Hermès, every mention

Hermès (Audio) · Acquired Feb 20, 2024 · 100 mentions

• ▶ 59:46 David Rosenthal After World War II, Robert decides that Hermès needs a logo, so taking inspiration from the nineteenth-century painting Le Duc Atelier Groom à la Tente, which means hitched carriage waiting groom, the famous Hermès logo is born.
• ▶ 1:01:45 David Rosenthal There are probably some Hermes products in there, but it's like a museum exhibit, it's artwork.
• ▶ 1:01:54 Ben Gilbert There is no utility to these displays, and these displays, much like any advertising that you see of Hermes today, it's not about the product, it's about how you feel.
• ▶ 1:03:09 Ben Gilbert And so when you buy an Hermes product, you aren't just buying the product, you're buying a piece of art, a piece of their heritage, a feeling that connects you to the maker and the place it was created.
• ▶ 1:03:19 Ben Gilbert You're trying to buy a piece of Hermes' heritage and reputation and hoping to adopt it as a part of you, as a part of your identity.
• ▶ 1:03:38 David Rosenthal There's this genius aspect, too, to what Hermes is doing and what Robert's doing with the arts, like these window displays.
• ▶ 1:03:56 David Rosenthal You will never see any of these brands, Hermes included, become art galleries.
• ▶ 1:05:38 David Rosenthal The most amazing, unbelievable, fantastical dream of the 19 fifties happens to Hermes in real life.
• ▶ 1:09:08 David Rosenthal They're coming up on Hermes here.
• ▶ 1:11:01 David Rosenthal I mean, honestly, it's like Hermes over the past couple years.
• ▶ 1:11:41 David Rosenthal Certainly, this plays right into this whole dream thing that we've been talking about, and burnishes Hermes' already incredible brand and image.
• ▶ 1:12:09 David Rosenthal Yes, I'm pretty sure it becomes Hermes' biggest selling bag.
• ▶ 1:13:39 David Rosenthal As we head through the sixties and into the 19 seventies and the end of Robert's tenure and his generation as the head of Hermes, the company kind of starts to fall on hard times.
• ▶ 1:14:03 Ben Gilbert Hermes is not quite in those dire of straights, but
• ▶ 1:14:06 Ben Gilbert I mean, they have the ingredients of Hermes that we know today.
• ▶ 1:14:09 Ben Gilbert They've got the Kelly bag, they've got the orange box, they've adopted the logo.
• ▶ 1:14:12 David Rosenthal They've got the scarves.
• ▶ 1:14:13 Ben Gilbert They've got the scarves, they have these small workshops where they make everything, but it's not working yet.
• ▶ 1:14:56 David Rosenthal And the dream of Hermes that was once so elegant and so desired by so many people, but inaccessible,
• ▶ 1:15:38 David Rosenthal Is very, very, very different than what Hermes is selling.
• ▶ 1:15:42 Ben Gilbert This is an important distinction between Hermes and all the brands you just named.
• ▶ 1:15:57 Ben Gilbert And Hermes comes from, I mean, mind you, by this point, they're already a 120 years old, 130 years old.
• ▶ 1:16:04 Ben Gilbert They come from the world of leather, and horses, and
• ▶ 1:16:14 Ben Gilbert It's not how creative and crazy can we be, it's, they talk about it as responsible growth.
• ▶ 1:16:45 Ben Gilbert And David, this is probably a good time to share who we chatted with in preparation from this episode and his observation about Hermes.
• ▶ 1:17:54 Ben Gilbert That, uh, Domenico helped us understand about Hermes is they have been so protective of their brand and this unbelievable steward.
• ▶ 1:18:02 Ben Gilbert They're so careful at how they've chosen to deploy the brand.
• ▶ 1:18:06 Ben Gilbert They make sure that the mystique is always there.
• ▶ 1:18:09 Ben Gilbert They don't violate the promise.
• ▶ 1:18:10 Ben Gilbert They never cut corners.
• ▶ 1:18:12 Ben Gilbert They have been above board in their brand promise and keeping that promise with customers for over a hundred years.
• ▶ 1:18:33 David Rosenthal So, all this culminates towards the end of the 19 seventies as Robert is nearing the end of his tenure at Hermes and the end of his life.
• ▶ 1:18:46 David Rosenthal Where they bring in consultants, and the consultants recommend, like, hey, you guys should probably do what Gucci is doing, and you should probably close the atelier above the shop at the Faubourg, and you should probably outsource…
• ▶ 1:19:15 Ben Gilbert Hermes has a corporate policy of no consultants, and now I know where that came from.
• ▶ 1:19:29 Ben Gilbert Wow, so the recommendation was to come in and destroy everything that makes you special and follow the playbook that everyone else is running.
• ▶ 1:19:36 David Rosenthal Yeah, I mean, it's working for them, and it's not working for Hermes.
• ▶ 1:19:55 David Rosenthal And the company and the brand is under existential threat, even though we think of Hermes, you know, the most unassailable thing in the world right now, but finds itself at a moment where it can be assailed.
• ▶ 1:21:28 David Rosenthal You know, Axel talks all the time about dinner table conversations between his uncle, Jean-Louis, who we're about to talk about now, who is the fifth generation CEO of Hermes, and his mother, who was head of production at the dinner table…
• ▶ 1:22:15 Ben Gilbert Shut down your shop where they still today make Birkin and Kelly bags by hand, one artisan at a time, in the most famous address in all of luxury and fashion.
• ▶ 1:23:08 Ben Gilbert Saddle stitching is an amazing technique that Hermes uses for every single bag that they make.
• ▶ 1:26:20 David Rosenthal I'm going to channel my inner Pierre-Alexei here, the current artistic director of Hermes.
• ▶ 1:28:39 David Rosenthal It's two years of training to become a Hermes artisan, period.
• ▶ 1:28:57 Ben Gilbert So this knowledge is passed from generation to generation, and Hermes refers to this as the savoir-faire, or the know-how or the expertise about the materials and the exceptional technique that's transmitted from one craftsperson to…
• ▶ 1:29:44 Ben Gilbert 133 times savoir-faire is referenced in the Hermès registration document.
• ▶ 1:30:35 David Rosenthal She was an artisan at Hermes in Paris.
• ▶ 1:30:58 David Rosenthal So she moved to San Francisco when Hermes opened the San Francisco store.
• ▶ 1:31:12 David Rosenthal There was one person in New York, and I was in San Francisco, and we came from the Faubourg, and you know, a few of these people go around the world, and one of the things about Hermes, and actually Jean-Louis would say that this, like,…
• ▶ 1:31:57 David Rosenthal When I was training as a young person and decided I wanted to go into this field, Hermes was absolutely the greatest company that anyone could hope to work for.
• ▶ 1:32:14 David Rosenthal She said, look, I decided that either I was going to get a job at Hermes or I was going to leave this industry and go do something else.
• ▶ 1:32:37 David Rosenthal The consultants were telling Hermes to go in that direction too, but they're the last one standing that did all of this by hand in the tradition handed down through hundreds of years.
• ▶ 1:33:17 David Rosenthal And there's nobody else, certainly at Hermes' scale,
• ▶ 1:33:22 David Rosenthal You know, she ended up leaving Hermes and starting her own boutique here in San Francisco, April in Paris, and she actually also runs her own leather school here in San Francisco, too, to train artisans.
• ▶ 1:33:48 Ben Gilbert And the people who don't work for Hermes,
• ▶ 1:33:53 Ben Gilbert If you go as a customer, and you want something like a saddle-stitched bag, or wallet, or something like Hermes would make in that traditional sort of pre-war, early 20th century fashion, there aren't that many other artisans out there.
• ▶ 1:34:10 Ben Gilbert Hermes employs 7000 of them.
• ▶ 1:34:16 Ben Gilbert And it's not like Hermes has cornered the market.
• ▶ 1:34:55 David Rosenthal Welcome to Hermes.
• ▶ 1:35:35 David Rosenthal On the other hand, this is the CEO of Hermes.
• ▶ 1:35:38 Ben Gilbert And I think it's important to realize these individual craftsmen are entirely non-competitive with Hermes.
• ▶ 1:35:49 Ben Gilbert When you're buying Hermes today, you don't start from a place of, you know, I think I want some of the very best sewn leather goods I can find.
• ▶ 1:36:08 Ben Gilbert Either, A, you're doing that, and you are a person who knows about a bunch of individual leather craftsmen, which is rare, or B, you actually just want to buy something from Hermes, and there's not any evaluation going on, and maybe there…
• ▶ 1:36:31 Ben Gilbert It's, you either want something from Hermes, or you're a different type of customer.
• ▶ 1:36:39 David Rosenthal How did he turn this thing around and save Hermes from the consultants?
• ▶ 1:37:58 Ben Gilbert In fact, if you go way back, do you know how Hermes entered the United States?
• ▶ 1:38:32 David Rosenthal But he takes that back, and what he says, like, look, the way forward is we are going to figure out how to make Hermes relevant.
• ▶ 1:39:00 Ben Gilbert Revitalize, rejuvenate, make Hermes relevant for this new era with this new audience with the same products.
• ▶ 1:39:08 Ben Gilbert Keeping the same products and not violating everything that Hermes currently stands for.
• ▶ 1:39:35 David Rosenthal So, well, the first thing, in 1979, the first year he takes over, he launches a new ad campaign in Paris with young Parisian women wearing the iconic Hermes scarves, which remember, like, that's the main part of the business at this point…
• ▶ 1:40:05 David Rosenthal It's the Hermes version of Not Your Mother's Tiffany.
• ▶ 1:40:38 David Rosenthal I mean, the rest of the family is really upset about it, but he pushes it through, you know, and you can still see echoes of this to this day, like a big part of Hermes fashion and probably the biggest part of, I think, the scarf fashion…
• ▶ 1:41:20 David Rosenthal But I think this is brilliant because this is allowing Hermes to exist and be relevant alongside fashion without actually getting into fashion themselves.
• ▶ 1:42:36 Ben Gilbert Everyone knows what a Kelly bag costs.
• ▶ 1:42:38 Ben Gilbert And like, it's gone up a little bit, but Hermes has very high price point products that stay approximately that price forever.
• ▶ 1:43:23 David Rosenthal So that's on the product side, and kind of doing this jujitsu to reposition the products in Hermes.
• ▶ 1:44:47 David Rosenthal And I think to this day is a huge part of the defensibility of Hermes and Louis Vuitton too.
• ▶ 1:45:39 David Rosenthal And unlike the Kelly bag, which, you know, again, was an accident, like, yes, it was his father, Robert, and incredible genius, and then repositioning and renaming the bag the Kelly bag.
• ▶ 1:46:58 David Rosenthal Well, certainly if you follow the Hermes stock, you know what a Birkin bag is, even if you probably couldn't pick it out of a crowd.
• ▶ 1:47:28 David Rosenthal These two women, these two personas that are embodied in Hermes, like Hermes doesn't do celebrity advertising.
• ▶ 1:48:25 David Rosenthal So, as the two of them, Jean-Louis, CEO and Artistic Director of Hermes, and Jane Birkin, French cultural icon, are boarding this flight to London.
• ▶ 1:48:59 Ben Gilbert By the way, how crazy is it that the Kelly bag was to hide a pregnancy, and the Birkin bag was designed to carry baby bottles and… Baby forward.
• ▶ 1:49:14 David Rosenthal Imagine the older generation Hermes embracing this.
• ▶ 1:49:36 Ben Gilbert And she says something like, well, yeah, wouldn't that be great if there was a bigger bag that actually closed, and, you know, but Hermes doesn't make that.
• ▶ 1:49:43 Ben Gilbert Or she made some comment, and he goes, I am Hermes.
• ▶ 1:49:47 David Rosenthal The legend, now who knows if this is true, is that she said, well, when Hermes makes a diaper bag, you know, I'll, I'll use that one.
• ▶ 1:50:07 David Rosenthal And as they get to talking, they're talking about the Kelly, and she's like, look, you know, Kelly's the Kelly, right?
• ▶ 1:50:21 David Rosenthal Larger than the Kelly, but smaller than the old original Hermes bag.
• ▶ 1:50:27 David Rosenthal It's a tote bag, and it has two handles, unlike the Kelly, which has one handle, and so with two handles, you can put it over your shoulder.
• ▶ 1:50:33 David Rosenthal You know, it's this sort of, it feels weird to say, more casual version of the Kelly, given that it's, you know, the Birkin bag, but it is.
• ▶ 1:50:40 David Rosenthal It's the more casual, modern version of the Kelly.
• ▶ 1:50:42 Ben Gilbert And the Kelly has cleaner lines and this sort of beautiful, almost mid-century trapezoidal shape, whereas the Birkin, everything about it kind of screams function.
• ▶ 1:51:01 David Rosenthal I think part of this is that the Hermes kind of brand transformation modernization was probably still underway.
• ▶ 1:51:33 Ben Gilbert Now granted, Hermes is the least flashy of the luxury labels you could adopt, but people know the brand.
• ▶ 1:51:41 David Rosenthal Yeah, I mean, it takes five years for it to become any modicum of success for Hermes.
• ▶ 1:52:35 David Rosenthal Ben, you would make a great Hermes essay.
• ▶ 1:52:39 Ben Gilbert I actually had a wonderful Hermes associate that I worked with in the Exxon Provence store, and it was crazy.
• ▶ 1:52:47 Ben Gilbert I mean, we bought basically the most entry-level Hermes products that you can buy in one of their stores.
• ▶ 1:53:28 Ben Gilbert No, I don't think I would be a good Hermes sales associate relative to where the bar has been set.
• ▶ 1:56:34 Ben Gilbert And your Hermes SA will not be very happy that you did that, because the point of buying one is to own one and use one and appreciate the craft and the work and the beauty that went into this product, and Hermes is not trying to sell it to…
• ▶ 1:56:50 Ben Gilbert They're trying to sell it to valued customers who will be people who appreciate the Hermes dream for the rest of their life.
• ▶ 1:57:05 David Rosenthal That Hermes makes has what Hermes calls a blind stamp on it.