The 1916 Company is known as one of the biggest names in both new and secondhand watches and jewelry. Now, the company is adding a new category to its offering: secondhand handbags.
The Pennsylvania-based company announced on Monday the full acquisition of Luxury in Reach, a Maryland-based handbag resale platform founded by Lauren Lynch Schuster, who is joining 1916 Company to oversee the sales of designer handbags. Schuster and Luxury in Reach previously sold handbags at the storefront of Baltimore-based Radcliffe Jewelers, which merged with the 1916 Company in 2023. Now, 1916 has fully acquired Luxury in Reach. The 1916 Company had around $600 million in revenue last year.
For both Schuster and 1916 Company CEO John Shmerler, the overlap between handbags and watches made the match a natural fit. Both products are luxury items, have a strong culture of collectors and enthusiasts around them, hold their value over time and have a robust secondhand market.
“It’s a vertical that makes perfect sense for what we do,” Shmerler said. “We believe in the secondary market. These types of items [handbags] hold their value, and they attract collectors. There are so many parallels to watches and jewelry.”
Handbags through Luxury in Reach are currently available on the 1916 Company’s website and at several of the company’s physical stores, including Baltimore and Pennsylvania. On the website, handbags are listed as a category alongside watches and jewelry, without any Luxury in Reach branding. For now, Luxury in Reach’s social channels remain intact, but they may be rebranded with the 1916 Company branding soon, according to the company. The 1916 Company was formed in 2023 from the merger of the online watch marketplace Watchbox with the jewelers Govberg Jewelers, Hyde Park Jewelers and Radcliffe Jewelers. Prior to the acquisition, Schuster owned 25% of Luxury in Reach, with the rest owned by Radcliffe Jewelers.
Schuster won’t just be overseeing the company’s handbag sales; she will also continue to host the popular live-shopping streams she hosts for Luxury in Reach. Luxury in Reach has about 50,000 followers on Instagram, where Schuster and director of operations Miranda Levin broadcast two to three times per week. On these broadcasts, Schuster and Levin show off new handbags and make sales. They also field questions about bags and have viewers track down elusive bags.
Schuster told Glossy that she won’t be changing anything about her live shopping strategy, except “magnifying” what already works well.
“We’re going to start doing more shows,” Schuster said. “We’ll introduce more categories. We’ll definitely be selling more watches and jewelry. And while it will still be and Miranda, we’ll bring in more experts on these other categories. We want it to be a one-stop for everything luxury.”
The global fashion resale business has been growing steadily for several years and is projected to reach $360 billion by 2030, according to Boston Consulting Group. Luxury marketplaces like Fashionphile and Rebag for handbags and Bezel and Chrono24 for watches are plentiful, making competition in the space tight.
Shmerler said the live shopping aspect that Schuster brings is one competitive edge the company has, along with the fact that 1916 Company has consciously avoided the peer-to-peer business model of some other resale companies.
“We own all of our inventory,” Shmerler said. “There are a lot of resellers that are very transactional — they barely touch the item. This is a market that relies on authenticity and trust. We decided early on to take a different path from some competitors.”
