Saddle Makers Who Never Left the Horse

Hermès opened in Paris in 1837 making harnesses and saddles for carriage horses. It was a workshop serving the carriage trade.

Then the motor car arrived, and the carriage trade ended.

Almost every business in that industry disappeared. Hermès is now one of the most valuable luxury companies in the world, and the reason is a single act of correct self-definition.

A company that believes it is in the harness business dies with the harness. A company that understands it is in the business of working leather beautifully, by hand, to a standard almost nobody can match, can move into luggage, then bags, then silk, carrying its actual advantage with it.

That advantage has a name: the saddle stitch. Two needles, one thread, worked by hand, slower than any machine, and it does not unravel when cut. A harness maker used it because a failing harness at speed kills somebody. A bag maker still uses it because the house never stopped selling the difference, and because it is a genuine difference that a customer can be shown.

Which brings us to the most misunderstood thing about Hermès, the Birkin waiting list.

People assume it is a marketing device, and understandably so, because in almost every other luxury brand it would be. Scarcity is usually a decision: produce fewer, charge more, let the queue advertise you.

Here the constraint is capacity. Each bag takes a trained artisan many hours, artisans take years to train, and the house trains its own. The limit is how many skilled pairs of hands exist in the world.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Manufactured scarcity reads as a tactic and is remembered as one, and customers are increasingly sophisticated about spotting it. A queue caused by there being only so many people who can do the work is a fact. Facts survive scrutiny in a way marketing decisions do not, which is why Hermès is the one luxury house whose exclusivity is rarely accused of being a trick.

The rest of the company's behaviour follows from the same logic and looks strange against every modern growth playbook.

It grows slowly. It refuses the wide licensing that made other houses fast money and then destroyed them. It keeps production in its own workshops rather than outsourcing. It trains artisans for years before they touch a saleable bag. Every one of those decisions costs money in the short term and buys the only thing the brand actually sells, which is the credibility of the claim.

There is a line long associated with the house: that it has no policy of image, only a policy of product.

You can be cynical about that, and you can also check it. Look at what the company does rather than what it says. The workshops are real, the training is real, the stitch is real, the refusal to licence is real and has cost real revenue. It is the rare case where the slogan and the accounts agree.