South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
For these Birkenstocks, you may have to pay up
Birkenstock Boston clogs should cost you about $160. If you can find a pair, that is.
Thanks largely to social media, the cork-heeled staple has become a hot-ticket item in recent months. It’s so hot that the taupe suede leather model, the favorite among users on TikTok, is sold out in every size on Birkenstock’s website. Only a few sizes are available in other suede leather colors. (If you have very tiny feet or very large ones, you may be in luck.)
This leaves three options. One: You can wait patiently for a restock. On the Birkenstock subreddit, a community devoted entirely to the German footwear brand, users post updates alerting other community members when certain styles are back in stock online. Blink and they will be gone again.
Two: Try your luck at an outside retailer, where supplies have also appeared to dwindle in recent weeks.
Kristen Seninger, 24, called a local Journeys store in San Francisco for five days straight in late
August asking if it had a pair in her size. “I did this every single day, multiple times a day for the past week and I got them,” she said in a TikTok video filmed in her car after purchasing the shoes. “The girls in the store basically knew my name. They hated me, but we secured the goods today.” (In a phone interview, Seninger said the Journeys employee who sold her the clogs was “excited” she had finally gotten a pair.)
Or option three: Pony up some extra cash for resale sites like eBay and Poshmark, where sellers are listing pairs of Bostons for marked-up prices, in some cases for more than double their retail value.
Sarah Cowie, an accountant in Michigan, tried and failed to find a pair of the coveted clogs, specifically a pair in taupe suede, after seeing them in a video from one of her favorite YouTubers, Gretchen Geraghty.
“I’m so late to the party that they were all sold out everywhere,” Cowie, 27, said in a phone call. “I went on Poshmark because I use Poshmark to sell a lot of my clothes. I found a pair. It was ridiculously overpriced, but I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to wear these, so it’s worth it.’ ” Cowie said she ultimately paid about $330 for the shoes.
“They’re so controversial now,” she added, describing the popularity of the shoes on TikTok. “Some people are like, ‘Hey, they’re really cute,’ and some people think they’re a potato shoe.”
Cowie’s particular pair of Bostons made their way to Michigan from a Poshmark seller in Nashville, Tennessee, Savannah Huml. Huml, 27, purchased five pairs of Birkenstock Bostons this summer from a store in Wisconsin. A longtime fan of the style, she had planned to keep two pairs for herself and give the rest as gifts to her sisters and a friend.
“I was selling some of my older jeans on Poshmark, and I was wearing a pair of my old ones and people are more interested in those than they were in the pants that I was actually selling,” Huml said of the Bostons she happened to be wearing in a photo she posted on the resale platform. “That’s when I realized, ‘OK, you know what? That’s fine.’
If everybody really wants these, I can sell them instead of giving it to them for Christmas.”
She has since sold three of the pairs, including the ones she sold to Cowie. One pair fetched $350, Huml said. (Poshmark takes a
20% commission on sales over $15.) People on the platform have accused her of price gouging and have left nasty comments, some of which Huml said she reported to Poshmark for harassment.
“I looked at some of the people that were kind of harassing me and they seem to be adult accounts. They weren’t, you know,
14-year-olds,” Huml said. “These seem to be moms, mothers harassing me on the internet because I have a pair of Boston clogs that their daughter really wants.”
The rise of the Birkenstock Boston did not happen overnight. The clogs were spotted in 2021 on the feet of many celebrities, including Kendall Jenner, Kaia Gerber and YouTube personality Emma Chamberlain.
“I didn’t come up with this idea on my own. But I saw multiple people that I
really like their style wearing these,” Chamberlain said of her purchase in a video last year. “Sometimes I’m a sheep just like everybody else.”
Sales of Bostons are “up double digits,” according to a representative for Birkenstock, writing in an email that the company has seen increased interest in the style over the past several years. “Consumer demand for Birkenstock has exceeded supply for 10 years now,” the representative wrote. The Birkenstock Arizona, the iconic two-strap sandal that is synonymous with the brand, has also become fashionable in recent years, from designer pairs to the super comfortable plastic
EVA model.
The steady increase in popularity of the clogs on social media caught Sarah Hoxsie’s eye. Hoxsie, 25, works in digital marketing and runs a side business reselling clothes on Poshmark from Fairfield, Connecticut.
“When you see things going viral on TikTok, from a reseller’s point of view, that’s more of, like, ‘OK, that’s something that I should keep in stock’ or ‘I should try and sell,’ ” she said.
Hoxsie purchased six pairs of Bostons at Retail
101, a discount store that sells new items as well as items with slight defects and items that had previously been returned.
“I’ve never in my life felt like a Birkenstock would be something that is almost like a Supreme item where people buy them and then resell it for like five times the amount,” Hoxsie said. She said she also received her share of critical comments, reporting some for harassment on Mercari, another reselling platform she uses.
Not everyone cares to have the real deal, though. For some, getting the Boston look at a fraction of the price scratches the same itch. Sonali Prabhu,
25, got a pair of dupes — internet speak for a cheaper duplicate of a popular product — from Kohl’s for $50. “I feel like they just all look the same. And most of the outfit inspo that I’m seeing for these Birkenstocks are, like, covered. They’re halfway covered,” Prabhu, a photographer and influencer in Austin,Texas, said. “It’s just like the little, like, round part in the front that’s showing anyways. So I just thought, you know, it’s not even worth getting it for, like, hundreds of dollars.”