leather, thin plating which will peel off in several months. 800-1500: average quality, what most Reddit sellers define as top tier. Over 1500 from a real small manufacturer: decent quality for many years ahead. The key is to understand that 1500 of a Reddit seller and 1500 of a small manufacturer are different things. The seller buys for 300-400 at the factory and sells for 1500. The manufacturer sells for 1500 materials and labor which cost 1500. These prices are for the bags I've told you about. For colorful, seasonal, exotic leathers or bigger sizes the prices may increase twice or more.

What to ask a seller:
thickness of plating in microns, leather quality and how it differs from others, production time of one bag, sizes where the seller excels and doesn't, and typical issues of this model. If the seller gives a specific answer then it's worth continuing the conversation. If he or she starts saying something like "the best quality" or "European materials" or uses AI-generated responses then finish the conversation. It's a test for "uninitiated sellers". Savvy Reddit users usually employ AI in order to sound better.

Which sellers should you avoid right away?
The seller whose username consists of 3-4 letters, appeared not long ago, less than a year and has hundreds of reviews already. A seller who offers you 30-50% discount right away, indicating that the initial price is overestimated. The seller creating urgency: "last spots, price goes up tomorrow". The seller sending you only photos from one angle, taken in a studio, polished and staged. A seller always having everything perfect, no restrictions at all – there are always some.

How to check reviews?
Just click the account that left the review. Note when it was created, what this account wrote before, if anything except praising seller. Account created not long ago, in 2-4 months, and has nothing except enthusiastic reviews – most likely it is bought account. Most Reddit reviews are written this way.

How to evaluate subreddits where you read reviews?
Think how much content is there overall and how many reviews are. In some subs there are 90% of reviews and typically they praise 1-3 sellers. You try writing a review yourself, with made-up seller name and enthusiastic comments and if your post is deleted then this subreddit is probably unreliable.

Main rule for a newcomer :
don't hurry. Any seller trying to create an impression of urgency acts against your interests. Spend time studying the issue, reading posts and asking questions. Money wasted on bad rep cannot be returned. Time spent learning will save the money.

_If you have personal questions, feel free to send me PMs.

A year ago I was writing about the problems of the Hermes rep market. Today I can say it's gotten worse. Not better, not the same. Worse. And here's specifically what has changed.....

There are more sellers and quality has dropped. A year ago there were fewer active names on Reddit. Now new sellers appear every week. A name of 3 - 4 letters, hundreds of reviews in a month, stories about exclusive factories. The scheme is refined to automaticity. But more sellers doesn't mean more choice, it means more people buying from the same factories and reselling with a 300% markup. Competition between them is not on quality but on marketing. The winner is whoever inflates reviews better, not whoever makes better bags!

AI changed the game, not in your favor. A year ago I was accused of using AI to write posts because they sounded too good, as they still do now, all because I always do this from the heart, personally myself. But now when all of Reddit is flooded with these "expert posts," every Chinese bought account writes dozens of posts a day using AI without even trying, it became clear what AI garbage actually looks like. Fake expert posts were written clumsily with errors, you could tell the person didn't know the topic well. Moreover these sellers now answer questions with AI too, if a year ago I gave advice on what questions you can ask a seller to expose them, now they use AI in100% of cases. And if they simply copy text that's one thing but some "particularly clever" ones just take information and write it back to you in their own words, they have plenty of time since they don't produce bags, their job is to sit on Reddit and find clients to sell bags they'll buy at the market near their home in Guangzhou.

Have photos gotten better? Before sellers used other people's photos but now this has become very widespread, moreover they even use photos of originals like the well known seller with names of 3-4 letters, one of whom was already caught taking photos of originals, or rather people who wrote "reviews of his work" attached photos from trusted resale platforms where authentic Hermes Birkins and Kellys are resold. Of course these reviews are written by him and his team. If you pay attention to certain subreddits that publish content on the topic of Hermes reps, you can notice that QC there is always from the same sellers! And if you try to post your own seller in one of those subs, even a made up one, your post will not pass moderation 100%because it's already obvious to everyone how the review and recommendation system works in the Hermes rep market on Reddit. You can't trust any of them!

Prices went up, quality didn't. The average price of a rep from Reddit sellers has gone up over the year. Sellers explain this with inflation, rising material costs, the dollar exchange rate. In reality the purchase price at factories has risen insignificantly. The seller's markup has risen. You're paying more for the same or worse.
The same factories make the same quality for years. They have no desire to make it better, their only goal is to make more! And then using fake QC and reviews to sell you this garbage.

A year ago bought reviews were relatively obvious, new accounts, short history, cookie-cutter texts. Now they buy accounts with history, with varied activity, sometimes with years of Reddit presence. I've even seen accounts that are 10 - 13 years old that are obviously bought! Yes it's expensive, but when you're charging 1500-2000 for a bag worth 300why not spend 200-300 on such an account? Easy! New sellers who want to work honestly and sell goods at reasonable prices have an incredibly hard time breaking through among this deception and the weight of names that as you already understood belong to sellers of 3 - 4 letters. But I will continue doing my thing and telling the truth day after day so that sooner or later there will be more people who understand this market and these sellers, scammers, who sell you Hermes Birkin and Kelly of no quality, will stop operating.

Questions in DM. Have a good day!

Hello friends!! Most often people write to me about bag quality, how to determine quality, tell good from bad and so on. There really are many quality levels for Birkin, Kelly and other Hermes bags since there are many manufacturers and sellers, especially since each of them will tell you "I have the best quality" regardless of their price. But you know what the biggest problem is? Not that most people can't tell good quality from bad, and not even that sellers most often use photos that aren't even theirs and you're essentially trying to evaluate a bag whose quality will differ from what you receive. But specifically the "help" of other people who for some reason decided they can help everyone and judge all bags around them by quality level, deciding they suddenly have a lot of experience in this field...

I decided to run a crazy experiment!!! A few weeks ago using the help of my friends and some people who wrote to me with questions, with whom we'd already become what you could call "pen pals" haha, we conducted a large scale check of all Hermes rep QC experts on Reddit and the results shocked us, and we also managed to find another "false bottom" in most subs on the topic of Hermes reps, you've definitely never seen anything like this!

The "first bottom." We started systematically sending posts to various subs with dozens of posts and photos asking people to evaluate our "purchases" and do QC. Most often we didn't write the seller's name, sometimes we wrote names of well known sellers to "pass face control," but more on that later. But the most interesting thing is that ABSOLUTELY ALL the bags we asked to evaluate were AUTHENTIC. Some photos were taken by my friends who deal in authentic resale, some I took myself, and a small portion for variety we took from the internet on verified platforms with impeccable reputation. The authenticity of the bags was 100% beyond any doubt.

How do you think people responded? About 60-65% wrote that the bags were magnificent, and what did you expect to hear about authentic bags? Definitely not what the other people wrote haha. The remaining 30-35% always found "problems," the stamp, the stitching, the hardware, the leather, something was always wrong. Sometimes these same people criticizing our authentic bags recommended one of the "trusted sellers" whose names more often than not consist of 3-4 letters. Apparently their work is so great it's even "better than the original," that's funny....

Another category of people simply suddenly believed in their own "expertise" and decided to judge everything around them by their own rules. Known only to them. Citing obviously low quality Chinese rep photos as examples!
What does this tell us? First, many people simply want to diminish the quality of your bag, even an authentic one, in order to offer you their seller. Second, a large group of people suddenly decided for some reason that they understand something about the world of Hermes and can make such judgments.

And while 35% doesn't seem like a big number, the problem is that it's exactly these people who are very active in the comments, they're the ones who pressure and influence your opinion. Those who wrote positive things said things like "great bag, leather is incredibly cool," but those who criticized wrote and wrote, took photos and wrote again. Some consciously and some without understanding it but pushing you and steering you toward their supposedly "correct opinion."

The "second bottom." An interesting fact emerged while we conducted that experiment. Earlier I said we periodically wrote seller names from the "trusted list" or whatever that list is called, the one you get on by paying the subreddit admins? Haha. Anyway the thing is that initially we didn't write seller names at all but in 90% of subs our posts were simply deleted, and in some our account was even blocked. Why? That's strange. Where a girl with a real account and history asks to evaluate a photo of her bag, with no hint of a seller in the post or comments, and the post is simply deleted or doesn't pass moderation. And at the same time posts with certain seller names keep appearing and appearing.

Of course... we decided to test this and wrote the names of those sellers mentioned by other people whose posts weren't deleted. I think you can already guess what happened? Exactly, the posts passed moderation, weren't deleted and some are still up in those "honest" subs to this day. It's all simple and obvious, either sellers pay them or these subs were created by sellers, or maybe bought

All of this mostly concerns subs that publish content on the topic of Hermes, since our experiment specifically involved Hermes bags. And I'll be honest, both the "first bottom" and the "second bottom" simultaneously shocked us and confirmed our fears. This space is rotten to the core, and beyond deception from sellers, bought and inflated accounts, now there are even entirely fake subs! There are simply many people here who have never held an authentic in their hands and evaluate it as "below average quality" because of a crooked stitch or stamp in their opinion.

Hermes is not just a bag, it's handwork, expensive and natural high quality leather, Hermes is people who apparently work with soul since their bags have their own "roughness" in production. And Chinese manufacturers make in a bad sense "perfect" reps, stitching, stamps, if we're talking about the high segment, and this is that case where crossing that level makes the bag soulless like a Barbie doll.

Don't forget that I'm writing about high quality Hermes, the maximum, and of course I'm not factoring in average and low quality because there's nothing to even discuss there!

Questions- Write in DM and have a good day!

I see so many beautiful pictures every day. But each time, I think to myself that there is no relation between the picture and the result I will get.

Now then. Sellers on Reddit have known for ages that the buyers would make decisions based on how the item looked in pictures. And so instead of offering demos, the sellers use pictures as their primary selling tool. Either they obtain images of the items directly from Instagram, where customers share pictures of their bags. Or they go to reseller websites such as The RealReal, Vestiaire, or any others and take high quality pictures there stating that “these are our Hermes Birkin or Kelly reps.” In a picture, you see an authentic worth 25k. However, the bag you receive could differ greatly. In addition, keep in mind that many individuals upon receipt do not notice the difference at all since they have never owned an authentic in their life before. And the whole thing becomes quite funny. A person who himself has never possessed an authentic sells it to a person who has never seen an authentic in his life before, and both are happy about it.

The last one is also very common ,people who simply copy pictures from actual producers. I know lots of producers that make high quality things. I've seen some pictures of them at work, of their workshops and products. From time to time I come across such pictures on some Reddit accounts, which clearly have no relation to these producers whatsoever. The thing is, they simply find them on the Internet and use them. Customers are unlikely to notice this, but I always do. Pictures can never tell you about the weight of hardware, the smell of the leather, the edges of stitching, the thread tension, or just how a product feels in hands rather than on a stand. None of this matters when someone is simply trying to deceive you by selling other people's work under their name.

A beautiful QC photo in 2026 is not quality. It's the ability to use the internet.
__If you have personal questions write to me in private messages.