Like many other youngsters, Tammy Phan had big dreams of one day having an exciting career. Read More
Calgary changemaker: One-time high-school dropout Tammy Phan went from putting used designer handbags on online classified sites to creating a multimillion-dollar reseller of high-end accessories
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Calgary changemaker: One-time high-school dropout Tammy Phan went from putting used designer handbags on online classified sites to creating a multimillion-dollar reseller of high-end accessories
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Like many other youngsters, Tammy Phan had big dreams of one day having an exciting career.
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“I wanted to be a fashion designer,” the native Calgarian says of her early teen years. But with her parents struggling just to keep a roof over their heads, such ambitious plans seemed far out of reach, even for a girl with a lot of moxy. “I wasn’t book smart, but I was street smart,” she says. “And I was scrappy.”
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While she didn’t end up designing clothes for the runway, Phan is what you would definitely call “fashion designer adjacent.” As the founder and CEO of Luxe du Jour (ldj.com), an online consignment seller and renter of luxury handbags, jewelry and other much-coveted fashion items, she sits atop a growing business empire that last year grossed C$30 million, with a staff of 31 running the show out of offices in Calgary, Vancouver and Irvine, Calif., along with three overseas satellite offices in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Thailand.
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She recently added men’s and accessories divisions to her growing offerings, where such items as Rolex watches can be purchased at a deep discount from their retail prices, along with an app that can be downloaded from the Apple app store.
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While some may scoff at the idea of selling used designer handbags as a solid business venture, consider this: according to Statista, a German-based online platform specializing in data gathering, the Canadian handbag market in 2025 is projected to generate revenue of US$1.2 billion, while the American handbag market is forecast to generate US$13 billion.
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In 2023, Phan appeared on CBC’s Dragons’ Den show, making a pitch for $3 million for a 10 per cent stake in the company. Dragons Manjit Minhas and Michele Romanow — two fellow Calgarians — agreed to partner with her for $3 million and 20 per cent of the business. An even better offer, though, was waiting after the cameras stopped rolling — one the Dragons weren’t willing to match. A Vancouver-based angel investor — who’d made his own millions seeing his startup acquired by a major player — stepped in with an offer of $5 million for a 20 per cent stake.
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While she went into her Dragon’s Den pitch with a $30-million valuation for the company, today Luxe du Jour is raising a Series B round of equity financing at a C$60-million valuation. Her angel investor “helped make it possible for us to open an office in California, and double our valuation in less than two years,” says Phan, who now has bragging rights to one of the biggest online luxury resale companies in North America.
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Plus, instead of quarterly meetings common with other investors, “I can randomly text him anytime I need help.”
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It wasn’t always in the bag for ‘black sheep’ of the family
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Phan, who currently divides her time between the new office in California and Luxe du Jour’s Calgary headquarters, is the first to admit she stumbled into a unique business idea she couldn’t dare to dream about as a kid growing up in what she calls Calgary’s “rough” neighbourhoods. Impatient to get out in the world and make her mark, her adolescence was marked by bouncing around from school to school, at one point getting expelled from Forest Lawn High School for truancy.
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By age 16, she was a high school dropout, much to her parents’ disappointment, which she says made her the “black sheep” of the family. Relatives told her young cousins to stay away from her, so they wouldn’t get any ideas about skipping classes or, heaven forbid, dropping out altogether. “Today, they are doctors and engineers,” says Phan, who has two younger brothers, one of whom works for her company. “That was what was expected of me as well, and my parents were so disappointed in me.”
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The lure of having her own bank account, though, was too much for the then-teenager, the daughter of refugees from the Vietnam war. “There was never any money and I wanted my own,” she says. Throughout her teens, she worked in her mom Feng’s cafe and deli near Chinook Centre, along with other various odd jobs.
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One of the things she wanted money for was a designer handbag. While that might seem like a frivolous purchase, for Phan it meant so much more. “I could never afford an expensive car, or a mansion,” she says, adding it was the one bit of luxury she could attain. “People said to me, ‘Why waste your money, just buy a fake,’ ” she says. “With counterfeits, you’re impressing other people; with the real thing, you’re impressing yourself.”
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Another benefit of a bona fide designer bag was one she’d learn a little more about down the road. “A lot of people have no idea that the real thing is an investment. Some of them, over time, can really go up in value.”
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At the tender age of 16, and with the help of an older boyfriend who had a steady paycheque — “a boyfriend my parents didn’t know about,” she says with a laugh — she got her first authentic designer bag, a $1,000 Louis Vuitton. And, as the saying goes, the rest is history.
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First foray into online selling an eye-opening experience
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By 2016, the then-22-year-old, who had been working as a bank teller for six years, had amassed a large handbag collection that included names such as Chanel, and Phan decided to sell off some of her collection to give her parents some money. “They had gotten into a financial pickle and I wanted to help,” she says.
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That first foray into selling her treasures was an eye-opener. “Back then, all you had online was Kijiji, Craigslist and eBay,” says Phan, an early online world she describes as a cesspool of lowball offers and out-and-out scammers. “Then there were the consignment stores, but they charged 40 per cent, even 50 per cent commissions.” Frustrated with the lack of options, Phan became an early adopter of Instagram, displaying her wares for a growing audience and finding a community of thousands.
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“I shared my knowledge of handbags, like how to choose the right bag as an investment, how to tell a fake from the real thing,” she says, noting she initially charged a bargain-basement 10 per cent commission (today, it is 20 per cent). She also convinced friends to post their bags and heard from a growing number of her Insta fans who also were interested in putting their designer handbags up for sale. “I still didn’t have any idea this would turn into a business,” says Phan, who spent the first few years of Luxe du Jour working out of her parents’ basement.
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In 2018, Phan travelled to Malaysia to study the art of handbag restoration, which led to the birth of the Luxe Bag Spa, which cleans, repairs and restores luxury bags. A microscopic intelligence scanner helps her to verify the authenticity of a handbag. But she long ago stopped educating her customers publicly about how to spot a fake from the real thing, “because the counterfeit manufacturers would use that information to improve their counterfeits.”
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Even for someone who would never shell out $3,000 for a Chanel bag or $14,000 for a Hermes Birkin bag, it’s entertaining to hear a little bit about the crazed world of luxury designer bags.
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Phan says the most she spent on a bag was C$140,000 for a rare Hermes Himalayan Birkin. She’s quick to note that after two years of toting it around in places like Las Vegas, she sold it to a California tech billionaire for C$180,000 as a gift for his wife. “I posted it on Instagram and it sold within 10 minutes,” she says, noting that the luxury brands that hold or increase in value include Hermes, Chanel and certain Louis Vuitton styles. “A Chanel bag I bought years ago for $3,000 now goes for $15,000.” (Fun fact: a quick online search shows one American auction house offering a Hermes Birkin 30 Gris Cendre Himalaya Niloticus Crocodile bag at the jaw-dropping price of just under C$1 million.)
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Growing focus on ‘circular, sustainable fashion’
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These days, Phan is focusing on growing the rental side of the business, with such offerings as a seven-day rental of $200 for an $8,000 Chanel bag, the profits split 50/50 between Luxe du Jour and the owner. “These days it’s all about circular, sustainable fashion,” she says of what she cheekily calls an AirBnB for purses.
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Along with providing a source of income to clients whose handbags would otherwise sit on a shelf for months on end, she’s making luxury accessible to those wanting a taste. “Some people just need one for a special occasion, or want to try before they buy,” she says, noting her vetted customers almost always bring back the handbags in perfect condition (one claimed her bag was stolen, and had to pony up $5,000 for full replacement cost). She also gets celebrities who are looking for “that one weird bag” for photos.
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Phan is hoping that in the next three years, Luxe du Jour will be as big as other online luxury resellers such as Rent the Runway, which saw a valuation of US$1.7 billion after going public in 2021. The hope, she says, is to be acquired by a bigger company — the way her angel investor made his millions — or go public with someone else installed as CEO.
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“I want to retire by age 35,” says Phan, who with husband Andy Phan has two preschoolers. “Right now, it’s not a nine-to-five job, more like a nine to 11 p.m., so I’m always working,” she says, adding her now-retired parents, who once worried about the future prospects for their high school dropout, are frequently on hand for babysitting duty.
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Still, as she works toward that goal, she’s grateful for stumbling into her chosen career nearly a decade ago. “The odds were totally against me,” she says of her modern-day rags to riches story.
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While she didn’t get to be a fashion designer, the scrappy kid turned fashion resell dynamo is enjoying the entrepreneur roller-coaster life. “Sometimes you want to close your eyes and go ‘Whee!’ because I know it’s part of the ride,” she says. “You can’t have the story without the struggle and my life was full of struggle.
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“I can’t wait to see my story turn into success.”
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Changemakers, a regular series in the Calgary Herald, started Feb. 25, 2025. Read more at calgaryherald.com/changemakers. Who are the changemakers you know? If you’re aware of someone making a difference — big or small — in our community, send us a couple of sentences, along with that person’s name, describing why they deserve a public nod. We’ll publish their name, along with your description of why they are a changemaker, at calgaryherald.com. Feel free to send along a photo, too, to feedback@calgaryherald.com
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