Hermès guides

These guides explain how Hermès bags are bought in boutiques and online, what Hermès colours and leathers look like, and which models reach the Hermès online store. Where Hermès publishes nothing official, such as quota rules, we say so and describe only what buyers commonly report.

How to use these guides

Start with the buying guides if you are thinking about a Birkin or a Kelly bag. Neither is sold in the Hermès online store, so the route runs through a boutique or the resale market, and each guide separates what can be checked from what buyers only report.

The colour and leather guides draw on Hermès product pages and on our own record of which models appeared online in each colour and leather. They are most useful when you are deciding on a shade or a leather before a restock.

What is checkable and what is not

Three kinds of fact appear in these guides, and we keep them apart. Hermès publishes dimensions, materials and prices on its product pages, and those we quote with the date we checked them. Our own monitoring of the online store produces the appearance figures: how often a model came back and when it was last seen. Everything else — how a boutique decides who is offered a Birkin, what a sales associate can do for you — is what buyers report, and it is marked as such.

That distinction matters most where the money is. Hermès has never published a quota rule, a spending requirement or a waiting list policy, so any page that states one as fact is repeating a rumour. Our quota bag guide collects what buyers describe, names the countries where practice differs and stops where the evidence stops.

Which guide answers which question

If you are choosing a colour, start with the colour hub: it ranks every shade we have recorded by how often it appeared online, so you can see whether the one you want is a regular or a rarity. The individual colour pages then show which models carried that shade and when each was last seen.

If you are choosing a leather, the leather pages quote Hermès on appearance, feel and how each one ages, then list the models recorded online in it. Swift is listed on thirteen of the lines in our reference and Clemence on seven, so those two turn up most often; Togo is on four and Barenia Faubourg on five, where it always costs more than the everyday grain.

If you are trying to buy a bag that is never sold online, the buying guides are the honest place to start — and the Birkin and Kelly pages say plainly that no alert can help you there.

Bags you can buy online

The model pages cover the Hermès bags that do appear in the online store, such as the Evelyne, Picotin and Lindy, with official dimensions, prices and how often each one appears. Each page carries the date its prices were checked and the date of the last appearance we recorded, so you can tell at a glance how fresh the numbers are.