In 2020, Jackie Wegner started saving money to buy her very own Nantucket friendship basket.
Last month, Wegner, a 29-year-old lawyer from Chicago, made that dream a reality when she placed an order with the Four Winds Craft Guild in Nantucket for one of the baskets, a local specialty particular to the Massachusetts island. She paid $2,650 for the eight-inch piece, and expects to pay another $1,000 for the custom carved design on top after she receives it in six to eight months. Wegner, who regularly vacations on Nantucket, considers it not just a 30th birthday present to herself, but a sign that “I’ve made it.”
Lauren Lowe, 40, an interior designer from Atlanta, placed an order last month, also at Four Winds, for her first friendship basket. In a phone interview, she said, “It’s so interesting to have a piece of history and craftsmanship that you get to wear as fashion.” She hopes to get her basket — one that, like Wegner’s, will be crafted by the local basket maker Larry Brewster — by Christmas. She declined to share how much she paid.
The workmanship, the price tag, the wait. Sound familiar? As tourism soars amid a social media obsession with the tiny New England island of about 15,000 to 80,000 residents (depending on the time of year), the friendship basket has become a woven collectible sometimes compared to an Hermès Birkin bag. (Jane Birkin, the actress for whom Hermès designed the bag in 1984, was coincidentally known for carrying a simple open wicker basket as a purse.) New Birkins now retail for $13,500 and up, and can require wait times of six months or more.
Nantucket lightship baskets, as they are known when they are open-topped — friendship baskets have a lid — can take six to 18 months to make, and have a starting cost of about $2,250, depending on weaver and size. Vintage pieces tend to go for $4,000 on up.
John Sylvia, the owner of Four Winds, said that several years ago he sold “a very unusual basket,” the provenance of which he said he could not disclose because he signed a nondisclosure agreement, for $35,000. (On Nantucket, discretion is often the name of the game.)
He added that sales of new friendship baskets in his store are up by a little more than 40 percent this year over last, and that sales of vintage baskets have increased by more than 30 percent.
Sailors aboard the South Shoal Lightship, who began making baskets in the 1850s as “what we would now call a side hustle,” said Michael R. Harrison, chief curator of the Nantucket Historical Association, could not have predicted that Google Trends data would show searches for “Nantucket lightship baskets” and “Nantucket friendship baskets” skyrocketing in the summer of 2026. Probably neither would José Reyes, the Filipino immigrant who made the basket a purse by adding a lid with custom carvings called scrimshaw in the late 1940s.
About 5,000 pieces by Reyes, who died in 1980, exist today and sell for about $4,000 to $7,500 on the secondhand market. Even reproductions are gaining value: Companies like Barlow sold a mass-produced version of the friendship basket in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s for about $100 to $200 that have appreciated considerably. Stephen Turner, the fourth-generation owner of Briggs Auction in Garnet Valley, Pa., recently sold a Barlow basket for $1,700, not including fees.
The baskets carry a certain currency on social media as well. Wren Alaia, the content creator behind Connecticut Luxury, who has been going to Nantucket for “decades,” said her videos about the baskets perform particularly well. She received over 350,000 views on a TikTok post last month of women and their purses at the Baskets, Bubbles & Bourbon fund-raiser for the historical association, well over the views of her non-basket content.
“There are purse baskets everywhere and that’s when it starts becoming this badge of belonging,” Harrison said. “Like, I am a legitimate Nantucket summer woman because I have one of these baskets.”
So what happens when someone who spends a majority of her summer — maybe her whole life — “off-island,” as the locals call it, gets one? You know, like a tourist?
Connie Anne Harris, a collector and former Vogue executive, is unbothered. She’s been acquiring friendship baskets since buying her first in 1997 from Alan Reed, a master weaver on Nantucket. “The basket has a legacy and that’s one of the reasons why it’s not like any other bag in the world,” Harris said.
Alexis Hardy Greene, 30, a content creator from Pinehurst, N.C., who has two friendship baskets, said that in the age of Amazon, “the baskets mean more than something that can be easily obtained. In a world where everything is at our fingertips, the baskets aren’t as easily accessible.”
“People who are sourcing these bags genuinely care about having something that will last a lifetime and can be passed down for generations,” Greene added. She is already planning to pass her baskets to her daughter, who was born in April.
Nell Diamond, the chief executive and founder of Hill House Home, who grew up spending summers on Nantucket, is unsurprised by the attention online. “Whenever I would carry the purses, I would always get the kind of reaction that I’m seeing on social media now, which is: ‘Oh my gosh, this is so special … where is it from? Tell me the story,’” she said.
Diamond received her first basket from an auction at 16: “It was a real special moment.” Diamond, now 37 and a mother of three, said she hoped to pass down her friendship baskets one day. “I got one basket for the birth of each of the three kids,” she said.
The true value is the history and authenticity, say the collectors and fans. “There is this move away from things that are heavily branded,” said Alaia, the content creator. “People are appreciative of craftsmanship, scarcity.”
And scarcity is certainly a factor in the basket’s appreciation. Sylvia currently represents three weavers, the youngest of whom is 75. “There’s probably only six or seven full-time basket makers on island,” he said. “And there’s only one under the age of 50.”
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