Birkin bags, which retail for around $9,000 and can go for hundreds of thousands in auctionthey are not expensive, said Hermès artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas.
Instead, she uses the word “expensive” to describe the coveted handbags, and sees a difference between expensive and expensive purchases.
Cost is the price of getting a quality luxury bag right, even if it leaves customers waiting years for the chance to own one. Expensive objects, on the other hand, do not offer what customers want. The difference between the two is why customers need to be patient, Dumas says.
“We talk about craftsmanship, we’re not machines,” he said. “And we’re not compromising on quality in the way we make the bags.”
The challenge of getting a Birkin bag
The surreal twist of Hermès exclusivity is that even customers who can afford it will struggle to buy a bag. Stores usually do not have them for sale and the Birkin cannot be purchased on the Hermès website.
“It’s a long process,” Dumas said. “You go to a store, you have an appointment, you meet a salesperson, you talk about what you want. It’s not available. You’ll have to wait. They’ll get back to you. It’s going to take a long time. Eventually, it’s going to happen.”
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Store managers act as gatekeepers. There are stories of waiting lists of years for bags and waiting lists to get on the waiting list. There are also whispers from Wall Street that the company is playing bright with customers by artificially creating shortages.
Dumas said this is the kind of marketing idea that can only come from people obsessed with marketing, and Hermès, he said, does not have a marketing team.
“Whatever we have, we put it on the shelf, and it stays,” he said.
Craftsmanship in a high-speed world
Hermès does not have enough craftsmen to build the bags, which for a century are made from start to finish by a single craftsman.
“I always like to say that Hermès is an old woman with problems at the start, because we have grown so fast in such a small period,” said Dumas. “How can you grow so fast without changing what makes you strong?”
The company has dedicated itself to training people for lifelong careers at Hermès. By creating its own artisan portfolio, Hermès says it has been able to produce more of its coveted handbags than ever before, though the company won’t reveal an exact number.
The house opened a leather training center in 2021 where 400 graduates a year are trained in leather, including the brand’s assembly point, designed to be strong and functional.
With a needle in each hand, the craftsman pulls a strong linen thread coated in beeswax into precise loops. The criss-crossing of the needles that make the knot cannot be replicated by a machine and can take years to master, according to Hermès.
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The Kelly, the most difficult bag to build, starts with 30 different cuts of leather and can take 20 hours to complete, four hours for the handle alone. There are no manuals or cheat sheets; artisans rely on their training and muscle memory to make each bag.
Those who master the necessary skills are usually offered positions in one of the 23 leather workshops that Hermès has built in towns and cities across France.
One of them is in Tournes, a three-hour drive from Paris, in the French countryside.
The workshop is quiet, without the sound of sewing machines. Inside the artisans perform a silent dance with dueling needles. No one in the workshop seems to be in a hurry. The pace seems leisurely, with no clocks or looming quotas, just the slow pursuit of perfection. The bags are “signed” by the artisans when they are finished. The hidden mark of the craftsman is how Hermès bags are authenticated.
Dumas said that building something timeless takes time.
“Speed is the structuring value of the 20th century,” he said. “We went from horse-drawn carriages to the internet. Are we going to be so obsessed with speed and instant gratification? Maybe not? Maybe there is another way of relating to the world, which is linked to patience, to taking the time to make the things. You can’t compress time, at a given moment, without compromising quality.”
A tradition of quality helped by serendipity
It’s not just bags painstakingly made in a glacial location. Hermès silk scarves are filtered and sewn by hand. Some designs are two years in the making.
The craftsmanship and culture behind the brand has been preserved by one family for nearly 200 years. The house of Hermès was built on chairs, not silk. In 1837, Thierry Hermès began selling custom harnesses in Paris. This led to luggage and eventually handbags. More than a century later, Hermès is a $200 billion-plus luxury brand with a catalog that includes everything from ready-to-wear to jewelry, furniture and even a $272,000 pool table.
Dumas is the sixth generation of the family to take the reins. His father and grandfather worked at 24 Faubourg in Paris, Hermès’ flagship store for over a century. As a child, he learned to stitch, the hallmark of Hermès bags, in the Faubourg workshop. Assembly chairs are still made in the workshop today.
The appeal of Hermès, Dumas said, comes from a century of fine craftsmanship and happy chance.
A runaway success is the brand’s Kelly bag, designed by Dumas’ grandfather in 1935. It wasn’t a hit, but as legend has it, 20 years later, a hopeful Grace Kelly used the bag to hide the his paparazzi stomach. Women soon flooded Hermès, asking for the bag.
The company’s scarves have been favored by royalty and celebrities for decades, providing the kind of product placement money can’t buy.
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Even the brand’s famous boxes, with their citrus-like color, trademarked by the company in the US, were a happy accident of the 1940s. It was 1946 and there were still hardships from World War II. The paper and box making supplier was out of the beige paper they usually used.
“And he said:” I just have that stock of that orange roll of paper that nobody wants,” Dumas said.
This color ended up being a key part of the brand’s identity.
It was also serendipity that led to the piece de resistance at Hermès, the Birkin. The bag was designed in 1984 by Dumas’ father after he sat next to the British actress Jane Birkin on a flight to London.
“She said to him, ‘Well, let me tell you, I’m not happy with my bag. I want something looser, with bigger handles and easier, and always open when I’m wearing it,” Dumas said. “And while I was talking, my dad was really good at drawing.”
Dumas’ father showed Birkin the sketch and that was it.
