Pity the Chinese personal shopper. Life used to be easy for the daigou: women, usually young, who travelled the world to bring back foreign bargains for the handbag-hungry masses back home.
They’d trawl for Guccis by day, and feed off the fat margins at night as luxury goods were much cheaper in European capitals than in China, where duties, taxes and the laws of supply and demand led to inflated Pradas and Louis Vuittons. Buy high, sell higher — but not quite so high as in the luxury mall back home: that was the daigou business model. Call it handbag arbitrage.
The wise daigou didn’t give up her day job since what she was doing wasn’t strictly legal; but at the very least she got the odd free trip to Paris out of it.
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