## The Harness-Maker Who Built a Dynasty

The Harness-Maker Who Built a Dynasty

Thierry Hermès did not set out to create a luxury empire. In 1837, he opened a workshop at 17 rue Basse-du-Rempart in Paris and made harnesses. Good ones. The kind that held up under daily use by the city's cab drivers and private carriage owners, who cared more about durability than ornament. The leather was thick. The stitching was tight. The buckles didn't fail.

By the time his son Charles-Émile took over in 1880, the workshop had moved to 24 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where it remains. The new address came with larger premises and a shopfront, but the work stayed the same: bridles, saddles, harness fittings. Charles-Émile added a retail component, selling ready-made goods alongside bespoke commissions. The clientele expanded beyond working drivers to include aristocrats and wealthy amateurs who kept stables. Hermès became known, quietly, as a reliable supplier to people who rode horses seriously.

Émile-Maurice Hermès, Charles-Émile's son, joined the business in 1900 and recognised a problem his grandfather had not lived to see. The automobile was replacing the horse. Carriage trade was declining. Émile-Maurice travelled to North America and returned with two convictions: Hermès needed to diversify beyond equestrian goods, and the zipper—which he'd seen in use on American luggage—was worth importing. In 1918, he acquired the exclusive French rights to the fastener and began applying it to leather bags designed for the new traveller. The sac haut à courroies, introduced in the 1920s, was a tall trapezoidal holdall with a zipper closure and two rolled handles. It was meant for carrying a saddle. It also worked for weekend trips by car.

Émile-Maurice understood that Hermès could not survive by nostalgia. He kept the saddlery workshop running—it still operates today on the fifth floor of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré building—but he treated it as heritage, not strategy. The future was in leather goods for people who no longer rode. He introduced handbags, wallets, and luggage. He opened workshops dedicated to each category. He hired artisans trained in traditional techniques and paid them to work slowly. A single sac à dépêches, the precursor to the Kelly bag, required eighteen hours of bench time. Émile-Maurice did not lower that standard to increase output. He raised prices instead.

The house's most famous designs emerged not from fashion ambition but from practical requests. In 1935, Robert Dumas—Émile-Maurice's son-in-law and a designer at Hermès—was seated next to the actress and later Princess of Monaco, Grace Kelly, on a flight. She complained that her handbag was too small for her needs. Dumas sketched a larger version of the sac à dépêches on the back of a menu. That anecdote is disputed; what is certain is that the Kelly bag, as it came to be called after a 1956 photograph of the actress using it to shield her pregnant stomach from paparazzi, became Hermès' signature. It was not designed to be iconic. It was designed to hold things.

The Birkin followed a similar path. In 1981, Jean-Louis Dumas, Robert's son and then chief executive of Hermès, sat beside the actress and singer Jane Birkin on a flight from Paris to London. Birkin's diary and papers spilled from her bag during boarding. She remarked that she couldn't find a leather weekend bag that was both elegant and practical. Dumas sketched a prototype on an aeroplane sick bag. The Birkin entered production in 1984. It remains, forty years later, the most recognisable handbag silhouette in the world, largely because Hermès produces fewer than it could sell. Waiting lists run years long. The house has never disclosed production numbers.

What remains of Thierry Hermès' workshop is a way of working, not a product line. Hermès still trains its leather artisans in-house, a process that takes two to three years. Each craftsman is assigned a single category—handbags, belts, or small leather goods—and works alone at a bench. There is no assembly line. A single artisan cuts, stitches, and finishes each piece, signing it with a blind stamp when complete. The house employs roughly 6,000 leather artisans across its French ateliers. It has never outsourced production. When demand exceeds capacity, it builds another workshop. Thirteen new sites have opened in France since 2010.

The family structure has also endured, though not without tension. Hermès remains controlled by fifth- and sixth-generation descendants of Thierry, who collectively own just over 66 per cent of the company through a holding structure. The rest trades publicly. In 2010, LVMH began quietly acquiring shares, eventually amassing a 23 per cent stake. The family responded by consolidating their holdings and tightening governance to prevent a takeover. LVMH sold its position in 2014. Axel Dumas, great-great-great-grandson of Thierry, has served as chief executive since that year. Artistic direction has moved outside the family—Pierre-Alexis Dumas, Axel's cousin, oversees creative strategy, but the ready-to-wear collections are designed by Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski, who joined in 2014.

Hermès does not follow fashion cycles in the way other luxury houses do. It releases two ready-to-wear collections per year, but they account for a small fraction of revenue. Leather goods remain the core, generating roughly 40 per cent of sales. Silk scarves, introduced in 1937, represent another pillar. The carré, a square silk scarf printed with equestrian or botanical motifs, was originally designed as an accessory for riders. It became a signature because the house kept making it, in the same 90cm format, with the same hand-rolled edges, season after season. Hermès now produces around two million scarves annually, each screen-printed in Lyon using up to forty-five separate colour screens. The process has not been updated for efficiency.

The question facing Hermès is not whether it can survive—it reported €13.4 billion in revenue in 2023, a 16 per cent increase over the prior year—but whether it can grow without eroding the scarcity that underpins its value. The house has resisted the usual levers: it does not discount, does not wholesale to department stores, does not pursue celebrity endorsements aggressively, and does not flood the market with entry-level products. It has opened new stores, but slowly. There are roughly 300 Hermès boutiques worldwide, compared to more than 2,000 for Gucci. The average transaction value at Hermès is the highest in luxury retail, north of €3,000 per visit.

What remains of the harness workshop is a belief that the object matters more than the story around it. Hermès still makes saddles. It still employs master saddlers who learned the trade over decades. Those saddles sell in small numbers to a shrinking cohort of riders who can afford them. The house could close the atelier and allocate the space to handbag production. It has not. The saddlery remains because it was there first, and because the skills required to make a bridle—precision, patience, a respect for materials—are the same skills required to make a Kelly. Thierry Hermès did not think in terms of brand equity or heritage marketing. He made harnesses because people needed them, and because he knew how to make them well. The house that bears his name has kept that logic intact, even as the product has changed entirely.