Drop In Luxury Purse Sales Means Alligator Glut For Louisiana

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed)
Apr 10th 2009 at 7:02AM

Here's one part of the luxury economy I hadn't considered, the alligator farms. It turns out the decline of the "it bag" has reverberations throughout the various industries that feed into the luxury brands. The Houma Today website tells the story of Gerald Savoie Jr., the owner of Savoie's Alligator Farm whose has plenty of alligators and no one to buy the skins.

You many have seen Savoie's Alligator Farm on past episodes of "Dirty Jobs" where Mike Rowe learned about ins and outs of alligator farming. Savoie has over 60,000 alligators but the world's luxury brands like Gucci and Versace aren't buying as many skins as they did in past years.

The Louisiana bayous produce a lot of alligators and the skins are shipped around the world to be turned into belts, purses and other goods. Alligator farms are a $60 million dollar industry in Louisiana. Vermilion Gator Farms Inc. says they generally sell 75,000 hides a year but haven't sold an alligator skin in a year and predict that they may not be able to sell a skin for another year. An article on Abbeville Now last month reported that there are 840,000 tanned hides in the U.S. market waiting to be sold to tanners, a number far above the 275,000 hides generally sold nationally.

Tags: alligator, louisiana, luxury, purses