These days, Americans versed in pop culture “Sex and the City,” Oprah being turned away at the Paris Hermès store know about Birkins. Oh, and the entry-level leather model costs about $7,500, with a crocodile-and-diamond version topping out at $150,000.
Any other Jane who walks in off the street and asks for a Birkin is politely told there is a two-to-three-year waiting list.
For those not familiar with the Birkin bag made by Hermès, the French luxury leather goods company, for the singer Jane Birkin in the early ’80s, after its chief executive saw the chanteuse struggling with her vagabond-verging-on-cat-lady straw purse on a plane it doesn’t matter, because you can’t get one anyway. By the time Tonello settled in Barcelona, shipped his belongings from Cape Cod and signed a five-year lease on an apartment, his friend decided to move his manufacturing to Thailand.The end of the world just inched a little nearer: an eBay seller has written a memoir. Destiny came knocking when a friend offered him a job in Spain as a manufacturing middleman for his jewelry company, but that didn’t last long. Tonello was looking to ditch his days of grooming celebrities for a life in Barcelona. “A door closed and a little window opened and I looked at that window as a huge opportunity rather than it being an obstacle,” he told the Daily News Wednesday. But his quick wit and entrepreneurship turned him into the “Robin Hood of desperate women,” a best-selling author and the shoe designer he is today. The Massachusetts native was once a makeup artist and hairstylist who found himself in Spain with a brand new apartment, zero income and no clue on what to do next.
That’s what Michael Tonello did, well sort of. When life hands you lemons, you make $1.6 million from a lemonade stand.
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