Architecture student sells more than 200 designer handbags to help pay for school

In late March, Victoria Hughes mailed a purple and white Coach handbag that she had refurbished and sold on eBay. When her customer received it, she claimed that the bag got damaged in the mail because someone had ripped the box open and the bag fell out.

Hughes was surprised. The bag was in excellent condition, and had only a small mark on the bottom that she couldn’t get rid of by cleaning, she said. When she got the bag back, she realized that the customer swapped Hughes’ bag with another one in terrible condition. This bag had scuffs all over, the handles’ thread was loose, the Coach patch on the inside was missing and the mark that was on the bottom of Hughes’ bag was gone.

Photo: Ellen Meyers

“I freaked out and I was just like ‘How could this person do this to me?’ She just committed fraud,” said Hughes, a second-year architecture student at Syracuse University.

That is one of the dangers of doing online business, but Hughes said it is the first – and hopefully only – time that she has been scammed since she started to buy, refurbish and sell designer handbags last year. In one year, she has sold more than 200 handbags and wallets on websites such as eBay, Tradesy and Poshmark.

Hughes started it off as a hobby of collecting vintage Dooney & Bourke bags in high school, but her financial situation took an unusual turn when she received her financial aid package from SU. She received federal work-study, which provides students part-time employment to help cover education expenses. But when she started her first year, she realized she couldn’t use her work-study. Like many architecture majors, Hughes could not find a job that would work with her classes, required studio hours and homework, she said.

It left Hughes to think of alternatives to make up for her unused work-study. Then it hit her – her hobby could be turned into a money-maker.

“I was only buying things that I wanted, but I realized how many deals that I was passing up on things that I wouldn’t personally wear but other people would love to have,” she said.

Hughes started to buy bags from other designers, such as Coach and Kate Spade, starting as low as $20. Most of the time, she uses a $5 fabric cleaner, a $7 stain remover for leather, a $7 leather conditioner and a towel to get rid of dirt, stains and other scuffs. On older bags, she sometimes has to replace small parts such as turn-locks and tassels. Some brands will ship Hughes replacement parts for free. Otherwise, the parts are relatively inexpensive, she added.

One of the more-consuming parts of the job is getting rid of residues and smells – especially cigarette smells. Hughes said she has to treat the interior by putting baking powder or baking soda in the bag and letting the powders sit for a few days. Although some items require her to spend extensive time cleaning and fixing, Hughes said it is worth it if she knows she can make $100 off a bag she got for $20.

She tries to maintain a large profit margin so she can allocate her money toward her savings and her expenses. For example, Hughes pays her personal expenses, including her cell phone bills, extra food, architect supplies and printing.

Her current roommate, Amanda Liberty, said Hughes’ handbag refurbishing business really took off at this school year because she has been taking it more and more seriously.

“As we lived together, it got worse,” Liberty joked.

But if someone walked into Liberty and Hughes’ room, the person would not see the flattened boxes that Hughes uses to ship items to buyers or the purses and wallets tucked away in Hughes’ closet. In fact, it took Abby Linnertz, one of Hughes’ close friends at SU, up until this school year to figure out what was happening.

“She always needed boxes,” Linnertz said. “She’s always on the search for boxes. I think I had to ask her about her box search. She wasn’t very forward about it.”

Even afterward, Linnertz did not fully understand the business at first, she said. She was never sure whether Hughes would keep bags for herself or sell them online.

 “But I think it’s really interesting, because I could never do it,” she said. “The whole concept of it blows my mind. I don’t understand buying something just to sell it again.”

When Hughes looks for more bags to sell, she goes online at odd times of the day to find the best deals. Sometimes, people’s lack of knowledge leads her to the best deals – one time, a girl sold a leather Dooney & Bourke handbag to Hughes for $10 because she thought it was fake. Turns out, it was a real Dooney & Bourke bag made in Italy during the 1990s. Hughes cleaned it up and made $100 off it.

“It just seems strange to me how she turns such a profit on it,” Linnertz said. “It’s cool because people sell them for much cheaper than they’re actually worth. And it’s like, ‘Why do they not know what they’re worth and she does?’”

Hughes’ entrepreneurship also astounded her family. Her mother, Cassie Hughes, said from the beginning, she was always surprised that her daughter could get bargains on designer handbags.

“It was almost too good to be true,” Cassie Hughes said.

Back in Victoria's hometown of La Grange, Kentucky, the Hughes family made extra money from holding yard sales. But they would sell things for less because they just wanted stuff out of their house, Cassie Hughes said. Even before her daughter started to sell handbags on eBay, Cassie Hughes said knew that the items she would sell at the family yard sales could go for much more online.

“Nobody is going to give you even close to what its value is at a yard sale,” she said.

Now, Victoria Hughes has introduced her mother to eBay so she can start selling unwanted items to other users online. And for now, she sees herself continuing this refurbishing handbag business.

“I think it’s one of those things that’s hard to stop doing it once you’ve already been doing it,” she said. “Yeah, I make money off of it, but I spend just time, like hours each day, just reading things online about purses, or just looking at purses.”

“I do love purses,” she adds. “It’s actually something I love to do.”