Inside Hermès: Dana Thomas on how integrity beat luxury’s giants
While rivals stumble, Hermès rises. Dana Thomas, author of Deluxe, takes us inside the secretive family firm to explain why timelessness, not trend, is the ultimate luxury strategy.
In the Game of Thrones that is mass luxury, one house stands above them all: Hermès, which has defied the downturn with a string of positive results, while rivals LVMH and Kering stumble from one crisis to the next. The question is why? How has Hermès, with its single brand, briefly managed to overtake LVMH earlier this year, when not so long ago it was a takeover target?
To find out, Dark Luxury spoke to Dana Thomas. Author of the landmark Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Lustre (2007), Thomas has spent almost four decades reporting on the luxury business and has enjoyed access to Hermès that few, if any, journalists have matched. For a 2011 Wall Street Journal feature she toured its ateliers in Pantin, the silk studios in Lyon, and the inner sanctums of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré headquarters. She has interviewed Pierre-Alexis Dumas (creative director), Axel Dumas (now CEO), and Patrick Thomas (the first non-family chief executive of Hermès). Dana Thomas is one of the rare journalists ever allowed inside this famously secretive family firm.
The key to Hermès’ success is simple: “If you maintain your integrity, customers keep coming back. You’re not a trend that comes and goes — you stay the course”. She goes further: “There are two ways of looking at it: you’re either in the business of beautiful products, or you’re in the business of beautiful profits. If it’s products, the profits will come. But if it’s the other way around, and you start cutting corners — outsourcing, cutting costs — that undermines the integrity of the product and the brand”.
In her Wall Street Journal reporting and in Deluxe, Thomas described how artisans in the Pantin workshop handcraft Kellys and Birkins the same way it has been done for more than a century. Each bag is entrusted to a single artisan, who cuts the hides, assembles the pieces, and sews the seams using the traditional saddle stitch — two needles passing through the same hole in opposite directions, tightened with waxed thread. This is then gently tapped with a hammer and sanded down flat for a smooth, uniform finish. “In my 30 years at Hermès, what has changed? Nothing. People change, but not the technique,” atelier head Lionel Prudhomme told her.
“You’re either in the business of beautiful products, or you’re in the business of beautiful profits. If it’s products, the profits will come.” – Dana Thomas
The same goes for its famous silk scarves. While competitors buy prefab twill from China, Hermès still weaves its own in Lyon from silk raised on its farm in Brazil. Scarves, with their ornate and highly detailed designs, are hand-printed in dozens of dazzling colours, their hems rolled and stitched by hand for that finish so prized by collectors. Queen Elizabeth II, for instance, had a large Hermès scarf collection that she wore year after year, becoming a part of her signature style. Perfume, too, isn’t outsourced to the industrial labs that supply Procter & Gamble and Unilever. It is created by an in-house perfumer in a studio near Grasse, the centre of traditional French perfumery.
“Let’s see what the ugliest, dumbest thing we can design is, slap a Louis Vuitton logo on it, and see if it sells. And it did — it was a gold pineapple.” – Dana Thomas
Even as the market for mass luxury roared and giants like Kering and LVMH cashed in by outsourcing production, Hermès’ slow-and-steady rise was something Thomas saw coming back in 2007…
This is where the real story begins. Dana Thomas reveals the lessons from inside Hermès that most rivals refuse to hear — and why integrity has quietly become the most powerful strategy in luxury.
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