Birkin bags, which retail for around $9,000 and can fetch upwards of hundreds of thousands at auction, are not expensive, Hermès artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas said. 

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

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

“We’re about craft, we’re not machines,” he said. “And we are not compromising 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 hard to buy a bag. Stores typically don’t have any to sell and the Birkin is not available to purchase 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’ll have to wait. They’ll come back to you. It takes a long time. Eventually, it’s going to happen.”

Store managers act as gatekeepers. There are stories of years-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 brilliantly gaming customers by artificially creating scarcity. 

Dumas said that’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. 

Handcrafting in a high-speed world 

Hermès doesn’t have enough artisans 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 issues, because we’ve grown so fast in such a small period,” Dumas said. “How can you grow so fast without changing what makes you strong?”

The company has turned to training people for life-long careers at Hermès. By creating their own pipeline of artisans, Hermès says it’s been able to produce more of their coveted 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 schooled in leatherwork, including the brand’s signature saddle stitch, designed to be strong and functional. 

With a needle in each hand, the artisan pulls a strong linen thread coated in beeswax into precise loops. The criss-cross of the needles that make the knot can’t be replicated by a machine and can take years to master, according to Hermès.  

The Kelly, the most difficult bag to build, starts with 30 distinct cuts of leather 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 every bag.

Those who do master the needed skills are typically offered positions at one of 23 leather workshops that Hermès has built in villages and towns all over 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 at the workshop seems to be rushing. The pace seems leisurely, with no looming clocks or quotas — just the slow pursuit of perfection. Bags are “signed” by the artisans when they’re completed. The hidden mark of the artisan is how Hermès bags are authenticated. 

Dumas said building something timeless takes time. 

“Speed is the structuring value of the 20th century,” he said. “We went from horse carriages to the internet. Are we going to be so obsessed with speed and immediate satisfaction? Maybe not? Maybe there is another form of relation to the world, which is linked to patience, to taking the time to make things right. You cannot compress time, at one point, without compromising on quality.”

A tradition of quality helped along by serendipity 

It’s not just bags made meticulously at a glacial place. Hermès silk scarves are screened and stitched by hand. Some designs are two years in the making. 

The craft and culture behind the brand has been preserved by one family for nearly 200 years. The house of Hermès was built on saddles, not silk. In 1837, Thierry Hermès started selling bespoke harnesses 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 clothes 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, the Hermès flagship store for more than a century. As a boy, he learned to saddle stitch — the hallmark of Hermès bags — in the Faubourg workshop. Saddles are still built in the workshop today. 

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

One serendipitous success is the brand’s Kelly bag, designed by Dumas’ grandfather in 1935. It wasn’t a hit, but as legend had it, 20 years later an expecting 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 the company trademarked in the U.S., was a happy accident of the 1940s. It was 1946 and there were still World War II shortages. 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 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 was seated next to British actress Jane Birkin on a flight to London.

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

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