I won one when I was 18! I’m going to tell this as best as I remember because I just turned 37 a few days ago so it has been some time! It was 2004 and post the Sex and the City episode featuring the Birkin (2001), the bag was hot and the waitlist was at six years at that point. Being a young closeted gay man in small town Michigan, I was watching SATC all the time and was starting my love affair with fashion and designers. Living nowhere near any real shopping (and at that time barely any luxury had real e-commerce), I was really only exposed to designer stuff I would score at TJ Maxx here and there. Along came the website Bluefly and it changed everything for me. During that time, they were basically a high end designer discount retailer and they carried such good stuff. I shopped from there quite often and spent a lot of time on their website.
One day, they post a “Win A Birkin” promotion that by playing an online slot game, you had the chance to instantly win a birkin. It had a bunch of other prizes but the grand prize was the bag. The first day I played, I also clicked on the option to get a daily play reminder. I was also the kid that spent extra time reading the details and noticed in the fine print that if no one won the bag as an “instant prize” it would then be raffled off and each time you played the game would count as an entry in that raffle. Those two things become important later on. I dutifully play every day and after a month or so, the promotion disappears from website and I totally forgot about it.
I want to say it was a month or so later, I am checking my email and I see one from an email address I don’t recognize and when I open it, it tells me I have won the grand prize! The Birkin was mine! The email further explains that I will be receiving an affidavit that I need to read and sign, have notarized, and have overnighted back to Manhattan in order to claim the prize. I instantly thought I was getting scammed and they were trying to get my social security number or something but also equally excited because what if I really did win?! My Dad was always paranoid about identity theft so my sirens were going off!!
I decide the only thing to do is call their customer service directly. I tell the young man that answers that I feel foolish for even calling and half-falling for a scam, but that I had received an email from an odd address saying I had won the contest. He asks for my full name and a few minutes later he gets back on the line and very excitedly tells me that I did in fact win the prize and that for legal reasons, they had an outside company doing their promotions and that’s why the email came from a strange address. I sat there in shock for about 10 minutes before calling my parents and telling them the whole story in one breathless sentence.
A few days later I received the affidavit via overnight signed delivery. I barely read it but knew to take it to my friends accountant sister to make sure it was legit, she notarized it for me, and I overnighted it back. The contract said I had to return the paperwork within 72 hours of signing for it’s delivery and also that the prize would be delivered 8-12 weeks after they received it. They took each and every single one of those 12 weeks to deliver which was also the entirety of my summer before starting college. The day it arrived, I ran it right up to my room to examine it. I’d just had a mythical unicorn delivered to me and I knew I had to do it in private. That’s a tradition I continue to this day.
There it was: a black 35 GHW Birkin sitting on my bed!!! Mind you, at that age I had a few
Coach bags and maybe one Louis bag, so I was completely taken aback by the entire thing: the big orange box, the way all the accessories were presented, the way it was packaged, my mind was blown! It was the first time I had ever seen a raincoat for a bag! I pulled it out, carried it in my room for a few minutes and put it away.
My family slowly filtered in and asked to see it and once my parents saw it, my Dad asked me what I was going to do with it. I couldn’t fathom the thought of carrying a “purse” at that age and all my bags were strictly messenger bags, so I told him I was going to sell it. He offered to pay me retail for it and offered it to my Mom but she declined because she said she didn’t feel right owning such an expensive handbag. I quickly posted and sold it on eBay.
I have mixed feelings about selling it to this day. On one hand, I was not in a place in life that I would have been comfortable carrying it. I was still very insecure and carrying a “woman’s bag” was a sure fire way of having my sexuality questioned and I was not ready for that. At this age, probably from 30 on, I would proudly swing that bag all around town. However, it makes for a really good story.
) I insisted that I only wanted H clutches. I’ve never used tote styles much, as I have always found them heavy. Then I saw a Birkin on the tpf marketplace with engraved hardware. The retired equestrian in me was hooked. The lovely and generous seller had to help me navigate the PayPal system, but then she was mine.
