For the past 2 months I have been on the hunt for a Gucci Disco Soho handbag. I was obsessed!! I decided to take the plunge and to purchase on off of eBay. I looked for several weeks to find one that was in the color I wanted (Red), in excellent condition and for a reasonable price.
The bag, isn't it lovely?
So finally, I thought I had found the one. This handbag was exactly what I wanted so I went for it! It was an auction so I entered the amount I was willing to spend, and to my astonishment I won the auction for a great deal less than the max I willing to spend on it! Clue #1- If the deal is too good to be true, it probably is. I won the handbag for a mere $530. Now that is a lot of money I know, but this handbag retails for $895 plus tax! I thought I had simply lucked out, so I happily paid the money and waited for my bag to arrive.
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So the bag arrived, fairly quickly. Since I had purchased it on eBay I immediately inspected it of course. But I'm not going to lie, I thought it was authentic!! The leather smelled great, and it felt even better! The zipper worked well. I thought it was a winner. However, I knew this was not enough to prove its authenticity so I did more research, and that is when I discovered it was not real.
With further inspection, the tag that says "Gucci made in italy" was really faint and fairly hard to read. It was almost non existent (you can see what I mean with the picture I took below)! When you look at the real deal, it is very clear to read and more imprinted, if that's the right word.
Another clue was the inside tag. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get a picture of this tag on the fake handbag but I do clearly remember how it looked like. Hopefully, I can paint a clear picture of it! There is a black tag, I believe its located on the left side, and on side said Gucci made in italy and the other side said 100% Cotone. That is WRONG. Below I have a picture of what the tag should look like! As you can see the text wraps around the front and back! It has some numbers below and that is it!
Lastly, and really the most obvious flaw in my opinion, it the hardware above the tassels. On the fake I received. You can really see the differences in the hardware from the pictures I took and the ones I got from the Niemam Marcus website. First of all the bumps (not sure if that is the right term but let's go with it) stick out just a tiny bit too much as compared to the real ones. Secondly, on the fake there were only three of this bumps in total! While I am not sure how many bumps there should be, there should definitely be more than just 3!
So that is pretty much how I knew the handbag I received was not authentic! I was lucky enough to have brought from a seller who refunded me all of my money back, so all in all, this was a good learning experience! I really, really hope this will be helpful to those of you looking to buy this hand off of eBay, or anywhere else for that matter! Let me know if you have any question I would be happy to help!
XOXO,
D
