After TikTok video on faux Coach purse at Humboldt Park vintage store goes viral, store owners fear

© Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune/TNS The Coach brand reached out to Candace Behrens and sent her a gift of a Coach purse after the incident. Candace Behrens was out shopping with her mom on Mother’s Day, doing what she loves to do — support local, small businesses — when a black Coach bag in a women’s vintage store caught her eye. A collector of Coach purses, she purchased the bag on a whim from The Fox Club, a swimsuit, lingerie, clothing and accessories store in Humboldt Park, before rushing to meet family at her home for a Mother’s Day celebration. It wasn’t until after everyone had left that the Milwaukee native opened her shopping bag and realized what she had actually purchased. “I looked at the purse and in two seconds I knew it was fake,” Behrens said. What happened next on that May 8th day has become a viral sensation on TikTok, leading to countless death threats against the store owners, and even their dogs. The Fox Club shuttered its doors, and locked down its social media accounts. Yelp is now monitoring the store’s flood of negative reviews “for content related to media reports.” © Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune/TNS The Fox Club store in Humboldt Park, seen here on May 18, 2022, has been closed since May 8 after receiving threats stemming from the sale of a fake Coach purse. “People have been reaching out on our cellphones, our work landline voicemail, personal emails, my business email, every Instagram account we’ve ever had — threatening us, saying that they’re going to come burn the store down,” said designer Lizzie Cook, a co-founder of The Fox Club. Death threats to kill our dogs, threats that if they ever see our faces, there’s going to be consequences, that Humboldt Park doesn’t want us there. Thousands of these messages.” © Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune/TNS Candace Behrens shows off the new Coach purse she received from the Coach social media team at her Chicago home on May 18, 2022. Behrens had bought what she thought was a genuine Coach purse at The Fox Club, a vintage store in Humboldt Park, but later found it to be a fake. In the rapid-fire world of social media, the power of a cellphone recording can have a profound ripple effect on brands, culture and the human psyche, say experts on social media. “There’s always going to be this back and forth — is it the customer who went too far by recording it, was it the business owner that went too far by maybe not embracing customer service the way they should have. It’s hard to say,” said Scott Kleinberg, Pittsburgh-based social media expert and former Chicago Tribune social media editor. “It’s just this giant domino effect … that one video that lasts two minutes leads to all this stuff happening later.” It started when Behrens and her husband returned to the store on Mother’s Day, with Behrens’ husband recording the interaction on a cellphone. I understand you don’t have a return policy. We’re recording this for my social media,” Behrens says as she approaches a store associate seated behind the counter. As Behrens begins to explain why she is there, the store’s other co-founder, Chanel Marshall, moves into the frame and interrupts Behrens. “I wish you would have asked me before purchasing, I would have told you that it’s not real Coach,” Marshall says in the video. “We would have priced it way higher if it was.” “But this is like a vintage store,” Behrens says before Marshall cuts her off again. “We’re a vintage store, not a thrift store,” Marshall says. Behrens points out that the purse was “priced accordingly” to the value of a real Coach purse.