Luck, amazing product, or both?
A guy sold handmade bags at the same New York flea market booth for the better part of two decades. Some weeks he sold one. Maybe two. Breaking double digits was out of the question. Then one customer filmed nine seconds of video on her phone, and everything changed. The story is everywhere right now — CBS Saturday Morning just did a segment on it. One of the things they focused on was the ticketing system that Pierre Laborde has implemented to control the crowds that line up every week in front of his booth.
@ideal.grace i need everyone to blow this man’s brand up, we need more local nyc designers without crazy price tags (though also every artisan deserves a fair wage) 🤍 #grandbazaar #nyclife #nyctiktok #shoppingaddict #shoppinghaul #baghaul #localbusiness ♬ unreleased - thisischromas
The Booth Nobody Noticed
Pierre Laborde has been making bags since 2008, working out of a small room in his Washington Heights apartment connected to his kitchen. Cowhide piled around the room. Thousands of colors. A sewing station splattered with nearly two decades of paint. For most of that time, he sold at the Grand Bazaar NYC, the city’s oldest weekly shopping market, on the Upper West Side.
He didn’t have an ad budget, a publicist, or a social media strategy. He had a table against a kitchen wall and a habit of showing up to the same booth, week after week, regardless.
Nine Seconds
In the fall of 2024, a fashion-focused social media strategist named Grace Masingale walked through the Grand Bazaar and stopped at Laborde’s booth. She was the only customer there. What caught her wasn’t a marketing pitch — it was the resemblance to a much more expensive brand. “What immediately drew me was it reminded me so much of Tom Ford,” she said. Except Laborde’s bags ran a few hundred dollars, not a few thousand.
She posted a nine-second TikTok. The ask was simple: “I need everyone to blow this man’s brand up.” It has since pulled more than half a million views. A week later, she went back to her followers with an update: his booth was packed.
From there it compounded. More TikToks through 2025, including a studio visit from the luxury handbag account Via Giulia after a viral clip from another creator. By this year, Laborde was posting sell-out weeks of around 30 minutes and switching to a ticketed system just to manage the crowds. One woman told NY1 she woke up at 4 a.m. to get to the city. Another flew in from Los Angeles and got in line before the market even opened. CBS Saturday Morning ran its own feature on him in August — by that point, a well-established story more than a discovery.
His Bags Were Always Special, But No One Knew It.
Here’s the part that’s easy to skip past: a nine-second video doesn’t create sustained demand on its own. It creates a spike. What happens after the spike depends entirely on what people find when they show up.
Every outlet that’s covered Laborde — NY1, NBC News, Black Enterprise, CBS — independently lands on the same detail. Every bag is genuinely one-of-one: he cuts the shape himself, matches the cowhide and leather by hand, stitches and paints the strap himself. No shortcuts, no mass production, no two bags alike. He’s turned down the option to scale it up. “To me, it’s like a child,” he said.
That’s the difference between a viral moment and a viral vendor. A booth can catch a lucky break and still burn out in a week if what’s actually on the table doesn’t hold up once a few hundred thousand new eyes are looking at it. Laborde’s moment is now fifteen-plus months old and still building. The product survived contact with the audience. That’s not luck. That’s what luck needed to work with.
More Media About Pierre Laborde
NBC News: “The secret behind the viral Pierre Laborde bags is how each of them are created by hand” — NBC News’ Zinhle Essamuah goes inside Laborde’s workshop to learn more about his process and journey. Published May 27, 2026.
Black Enterprise: “Meet The Haitian Designer Behind These Viral Hard-To-Find Handbags” — covers the second viral wave, driven by luxury bag-rental TikTok account Via Giulia.
MadameNoire: “Haitian Designer Francis Pierre Laborde Shakes Up Luxury Handbag Industry With Viral Creations” — more on Laborde’s background and design philosophy, plus current bag pricing ($275–$1,200).
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