Fool me once...

Hi there. I don't know how you got to here, but welcome. I've created this blog in order to prevent others from making the same mistake I did. You see, I unintentionally bought a fake Coach handbag. I'm not going to make any sort of moral judgments regarding those folks who choose to buy fake designer products. Most all of us have done it at one time or another. In the past, when I have done so, however, I have found that said product is of poor quality, falls apart quickly, and is usually a blatantly obvious fake to anyone in the know. Like those bags that sort of have the Coach signature C's except, when you take a closer look, they are really G's.

I've also created this blog as a penance. I wanted a deal and wasn't willing to wait until I had saved up enough to buy straight from Coach. I thought I could get the hookup from a reseller or someone who just got tired of their bag and wanted to get rid of it. I was wrong. Well, not entirely wrong. There are plenty of good, honest people out there trying to unload real, legit designer handbags. The problem is, you can never be sure. Oh, I tried to be sure. I looked for someone on EBAY who had good feedback and didn't seem to be a mass handbag seller. I found amykeeka. She seemed to just be unloading a bag or two she bought on impulse. She even had receipts! And I took the bait. What I received was this:


There are a few problems with this bag, though the one that jumps out at you is that this bag, as you see it in the photograph, was never manufactured by Coach. But that aside, there are some other little inconsistancies that, had I known as much then as I know now, I would have recognized. Like uneven lines and the weird color of the "leather," which naturally, as I am a sucker, turned out to be vinyl. Also, most real Coach bags stand up for themselves. If you put them down on a table, even when empty, they look pretty good. They don't slump in weird ways. And there is more.

But the point of this, my first post, is that I hate to be duped out of money because I was an uninformed consumer. In the case of the purchase of this "designer" bag, I was. The receipt turned out to be a photocopy that the seller used when posting three more of the same bag - whoa, red flag! That, and the uneven frabric was what set me off. Oh, and the vinyl. Anyway, since then, I have been on a quest to learn as much about identifying real Coach bags by sight as possible. And I want to include you in that quest.