When China Becomes More Credible Than Hermes

2025 has not been a good year for luxury brands. Their markets have dwindled amid a rise of inflation and anti-consumerism, their growth in one of their biggest markets — China — has slumped, US President Donald Trump’s tariffs have plunged a knife into their margins and now Chinese “manufacturers” have gone nuclear on their brand image.

That last bit began last week as scores of so-called manufacturers and “sourcing experts” from China began posting detailed and often provocative videos on TikTok claiming that most of the luxury items the world buys are all produced in China. They all seemed to fixate on one figure — 80%.

No one seems to know where that figure came from and it doesn’t seem like many care. From luxe handbag-makers Hermes and Chanel to footwear brand Birkenstock to legging-maker Lululemon… no one has been spared.

The man you see above — known currently as Senbags2 — became the face of this phenomenon as he claimed — in detailed videos — how 80% of the world’s luxury bags were made in China. Over the course of scores of videos he appeared to break down the various raw materials and costs of producing high-end bags — again, information that for most is hard to verify. Hilariously, someone dug up an old video in which he’s also seen claiming to be an expert on electric vehicles, saying China makes the best EVs in the world.

Still how do you distrust this information that he claims with such confidence? In one video he’s seen holding up leather, dyed bright purple, that looks like a full-scale alligator. In another he claims he isn’t infringing on any copyrights since the patent on the designs of these handbags “have already expired”. In a third video he talks about a stitching thread that he claims is the “Rolls Royce” of the leather sewing world. He then claims a $38,000 Hermes Birkin actually costs less than $1400 to make.

Most of his videos carry the message — “it’s time to open your eyes”. Another account posting similar videos says: “we make pennies, while they make millions… that’s unfair to us, to you, to anyone who values honesty… wake up, stop feeding the machine.”

It’s hard to argue that this isn’t some very masterful messaging, at a time when people in the US — their target audience — are counting the costs of eggs and gas in the face of outsized tariffs.

And it explains why these articulately crafted English-language videos became — and continue to be — all the rage among American influencers. One such influencer told the New York Times that “she believed that people in China were ultimately trying to help Americans.” The influencer — 23-year-old Elizabeth Henzie — has gone on to curate an entire spreadsheet of Chinese manufacturers for everything from sneakers to furniture.

And Henzie is also not the only one doing this. For every video of a “Chinese manufacturer” claiming to undercut luxury margins and Trump tariffs by selling direct to US consumers, there is an American feed listing out these manufacturers. For every person questioning the authenticity of these claims is someone claiming to be a fashion industry “insider” who “knows” they are “1000% true”.

The divide between the two sides — the one that claims these posts are a scam versus the one that’s celebrating the “outing” of luxury brands — is so deep that one video by Vogue magazine from last year showing how Hermes bags are made is littered with comments like “well, that didn’t age well.”

Regardless of how anyone might feel about these videos and the claims being made on them, it's worth pondering how a country known for decades for counterfeiting billions of dollars worth of goods has suddenly become the reliable and credible voice on luxury supply chains.

It’s a change that is the antithesis of the bad-guy image of China that Joe Biden so carefully crafted in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. And it’s a change that has undoubtedly been triggered by the unrelenting tariffs that Trump has wreaked on the world — where not even the penguins and seals on remote Antarctic islands are spared.

That’s a gargantuan leap in perception – and in just 100 days.

Laughing Straight to the Bank 💰️ 

It’s worth mentioning here that the immense unpredictability surrounding American tariffs have not helped. The running joke among analysts is that what might be true of tariffs today, may not be true tomorrow.

And so it’s easy to deduce that China is benefitting from the distrust around American politics.

Platforms like Reddit and Threads are suddenly seeing a deluge of comments cheering Beijing on as it seemingly refuses to bow to the threat of Trump’s tariffs. And the US President’s admission this week that those tariffs — that stand at a cumulative 245% currently — are about to go down substantially have only fuelled the fire.

It means that in just four months, the number of Americans that view China unfavourably has already declined. According to Pew Research, while the decline in the numbers is small (down to 77% from 81% last year), this is the “first time in five years” that such a fall has been seen.

It is also significant that any claims from luxury manufacturers denying that they manufacture in China haven’t received half as much the spotlight as the Chinese TikTok videos. In fact, even after TikTok has taken down the majority of these videos, their copies continue to flood across multiple social media channels.

Chinese suppliers are effectively in for a potential boom in revenues from American buyers looking for a bargain.

But perhaps the biggest irony here is that replicas of these luxury goods have existed for years and it has been the Chinese manufacturers – maybe the same ones who made the original? – who have consistently improved their quality.

• iPhone-maker Apple is shifting production to India to avoid levies on goods exported from China.

• The International Monetary Fund has warned that the global economy could suffer a “significant slowdown” this year from tariffs imposed by the US.

• The United Nations says large-scale scam centres have expanded from Southeast Asia to regions all across the world ‘like a global cancer’.
  

• And China is taking a leaf from the United States’ playbook as it looks to choke supplies of critical rare earth metals to the country.