If You Want These Birkenstocks, You May Have to Pay Up

Birkenstock Boston clogs should cost you about $160. If you can find a pair, that is.

Thanks largely to social media, the cork-heeled staple has become a hot-ticket item in recent months. It’s so hot that the taupe suede leather model, the favorite among users on TikTok, is sold out in every size on Birkenstock’s website. Only a few sizes are available in other suede leather colors. (If you have very tiny feet or very large ones, you may be in luck.)

This leaves three options. One: You can wait patiently for a restock. On the Birkenstock subreddit, a community devoted entirely to the German footwear brand, users post updates alerting other community members when certain styles are back in stock online. Blink and they will be gone again.

In New York City, the Birkenstock store in SoHo was completely sold out of the taupe suede Bostons on Friday morning and awaiting a new shipment. The Williamsburg location had only a few pairs in limited sizes and widths.

Two: Try your luck at an outside retailer, where supplies have also appeared to dwindle in recent weeks.

Kristen Seninger, 24, called a local Journeys store in San Francisco for five days straight in late August asking if it had a pair in her size. “I did this every single day, multiple times a day for the past week and I got them,” she said in a TikTok video filmed in her car after purchasing the shoes. “The girls in the store basically knew my name. They hated me, but we secured the goods today,” she added. (In a phone interview, Ms. Seninger said the Journeys employee who sold her the clogs was “excited” she had finally gotten a pair.)

Or option three: Pony up some extra cash for resale sites like eBay and Poshmark, where sellers are listing pairs of Bostons for marked-up prices, in some cases for more than double their retail value.

Sarah Cowie, an accountant in Michigan, tried and failed to find a pair of the coveted clogs, specifically a pair in taupe suede, after seeing them in a video from one of her favorite YouTubers, Gretchen Geraghty.

“I’m so late to the party that they were all sold out everywhere,” Ms. Cowie, 27, said in a phone call. “I went on Poshmark because I use Poshmark to sell a lot of my clothes. I found a pair. It was ridiculously overpriced, but I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to wear these, so it’s worth it.’” Ms. Cowie said she ultimately paid about $330 for the shoes.

“They’re so controversial now,” she added, describing the popularity of the shoes on TikTok. “Some people are like, ‘Hey, they’re really cute,’ and some people think they’re a potato shoe.”

Ms. Cowie’s particular pair of Bostons made their way to Michigan from a Poshmark seller in Nashville, Savannah Huml. (Ms. Cowie left Ms. Huml a comment on the platform thanking her for shipping the clogs so quickly. These comments, known on Poshmark as love notes, are public.) Ms. Huml, 27, purchased five pairs of Birkenstock Bostons this summer from a store in Wisconsin. A longtime fan of the style, she had planned to keep two pairs for herself and give the rest as gifts to her sisters and a friend.

“I was selling some of my older jeans on Poshmark, and I was wearing a pair of my old ones and people are more interested in those than they were in the pants that I was actually selling,” Ms. Huml said of the Bostons she happened to be wearing in a photo she posted on the resale platform. “That’s when I realized, ‘OK, you know what? That’s fine.’ If everybody really wants these, I can sell them instead of giving it to them for Christmas.”

She has since sold three of the pairs, including the ones she sold to Ms. Cowie. One pair fetched $350, Ms. Huml said. (Poshmark takes a 20 percent commission on sales over $15.) People on the platform have accused her of price gouging and have left nasty comments, some of which Ms. Huml said she reported to Poshmark for harassment.

“I looked at some of the people that were kind of harassing me and they seem to be adult accounts. They weren’t, you know, 14-year-olds,” Ms. Huml said. “These seem to be moms, mothers harassing me on the internet because I have a pair of Boston clogs that their daughter really wants.”

The rise of the Birkenstock Boston did not happen overnight. They were spotted in 2021 on the feet of many celebrities, including Kendall Jenner, Kaia Gerber and the YouTube personality Emma Chamberlain.

“I didn’t come up with this idea on my own. But I saw multiple people that I really like their style wearing these,” Ms. Chamberlain said of her purchase in a video last year. “Sometimes I’m a sheep just like everybody else,” she added.

Sales of Bostons are “up double digits,” according to a spokesperson for Birkenstock, writing in an email that the company has seen increased interest in the style over the last several years. “Consumer demand for Birkenstock has exceeded supply for 10 years now,” the spokesperson also wrote. The Birkenstock Arizona, the iconic two-strap sandal that is synonymous with the brand, has also become fashionable in recent years, from designer pairs to the super comfortable plastic EVA model.

The steady increase in popularity of the clogs on social media caught Sarah Hoxsie’s eye. Ms. Hoxsie, 25, works in digital marketing and runs a side business reselling clothes on Poshmark from Fairfield, Conn.

“When you see things going viral on TikTok, from a reseller’s point of view, that’s more of, like, ‘OK, that’s something that I should keep in stock’ or ‘I should try and sell,’” she said.

Ms. Hoxsie purchased six pairs of Bostons at Retail 101, a discount store that sells new items, as well as items with slight defects and items that had previously been returned.

“I’ve never in my life felt like a Birkenstock would be something that is almost like a Supreme item where people buy them and then resell it for like five times the amount,” Ms. Hoxsie said. She said she also received her share of critical comments, reporting some for harassment on Mercari, another reselling platform she uses.

“There’s very strong opinions on it. Like, ‘You’re like stealing from the poor,’ ‘You’re taking everything from these thrift shops,’” Ms. Hoxsie said, using a fecal expletive, of her work as a reseller. “We’re taking stuff that would go to landfill. But I don’t know. I think people are just mad when they can’t, like, go to the website and buy what they want.”

“Bostons have been trending up a lot recently,” Duncan Cook, a moderator of the Birkenstock subreddit, said. Mr. Cook, 39, is an engineering manager at a software company and lives in Oregon. “There’s been a few posts asking about, you know, ‘When are they going to restock?’ Or, like, ‘They just restocked’ and ‘How do we get more?’”

Mr. Cook is diligent about weeding out fake Bostons, regularly deleting posts from people claiming to have found the clogs on unauthorized websites for much cheaper prices.

Not everyone cares to have the real deal, though. For some, getting the Boston look at a fraction of the price scratches the same itch. Sonali Prabhu, 25, got a pair of dupes — internet speak for a cheaper duplicate of a popular product — from Kohl’s for $50. “I feel like they just all look the same. And most of the outfit inspo that I’m seeing for these Birkenstocks are, like, covered. They’re halfway covered,” Ms. Prabhu, a photographer and influencer in Austin, said. “It’s just like the little like round part in the front that’s showing anyways. So I just thought, you know, it’s not even worth getting it for, like, hundreds of dollars.”

Ms. Prabhu shared an affiliate link on social media that her followers could click to purchase her find. (Purchasing something through an affiliate link means the link poster, in this case Ms. Prabhu, receives a portion of the sales profit.)

“I have chronic foot pain and can 100,000 percent tell the difference,” one commenter on Ms. Prabhu’s TikTok video wrote, comparing the copycat pair with the Birkenstocks. “If you aren’t wearing them for support of orthopedic purposes, the dupes are great.” The clogs are now sold out in taupe on the Kohl’s website but are still available in black.

Ms. Hoxsie has already moved on from Bostons and is looking around for the next item poised to get the TikTok boost.

“I feel like in fashion things seem to get like watered down to the Amazon dupes very quickly now with how fast the trend cycles are going,” she said when asked if she thought the clogs were a passing trend. “I almost kind of feel like that’s a sign of death, but I’m sure a lot of people will still wear them.”