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A few days before Christmas last year, Nicole Pollard, the founder of luxury styling firm Lalaluxe, got a call from a client. They wanted a rare Himalayan Birkin with diamond hardware — and they wanted it wrapped and ready to go by the holiday.
For the unfamiliar, a Birkin is an exclusive Hermès bag favored by the very wealthy. Himalayan refers to the material: the hand-dyed underbelly of a crocodile. And the diamonds are self-explanatory. It all comes together for a price tag of $750,000.
Pollard turned to her international network of Birkin dealers for help. She procured the goods, and got the bag on a plane with its own security detail. It was under the tree on Christmas morning.
"For the person that has everything, why not have diamonds on your handbag too?" LA-based Pollard, whose services start at $600 per hour — plus a percentage of the purchase price — told Business Insider.
Pollard makes a good point: Holiday gifting is hard enough for people that do have wishlists. So what about the people who really have it all? Billionaires and centimillionaires like to give and receive just like the rest of us, after all, even if those gifts cost much more (and are probably harder to find at your local Target).
"They just want to see what the best of the best looks like," Elisabeth Brown, a New York-based client manager at travel and lifestyle concierge company Knightsbridge, told BI. "There's not really a budget — they just want what they want and would like to make it happen."
For comparison, this holiday season Americans generally plan to spend an average of $1,652, according to a Deloitte survey. That's about 0.2% of the price of that Himalayan Birkin.
From a racehorse to a vineyard, some gifts are too big to fit under a tree
Along with Chanel and Rolex, Hermès is one of the most requested brands, Pollard said. Birkins are viewed as a collectible and come in rare varieties, and are a popular choice among the uberrich.
Courtesy of Nicolle Pollard
Winston Chesterfield, the founder of Barton, a London consulting firm focused on the wealthy, knows one Hermès collector whose husband gets her a new color handbag from the French house every year — as well as a selection of luxury goods and tchotchkes in the same hue.
Other hits, Lalaluxe's Pollard said, are things that can be personalized, whether that means literally — monogrammed Goyard luggage that costs over $10,000 or a gift hamper full of items with the recipient's zodiac sign, for example — or just something tailored to someone's hobbies.
"Sometimes the thought that goes into a gift, no matter what the size, really stops them in their tracks," Pollard said.
A family that loves to hike may give each other the very best outdoor gear from brands like Moncler and Loro Piana, Chesterfield said. Foodies may gift balsamic vinegar flown in directly from Italy.
But other hobby-inspired gifts are more billionaire-coded.
For example, a vineyard in Tuscany for an oenophile. Knightsbridge Circle helped facilitate the purchase of a $5 million site as a Christmas gift, complete with a mansion where Napoleon once stayed, plus its own honey and olive oil production facilities. The pricetag makes the $50,000 annual membership fee for Knightsbridge Circle's services look like a bargain.
Have a loved one who's into racehorses? Fly them to a top stable, have them meet with the jockeys, and for the party favor: a steed of their own.
The chance to meet and learn from the best of the best — be it lessons at a turntable from a celebrity DJ or a cooking class with a Michelin-starred chef — is another popular present that can run into the high six figures.
"They cost an absolute bomb," Barton's Chesterfield said.
Experiences reign supreme for billionaires
"To everyone, and of course to the uberwealthy, time is your most precious commodity," Knightsbridge Circle's Brown said.
Sometimes the price of time is measurable. An hour on a private plane from Vistajet, for example, starts at $11,000. One of Chesterfield's contacts, who didn't want to shell out to buy a jet, gave his daughter about half a million dollars worth of hours after she got used to flying private during the pandemic.
But the intangible value of time well-spent is what the rich really covet, with all of the experts that BI spoke with saying that there's a general move away from gifting items and toward gifting experiences.
"People seem to be a bit exhausted with what you'd call hard luxury," Chesterfield said. The pandemic seems to have exacerbated the experience trend, too. One wealthy woman, he said, told her husband she wants no more jewelry after spending months locked inside buying luxurious goods.
One family that Chesterfield works with rented a private island in the Caribbean for two weeks, and he said yoga retreats and wellness breaks — from a trip to Rishikesh, the birthplace of yoga, to a father-son cycling excursion in Mallorca — are growing in popularity.
Some of Brown's clients hire private villas in conservancies in Africa, like Ol Jogi in Kenya or Saanane Island in Tanzania, which can run up to $40,000 a night. Still, she clarified that the stay (and the possibility of glimpsing wildlife from your breakfast table) is typically not the only gift they are getting.
Even further from home, Pollard has one client who is traveling to space for the holiday — which she called "the ultimate flex for the billionaire class."
The rich are racing against the effects of global warming
Climate change concerns are reflected in the types of travel experience people are giving, with a "rush for clients to see things before they're gone," Pollard said. Instead of a regular superyacht in St. Barths, they're chartering an expedition superyacht to see the glaciers in Antarctica or Patagonia, for example, or are going to Australia to see the Great Barrier Reef.
But there are also those who are more concerned about their carbon footprint — or just think it's all a little tacky — and are forgoing big gifts altogether.
"We've noticed this year people just being much less acquisitive and a bit more restrained," Chesterfield said. Christmas has "become just too commercial," they told her.
Maybe take a leaf from Warren Buffett's gift guide. The Oracle of Omaha famously used to give each of his family members $10,000 in cash — but after he learned they were blowing it, switched it up and now gives stock to some and chocolate to others. Bill Gates suggests books to enjoy over the holiday.
One family Chesterfield knows is doing a Secret Santa with a $10 spending limit.
"They think it's more about spending time with each other," he said. "They've become less materialistic."
Heartwarming, of course, but with a net worth of $250 million, maybe every day feels a bit like waking up to presents under the tree.