Giving Silk Scarves a Second Life

Michael Tonello

Author, Bringing Home the Birkin: My Life in Hot Pursuit of the World's Most Coveted Handbag, Founder of Respoke

What makes you feel like a grown-up?

Paying bills.

What’s the best thing that happened in the 80s?

I think my fondest memory of the 80s was when three of my friends and myself started a business together—in 1986, I want to say. The idea was really just to get work for each of us. And it was rooted in the advertising business. At one point we gainfully employed 64 people, and we sold the business three years ago. It was really special for me because I always thought it was great to have ideas, but the best part of an idea is bringing it to fruition.

What do you refuse to give an F about?

I don't really care what people think about me. I've learned that people can be very judgmental, but I don't really care what they think. Through my 20s and 30s and maybe into my 40s, I was always concerned about what people thought and I would dress a certain way and act a certain way, and now all bets are off.

A first in second verses: silk scarves become shoes.

You've had a really eclectic background—among other things, you were a hair and makeup artist, a premier Birkin bag buyer, and you once did a field study of socialites. Is there a common thread in all those things for you?

I think in some ways all of them involved a lot of creativity. My real career, if you want to call it that, was doing hair and makeup—I did that for probably 25 years. Obviously, that was creative. As I mentioned, I really love coming up with an idea and bringing it to fruition. At one point back in the mid 80s, my dad and I got a patent on a little device that helped you solve crossword puzzles. It was made with Popsicle sticks and just had the letters of the alphabet on it. The Popsicle sticks could move, and there was a clear window where you could move the letters. You could isolate a word out of the crossword puzzle, because sometimes when you have three quarters of the way through a crossword puzzle, you get sensory overload. So if you could isolate the letters and then move different letters and put in the givens that you had, then move letters around, it helped you solve the crossword puzzle. And it was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and I got the patent. Again, it was just this creative thing I’d come up with using Popsicle sticks.

How did you decide to become a premier buyer of Hermès Birkin bags (sometimes acquiring 120-130 in a 3-4 month span)? What did you have to learn to create this niche for yourself and how did that find you? 

It kind of was forced upon me, in some ways. I moved to Barcelona; I had been offered a part-time job before I moved. So I get there and after my phone is installed, the first call I get is telling me that I don’t have the job anymore because they’ve relocated their business to Thailand. So now I have an apartment and no income, basically. And all of a sudden 40 or so shipping containers start arriving with all my worldly possessions. I had been a collector of first edition, 1950s books—Truman Capote, Lillian Hellman and the like. And I decided to put Breakfast At Tiffany’s by Truman Capote on eBay, which was in its infancy; I had never sold anything there. It sold for a thousand dollars and that was like a bug, it bit me. All of a sudden I saw the power of eBay and I also saw everything in my house as if it had a dollar bill sign on it.

I listed a Hermès scarf next and that went into a bidding war and it sold for more than retail. So I started flipping Hermès scarves. I was buying some of Hermès scarves in Endora, a tax-free principality, where they were cheaper. I decided to buy a deck of Hermès playing cards, which I put on eBay; they sold for more than retail, to a celebrity in Bel Air, California. After she received them, she sent me an email and said, "I'm happy with my purchase. If you ever have a Birkin bag, let me know." I had no idea what a Birkin bag was. I googled it and learned it was a bag that Hermès made. So I ran up to Hermès in Barcelona, asked for a Birkin bag and they looked at me like I was crazy. (Note to readers: The iconic Hermès Birkin bag notoriously has up to a five-year waiting list with a price range from $9,000 to $300,000.)

I rented a car and drove to the South of France because there were six Hermès stores within a couple of hours of each other. Every store I went into told me they didn't have a Birkin bag. And then a couple of the stores mentioned the waiting list. And one store said there was a waiting list to get on the waiting list. And I put my name on the waiting list and then I forgot all about it.

A few months later, my husband Juan and I were in Madrid for a weekend and I said, "Let's go into Hermès, I want to buy some scarves." I piled up about 12 or 13 scarves. And as I was going to the register to pay for them, I said, "Oh, you don't happen to have a Birkin bag, do you?" And the woman said, "Let me look in the back." She came out with a huge orange box, put it on the counter, put on gloves, showed me the bag, and told me all about it. All I wanted to do was pay for it and get out of the store before she remembered it had a two-year waiting list. I sent an email to the celebrity who had asked for the bag three months before. And I was so ignorant of everything having to do with Birkins, I just added five grand to the price. I could have doubled it. She bought the bag and she had me deliver it to the Coco Chanel suite at The Ritz the following week.

That basically launched my Birkin business because she hooked me up with people in Hollywood. It dawned on me that each time I went into all those stores in the South of France, I just walked in and asked for the Birkin. But in Madrid I had piled up 13 scarves. So I had this hypothesis that maybe it had something to do with the scarves.

So the following day in Paris, I went into the Hermès store and I went to the scarf counter and I asked for a ton of scarves. I think I even asked for the same scarves I asked for in Madrid, because I didn't know one of those scarves was like a secret handshake. I had no clue. As I was going to pay for all these scarves, I asked for a Birkin bag and the woman said, "Let me look downstairs." Two minutes later, she came up carrying a huge orange box. And when I saw that box, now for the second time, I knew I was going to become the Houdini of Hermès Birkin bags. That following year, I bought and sold $1.6 million worth of Birkin bags. It was crazy.

What is luxury to you, and has that changed at all over the years?

I touched on this, in that I used to seek the approval of other people. So luxury to me at that time was external luxury. Now, I think more of internal luxury such as maybe an old London Fog raincoat that I'll have relined with Hermès silk. In that case, the luxury is personal because nobody sees it. And I don't particularly care about labels anymore. You'll see in the case of the things that we make for Respoke, there's usually no badging on things. There's a couple of rare instances where we'll put a piece of something on a collar and you therefore see it, but usually I'm not a fan of external branding. So luxury for me is personal luxury. Also, I love sharing wonderful things with friends—going out for a lovely spectacular dinner and nice champagne and enjoying each other's company.

Tell us about starting Respoke; what have been the highlights and challenges?

We started it about six years ago. We were really very fortunate in that our very first wholesale customer was Bergdorf Goodman and that really launched the brand. It's sustainable luxury. Every single thing that we make, and I mean everything, the paintings, the clothing, the footwear, the bucket hats, everything begins with an iconic silk scarf. We use Hermès, we use Emilio Pucci, Louis Vuitton, Alexander McQueen—it's all from a silk scarf, it's not silk fabric. We use a regular three foot square and 90 centimeter silk scarves. We start by making our footwear, which is handmade and hand sewn. (Watch a wonderful video about the process here.) And then with the remnants from the footwear, we make ready-to-wear and we also give remnants to an artist in Provincetown who does the paintings—iconic images that surround our store.

We also do small pieces of furniture. Again, it's all based on silk scarves, so we don't waste anything, ever. It's also part of our brand story that we are all based on sustainability.

A highlight was definitely having Bergdorf Goodman as our first account and it really came to be because of Ralph Lauren. I was having dinner at the Polo Bar in New York, wearing a pair of our espadrilles—one of the very first pair or two that had been made. I was with Fern Mallis, the woman who created New York Fashion Week. I had another pair of espadrilles with me that I had made in her size. Ralph came walking by and she called him over and she said, "Michael, tell Ralph about your espadrilles."

I told him they're made from vintage Hermès. It was brand new, I'd only made a few pairs. He said, "Come with me." He took me across the dining room to a table in the corner. There were four people seated at the table and he says, "Michael" he says, "Tell them what you just told me." And he said to them, "This is my friend, Michael." I was like, "Your friend from 10 seconds ago?" I mean, how kind is that? I'm mortified, because they're having dinner and I'm telling them about espadrilles. And turns out the woman at the table was Linda Fargo, the head of fashion for Bergdorf Goodman. She asked me for my card, I didn't even have one. I wrote my name and my email address on a paper napkin, literally. But the following morning when I woke up there was an email from Linda, as a purchase order: she wanted 77 pairs, and she wanted them ASAP. That delivery sold out in two weeks and they reordered.

The challenge now, quite honestly, is finding help. I don't know what's going on, but it seems like hiring talent has gotten very difficult. Also because of the fact that our stores are in seasonal areas, we typically have to also provide housing in order to cast a wide net for employees. We have people we’ve relocated from Dallas, West Palm Beach and Charleston to work in our stores because they're really, really great at what they do.

What would you tell people about creating a job for themselves born out of passion? Because it seems like you've always done that and a lot of people that read The Verse are thinking about their next verses.

I get a lot of emails from people who have read my book and I answer every one of them because I think it’s important to pay it forward. The most important advice I can give people is, it's really great to have an idea, but you've got to focus on bringing the idea to fruition.

And then the other thing that I always tell people in closing is what my mother told me, "No one ever died of hard work or embarrassment."

You can shop Respoke here.