Hermès artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas on why a Birkin bag is “expensive” rather than “expensive”

Birkin bags, which sell for around $9,000 and can fetch upwards of hundreds of thousands on auctionare not expensive, said Hermès artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas.

He instead uses the word “expensive” to describe the coveted handbags – and he sees the difference between expensive and expensive purchases.

Cost is the price of making a high-quality luxury bag properly, even if it leaves customers waiting years for a chance to own one. Expensive items, on the other hand, fail to deliver what customers want. The difference between the two is why clients need to be patient, says Dumas.

“We are about craftsmanship, we are not machines,” he said. “And we don’t compromise on the quality of 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 one will find it difficult to buy a bag. Stores typically don’t have anything to sell, and the Birkin can’t be bought on the Hermès website.

“It’s a long process,” Dumas said. “You go to a store, you get an appointment, you meet a salesperson, you talk about what you want. It’s not available. You have to wait. They get back to you. It takes a long time. Eventually , it’s going to happen.”

Store managers act as gatekeepers. There are stories of year-long waiting lists for bags and waiting lists to get on the waiting list. There are also whispers from Wall Street that the company is excellent gaming customers by artificially creating scarcity.

Dumas said it’s the kind of marketing idea that can only come from people obsessed with marketing, and Hermès, he said, doesn’t have a marketing team.

“Whatever we have, we put on the shelf and it goes,” he said.

Craftsmanship in a world of high speed

Hermès does not have enough craftsmen to build the bags, which for a century have been made from start to finish by a single craftsman.

“I always like to say that Hermès is an old lady with startup problems because we’ve grown so fast in such a short period of time,” Dumas said. “How can you grow so fast without changing what makes you strong?”

The company has turned to training people for lifelong careers at Hermès. By creating their own pipeline of artisans, Hermès says they’ve been able to produce more of their sought-after handbags than ever, though the company won’t disclose an exact number.

The house opened a leatherwork training center in 2021, where 400 graduates a year are trained in leatherwork, including the brand’s signature stitching, designed to be strong and functional.

With a needle in each hand, the craftsman pulls a strong linen thread coated with beeswax into precise loops. The intersection of the needles that make the knot cannot be replicated by a machine and can take years to master, according to Hermès.

Kelly, the most difficult bag to build, starts with 30 different leather cuts and can take 20 hours to complete – four hours for just the handle. 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 typically offered positions in one of 23 leather workshops that Hermès has built in villages and towns 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, artisans perform a silent dance with dueling needles. No one in the workshop seems to be in a hurry. The pace seems relaxed, with no looming clocks or quotas – just the slow pursuit of perfection. Bags are “signed” by the craftsmen when they are finished. The artisan’s hidden mark is how Hermès bags are authenticated.

Dumas said that it takes time to build something timeless.

“Speed ​​is the structuring value of the 20th century,” he said. “We went from horse-drawn carriages to the internet. Should we be so obsessed with speed and instant gratification? Maybe not? Maybe there’s a different kind of relationship to the world that’s tied to patience, to taking the time to get things right. You can’t compress time into a moment without compromising quality.”

A tradition of quality helped along by serendipity

It’s not just bags carefully crafted in an Ice Age site. Hermès silk scarves are screened 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 almost 200 years. The house of Hermès was built on saddles, not silk. In 1837, Thierry Hermès began selling custom braces in Paris. That led to luggage and eventually handbags. More than a century later, Hermès is a more than $200 billion 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 more than a century. As a boy, he learned to saddle – the hallmark of Hermès bags – in the Faubourg workshop. Saddles are still being built in the workshop today.

The allure of Hermès, Dumas said, comes from a century of excellent craftsmanship and happy chance.

A big success is the brand’s Kelly bag, designed by Dumas’s grandfather in 1935. It wasn’t a hit, but as legend has it, 20 years later, an expectant Grace Kelly used the bag to hide her stomach from paparazzi. 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.

Even the brand’s famous boxes, with their citrus-like color, which the company trademarked in the US, were a happy accident in the 1940s. It was 1946 and there was still a shortage of World War II. The supplier of papers and manufacturing boxes was out of the beige paper they regularly used.

“And he said, ‘I only have that stock of that roll of orange paper that nobody wants,'” Dumas said.

That color ended up becoming an important part of the brand’s identity.

It was also serendipity that led to the 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 plane to London.

“She told him, ‘Well, let me tell you, I’m not happy with my bag. I want something more loose with bigger handles and lightness, and always open when I carry it,'” Dumas said. “And while she was talking, my father was very good at drawing.”

Dumas’ father showed Birkin the sketch and that was it.