The luxury handbag market is a 13 billion dollar global market where leading brands compete for prestige and in the art of seducing affluent fashion conscious customers. Setting new trends for each season in colorful animal skins, precious metal and gems, designers create endlessly lavish interpretations of glamor, regality and function.

A handbag’s intrinsic value is constructed from the exoticness of material and expense of workmanship. The perceived value derives from a more complex set of carefully codified brand attributes that amount to an envisioned emblem of stature and fashionability. These aspirational values reverberate with the purchaser at the moment of sale, but the life of that value is fleeting. For some it will be short lived as further seasons of glorious new offerings tempt the bag connoisseur with ever more sensational designs and a renewed promise of fashionability.

The transition of a handbag moving from beloved personal artifact to one that is no longer a symbol of style is all but inevitable. The current market response to this fleeting affair is the growing online second market where purchasers can liquidate “last year’s bag.” While the promise of recovering a percentage of the purchase price by reselling on sites such as ebay, LuxuryExchange or SnobSwap is highly motivating—photographing, shipping and servicing customer inquiries can be fraught with frustration. The luxury consumer transformed into flea market peddler points to a large gap in the customer journey. An equally grand chasm exists for designers who have no tangible mechanism to cycle customers back into their brand. The customer is increasingly free to brand hop and the brand knows nothing of it.

A digital mindset is a human mindset. The predominant business success stories of recent years have created their advantage by innovating more fluid customer-focused experiences, products and services—creating faster and less hassled access to the things people do and consume. Delivering what people lack (or what could be done better) is where opportunity will be found and is made more easily achievable by digital innovation. When a customer’s affection for a handbag wanes it is a significant event ripe with information, but is currently an enigma. The brand that responds to relieve this point of frustration would be positioned to reap the benefits of affinity, loyalty and repeat purchase probability on an unrealized scale. If Zappos offers any indication, their 365-day return policy has contributed to a 75 percent rate of repeat business. For luxury handbag designers where points of differentiation between brands are nuanced, capturing an unrepresented area in the longer market picture would create a point of distinction and strengthen customer bond.

Arriving at the right response requires walking in the customer’s shoes and the best processes of design thinking. A broad solution taking the form of a digital exchange could become a key point of assurance for a customer interested in selling and upgrading. A customer would know the updated market valuation of their current bag in their online dossier and be able to upgrade to the new season’s collection. The service could include metrics that predicted when trends are changing and when a customer would likely be receptive to an up-cycling offer. The exchange could become an enriched experience where customer’s feel they have inside access to the brand—seeing special content from behind the curtain and the brand would have favored merchandising opportunity.

The complexities of extending into the second market are many: appraising the value of repurchased bags, creating facilities, systems and distribution channels on a global scale with retail partners. The method to profitably resell the inventory may require an alliance with an experienced second market retailer to facilitate all but the customer facing side of the operation rather than building out an organization.

Having an expensive bag that no longer gives cachet remains a lonesome predicament. Currently designer brands and retailers aren’t interested, and the second market platforms are unreliable and exact a hefty cut. If a designer brand had empathy for that customer beyond the moment of initial sale and extended itself to relieve the customer when the inevitable occurs the connection would pay off for both. This might even start a trend.