His Girlfriend Wanted a $10,000 Birkin Handbag. He Spent 60 Hours Making Her a Replica.

So when Sway’s girlfriend joked that she wanted a luxurious Hermès Birkin handbag, which the couple couldn’t afford, he decided to hand-make one for her. Sway knew nothing about crafting a handbag, let alone a Birkin, one of the most coveted accessories in fashion, which starts around $10,000 new, if you are one of the lucky ones who manages to get off the notoriously lengthy wait list. The bags can run well into six figures for exotic leathers and on the secondary market. 

Americans’ appetite for luxury goods has never been higher, and high-end handbags are increasingly seen as a symbol of the good life. But with prices rising well into five-and-six-digit territory, these bags are less accessible than ever. It is no wonder more people are attempting DIY versions.

But a novice sewing a Birkin? It is like attempting the “Mona Lisa” with finger paints.

Hermès artisans train for years and work for dozens of hours to hand-make a single bag—including doing special hand exercises to develop their muscles. Introduced in 1984 and named for the chic Brit-in-Paris actress and singer Jane Birkin, the bag is a status symbol that transcends fashion. Back in 2001 on the show “Sex and the City,” the character Samantha said, “When I’m tooling around town with that bag, I’ll know I’ve made it.” 

Today, “Birkin bros” carry them, rappers constantly rhapsodize over them, and their value only grows on the secondary market. All this might explain why Sway’s outdoorsy girlfriend, who is more into hiking than handbags, would talk about wanting a Birkin—and why Sway would try to create one.

Sway says he and his girlfriend grew up struggling financially. “It makes us look at life and the things that we want a lot more creatively,” he says. “When there’s something that you want that you can’t necessarily afford, we try to look for alternatives.” 

If Sway could make a pine cone, one of nature’s most elegant objets, he figured he could approximate a handbag. He looked at videos of Birkins being made (more artsy clips than tutorials), examined the construction of other luxury handbags owned by friends and family and dug up an unofficial pattern online for a Birkin. He bought $80 worth of alligator-stamped leather, $80 worth of calfskin leather and a few hundred dollars worth of tools. 

To keep the project secret from his girlfriend, he worked at his parents’ and brother’s houses over a period of about a month, for 60 hours total. 

“Oh my gosh, this is too much,” his mother, financial planner Lushia Tsway, says she thought at the time. (Her son uses the name Sway professionally.)

“But the world is not created by people like me,” she adds. “The world is created by brave people like Alex that have an idea and go for it.”

The mom even raced to throw a blanket over the unfinished handbag one day when the girlfriend popped by and almost saw the project.

Sewing the bag together required making about 1,000 pre-punched holes, which had to be immaculately sized and spaced apart. Sway initially punched holes too small for the thread, so he painstakingly widened each one. Plagued with self-doubt, his hands numb, he almost gave up. 

“The skin was all gone from his fingers,” remembers Sway’s mother. 

Another hurdle was that Birkins are constructed inside-out. So Sway had to do the bulk of the work on the bag and then flip it, which is no small feat without a proper workshop or the practiced hand of an expert. “I basically had to beat up this bag,” says Sway, who used a hammer and massaged the leather to try to get it to turn inside out. 

All that violence tore the stitches, so then he had to redo the sewing. Ultimately, the wonky inversion, with its wavy edge, is the dead giveaway that this is a homemade Birkin—not that it matters to Sway and his girlfriend, MJ Kim.

 “It just made me realize, ‘Whoa, Alex really cares about me,’ ” Kim says.

She recently took it to New York on a trip to visit her family. Her mother’s response: “Can Alex make me one?”

DIY-ers have a welcome audience on TikTok, where sustainability advocates, thrifty luxury fans and fashion students try to make their own versions of designer products such as Gucci and Louis Vuitton totes. Ilse Veening, a 21-year-old university student in the Netherlands, went viral with her video of a handbag she made out of garbage bags that resembled a Chanel.

DIY luxury items, particularly those that aren’t sold, fall into a gray area of trademark law. Hermès has registered a trademark for the Birkin name in the U.S., as well as for its shape, what’s known as a “trade dress.” This year, the brand won a case against an artist selling NFTs of Birkins. Hermès declined to comment on Sway’s homemade Birkin.    

Sway uploaded a video of his process to TikTok, where his handiwork attracted millions of views and thousands of comments—many lauding him as a pretty great boyfriend. 

“The effort screams love,” noted one poster.

“I’m sending this to my husband,” said another. 

Sway and Kim enjoy telling the story about how the bag came to be, though they have moved on to more practical pursuits. They are saving up for a camper van.

Write to Rory Satran at [email protected]

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