PARIS, FRANCE – JULY 03: A black Hermès Birkin handbag in box calf leather with gold-tone hardware is displayed on a glass shelf under spotlight lighting, highlighting the luxurious texture and classic structure of the iconic model. Photographed during a fashion and luxury goods auction preview at Sotheby’s on July 03, 2025 in Paris, France. (Photo by Edward Berthelot/Getty Images)
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There are exponentially more willing buyers of Birkin Bags than there are Birkin Bags. Which is why Hermes has to be so careful about choosing whom it sells its bags to.
Among other things, it must consider those who will represent it best, thus expanding broad excitement about the brand’s other products. Sales may also reflect a look ahead, whereby efforts are made to please small buyers who might eventually be big buyers. Certainly Hermes must look beyond best customers to spread sales around city, region, country and continents to maintain globalized customer interest and loyalty.
Arguably of greatest importance to Hermes is what it learns from certain buyers about how the bags are used, what they’re used with, worn with, and all manner of other considerations. Let’s call these buyers “venture buyers” as described in my 2018 book, The End of Work.
From these rarified but not necessarily richest customers, businesses learn how to not just meet the needs of existing and future customers, they learn how to lead their needs. Thought of in terms of Hermes’ brand opposite, if you’re McDonald’s and you’re testing the marketability of a new food item, would you prefer to sell it to a traditional vegan or someone known to devour fast food items with great regularity? Hopefully the question answers itself.
It’s useful to think about as Sen. Jim Banks (R- IN) brings forward the GAIN AI Act. The legislation would force chip companies like Nvidia, AMD and Intel to “satisfy U.S. demand before sending products to China and other countries subject to U.S. embargo.” The problems with this legislation are many. Let’s start with a pivot back to Hermes.
It’s useful to point out that your odds of purchasing a Birkin Bag improve in the secondary market. In other words, those Hermes sells to will at times put the bags up for sale.
Applied to Nvidia, AMD and Intel, how wrongheaded for U.S. lawmakers to force domestic sales that then set up the favored buyers to sell Nvidia chips at a premium inside and outside the U.S. Nvidia and others should be able to choose their customers, not have them chosen for them to their long-term disadvantage.
Then there’s the more obvious point that particularly if chip manufacturing doesn’t meet with global demand, AMD, Nvidia and others need to very carefully decide whom to sell to today with tomorrow top of mind. The latter not only has to do with maintaining existing market share in the present, it also has to do with the chip manufacturers positioning themselves for much greater global sales in the future.
Thought of in terms of China, it’s still a very poor country relative to the United States. It’s a sign that China’s best growth days are ahead. Which means Sen. Banks’s legislation could potentially cost the U.S.’s greatest chipmakers near-term losses of market share that will become quite a bit more costly in the future.
Or perhaps the loss of global share could be permanent if a perceived unreliability of U.S. producers via legislative decree forces Chinese technologists to turn inward, or away from the United States in pursuit of more reliable domestic or foreign suppliers. See Huawei’s Mate Pro 60 smartphone if you’re skeptical.
Which brings us to the crucial “venture buyer.” If Nvidia, AMD, Intel and others can’t sell into an increasingly innovative Chinese technology sector, they’ll be unable to learn from those buyers how they use their chips, what the market applications of those chips are and could be, and what to design in the future to profit from knowledge gained.
Paraphrasing Jensen Huang, others don’t have to lose for Nvidia to win. Exactly. Explicit there is that the greatest AI leaps won’t come via siloed innovation, but the greats working together.
Precisely because Chinese innovation is on the rise, Nvidia must be able to sell to and learn from these venturesome buyers who, in preferring American chips, will teach American innovators even more about their worth through visionary use of them. In short, the GAIN AI Act doesn’t just imperil Nvidia, AMD and Intel market share in China, it imperils their future ability to compete around the world, including in the United States.