Build The Business Around The Craft, Not The Other Way Around
Every generation of the Hermès family has apprenticed with their hands before taking over the business. Thierry Hermès spent 16 years as an apprentice before opening his Paris shop. His son Charles-Émile apprenticed in the workshop for two decades. Today, Axel Dumas, CEO of a $200 billion company, and Pierre-Alexis Dumas, the artistic director, both spent five years after school in the atelier learning the saddle stitch and making bags. This is not symbolic. It is the operating system of the company. The saddle stitch itself illustrates why this matters. Two needles, one thread, each needle passed through the same hole from opposite directions. The result is a stitch that locks on itself so that if one section breaks, the rest holds. To unravel a saddle-stitched seam, you have to cut every individual stitch by hand. A Kelly bag is assembled from 36 pieces of leather by a single artisan, takes 20 hours of work spread across several weeks, and requires at least five years of training before that artisan is permitted to touch the flagship bags. This is not marketing language. It is the production constraint that everything else about the business follows from. Axel Dumas says it plainly: today, hand stitching produces higher quality than machine stitching. The moment a machine produces equivalent quality, Hermès will use it. "We are not a museum." The commitment is to craft, not to the specific method. But as long as the method is the highest quality available, the method is non-negotiable.