Chanel destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of products in one market to protect its exclusivity. Ask a fashionista whether it is criminal to destroy hundreds of painstakingly made luxury items simply because they belong to an old season, and she will probably say yes. To the heart, it seems cruel to shred beautiful objects merely because they failed to fly off the shelves. Yet until only a few years ago, this was a closely guarded reality at luxury maisons such as Chanel.
Knowing that hundreds of Chanel products were destined for destruction, four men who worked at the house’s Hong Kong warehouse plotted to steal 814 items with a combined production cost of approximately $1.12 million. Their scheme consisted of two separate plots. The first, in 2016, targeted 90 handbags with a production cost of $670,000, reported SCMP. The second, attempted on a much larger scale in February 2017, involved 601 handbags and 123 wallets. Altogether, the men intended to make off with 691 handbags and 123 wallets, products that Chanel itself had decided were commercially worthless.
Leaving the law aside for a moment, it is difficult not to see the waste in shredding so much craftsmanship. And this was only one warehouse. According to evidence presented in court, Chanel Hong Kong destroyed between 10,000 and 20,000 outdated products roughly every six months to protect the brand’s exclusivity. That works out to as many as 40,000 products a year in Hong Kong alone.
The attempt on saving the Chanel goods from certain death and for their benefit did not land well for the thieves. On August 3, Hong Kong’s High Court sentenced the four men to prison terms ranging from four to seven years over the two foiled plots, which took place between June 2016 and February 2017. Two defendants had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to steal before the trial, while warehouse supervisor Ng Yiu-lun and former employee Cheung Ka-wai were convicted after an 11-day trial. Ng, who received the longest sentence of seven years, was the mastermind, a Chanel warehouse supervisor, who controlled the password and key needed to operate a restricted freight elevator at the Goodman Interlink warehouse in Tsing Yi.
During the larger 2017 attempt, Cheung and warehouse worker Ho Tung-shan moved 33 boxes containing 724 Chanel products onto six pallets. Using pallet jacks and the restricted freight elevator, they transported the shipment from Chanel’s storage space on the 23rd floor to the underground loading area. A GoGoVan was waiting to carry the goods away, and the plan appeared to be working until an assistant warehouse manager confronted Cheung and called the police. Officers intercepted the shipment before it could leave the building, recovering all 724 products. That telephone call saved the Chanel goods from being stolen, but not from their original fate. The recovered products were later destroyed as planned.
If the four men learned the legal consequences of treating corporate waste as free merchandise, Chanel appears to have learned something from the episode too. The company says it no longer shreds unsold products. Their dead stock is now directed to L’Atelier des Matières, the recycling and creative-reuse operation Chanel established in 2019.
