You can get a loan, buy the handbag for $10000, and disassemble it to create a copy pattern. Then you make and sell 10 copies at $2000 to pay off your loan, and sell an 11th copy to pay for the 12th, that you keep for yourself. At that point, you can continue making copies to serve all the customers that Hermes is excluding by setting its price so high, and profit from their narrow market focus. But you can't put a Hermes logo on your copies. Trademark.
This happens all the time, because fashion has no copyrights.
Copying isn't stealing. Stealing is stealing. You can't be a fashion monopolist, because there are trivial barriers to entry and no legal protections. Therefore, in order to price higher than the marginal cost of production, you have to sell the protected monopoly good--your trademark.
Hermes can charge $10000 for a $1000 item because it has created $9000 worth of brand value in its trademark. So, theoretically, it should be value-neutral for you to take the Hermes bag and leave $1000 on the counter, provided that you also remove and leave behind every trademarked element on the item. That's the only way Hermes breaks even. And the only way you can do this non-hypothetically without it being considered theft is by purchasing a knock-off bag for $1000 instead.
You can get a loan, buy the handbag for $10000, and disassemble it to create a copy pattern. Then you make and sell 10 copies at $2000 to pay off your loan, and sell an 11th copy to pay for the 12th, that you keep for yourself. At that point, you can continue making copies to serve all the customers that Hermes is excluding by setting its price so high, and profit from their narrow market focus. But you can't put a Hermes logo on your copies. Trademark.
This happens all the time, because fashion has no copyrights.
Copying isn't stealing. Stealing is stealing. You can't be a fashion monopolist, because there are trivial barriers to entry and no legal protections. Therefore, in order to price higher than the marginal cost of production, you have to sell the protected monopoly good--your trademark.
Hermes can charge $10000 for a $1000 item because it has created $9000 worth of brand value in its trademark. So, theoretically, it should be value-neutral for you to take the Hermes bag and leave $1000 on the counter, provided that you also remove and leave behind every trademarked element on the item. That's the only way Hermes breaks even. And the only way you can do this non-hypothetically without it being considered theft is by purchasing a knock-off bag for $1000 instead.