The hospital for handbags

A recent Tweet says it all. A woman in London, delighted at the recent opening of the city’s branch of the Handbag Clinic, enthused: “Our prayers have been answered – London’s first handbag hospital.”

This is indicative of the general response provoked by the shop on Chelsea’s prestigious King’s Road.

Before it even opened, founder and managing director Ben Staerck was inundated with enquires – how soon could people start bringing their handbags for repair, being the central theme. At the launch, attended by Welsh glamour model Imogen Thomas, Ben and his staff staged demonstrations including removing white paint from the likes of Chanel, Gucci and Chloe bags. Customers were impressed, and, within five days of opening, the shop had hit its target for the month.

To Ben and his highly skilled team, it was all in a day’s work.

The Handbag Clinic began in summer 2013 as a spin-off of The Furniture Clinic, the company established by Ben’s father Keith in Newcastle. Already accustomed to repairing handbags, Ben felt this branch should be a stand-alone business. His theory – that those uncomfortable with sending their bags to a non-specialist would prefer this – proved justified, and trade multiplied overnight.

Now, the industrial unit adjacent to the Furniture Clinic, which is the Handbag Clinic’s headquarters, cleans and repairs more than 100 bags a week, with numbers quickly rising.

It is an unglamorous setting. Stepping through the front door, you are greeted with a display of different types of leather and beyond this is the factory floor, where colours are matched using a specialist machine called a spectrophotometer.

Bottles of fluids – everything from stain remover to furniture scent – attest to the company’s origins, as a manufacturer of wood and leather cleaners. Upstairs, there are scenes of mild chaos as work to add an extra 4,000sq ft of space progresses, yet, amid this, packed in boxes, are highly-prized handbags – some worth up to £5,000.

A lone Celine bag stands in a booth, ready to be sprayed. There are eight technicians, each employing a range of skills to make handbags as good as new, and often the first task is applying carefully matched paint. A plastic container stands in the corner, each brand with its own range of colours. When bags come in for repair, it’s useful to have this as a reference point, but, as Ben explains, it’s never that simple.

“Even if another bag comes in with the exact same colour, we still need to tweak it, because obviously one bag might have been exposed to more sunlight and so on,” he says. “Each repair is individual.”

Most of the clinic’s trade comes from outside the region, with customers normally sending bags through the post. It was its distance from the South – and the desire for a customer-facing outlet, that prompted the opening of the London store.

“There’s obviously a lot more wealth in London,” says Ben, 28. “Every woman who walks past the shop has an expensive handbag, whereas if you stood in Northumberland Street, you would see an awful lot more people but I bet you wouldn’t see as many designer names.”

While Ben estimates the average value of handbags the clinic sees as £1,000, it repairs extremes at both ends of the scale. Sometimes, people send in relatively cheap bags because they can’t bear to part with them.

“We get people who have bought a bag from Marks & Spencer and can’t find another one like it so they send it to us for repairs,” says Ben. “Some are family heirlooms with sentimental value. We get quite a lot from the Duchess of Northumberland. The cheapest repair we do is £24.95 and that’s stitching work for small pieces of damage, ranging to beyond £500. The average order value is £110.”

Customers are quoted not on the item’s value but the complexity of the repair, so that a vintage bag with intricate weaving, for example, might cost more than a flat-panel Chanel. The clinic also offers stain insurance, providing peace of mind for this common problem.

“We can always remove or cover a stain but if a piece of hardware is damaged, we can’t replace it with a piece of branded hardware, so we didn’t want to over-commit for repairs,” explains Ben.

That said, the clinic is loath to give up on any bag, and has even enlisted help from specialist metal fabricators. The only downside to this is the cost, but, for some customers, money is no object.

“We’ve done repairs for Caroline Kennedy, Arlene Phillips and a Saudi princess,” says Ben. “Sometimes we will get a bag in and we can’t find the problem with it – it can be the tiniest little problem ever. We have one customer who has over £100,000 worth of bags insured with us. She’s put a value on one of £40,000.”

As the handbag business has flourished, so the Furniture Clinic has continued to grow, and now has 11 branches, including in New York and Hong Kong. Ben sees bright futures for both, and would love to open further Handbag Clinics.

“I knew it was always going to be big but I didn’t ever think it would be as big as we’ve got now,” he says. “I can see so much potential. We get shoes, skirts, leather jackets and all sorts now for cleaning and repairs. If the London shop continues to go well we will most likely open a Handbag Clinic in Manhattan. We could probably have five shops in London.”

One thing Ben claims won’t change is the clinic’s base. He lives in Whickham, near the industrial estate on which it stands, and has no plans to move. Neither, he says, would he want to relocate his core team of staff, who take two years of training to acquire the necessary skills.

If nothing else, running the clinic, which is often compared with a spa or hospital for handbags, has given Ben a rare insight into female psychology. “I had a customer recently who said her husband spent money on cars, so why shouldn’t she spend it on handbags,” he laughs. “I would probably say a big part of our business is fixing bags from people who should never have bought these expensive bags in the first place. Maybe it’s a once-in-a-lifetime purchase. For people like that, I think we are a saviour.”

• The Handbag Clinic, Unit 10, Hobson Industrial Estate, Burnopfield, (01207) 279963 thehandbagclinic.co.uk