How Hermes crafts its iconic bags by hand: Inside the maison’s new leather atelier in France

It doesn’t begin on a celebrity’s arm. Every Birkin bag — though a global symbol of luxury — starts life on the unassuming workbench of an artisan like Odile.

Her hands cradled a half-formed Birkin 25, taupe in colour, its elegance still hidden in the scaffolding of construction. “Every Birkin starts life inside out,” she explained softly in French through an interpreter. “We have to turn out each bag slowly before it moves on to the final steps.”

Her fingers pressed the hide between her palms, coaxing it with warmth and pressure. “If you go too fast, too carelessly, it will resist,” she added, her eyes never leaving the grain, alert to the slightest crease. “And it could ruin the entire bag.” 

The workshop hummed with a focused silence. There was no clatter of machinery, no mechanised tempo. The soundscape was intimate: The brush of fingers against hide, the hush of waxed linen thread pulled taut, the muted tap of a hammer aligning an edge. Sunlight slanted across the worktops, catching two dozen or so artisans working in concentration. A faint scent of beeswax lingered in the air.

That was a scene from Hermes’ newest leather workshop in L’Isle-d’Espagnac, a small town in the southwest of France nearly two hours from Bordeaux. Inaugurated in late September 2025, the site will eventually employ 300 people — 260 artisans, the rest supervisors and support staff. This is the luxury house’s 24th leather-making workshop. For Hermes, it marks another step in its gradual expansion across rural France to feed global fashion’s voracious appetite. For the community, it is something more: Dignified long-term employment and regional economic growth.

BEYOND THE BIRKIN

This is not simply a story about how a handbag is made. It is a story about whether craft — with its rhythms, limits, and stubborn slowness — can survive in a world that demands speed and scale. Luxury’s appetite has never been greater. Hermes, too, is growing. But can a house so anchored in artisanship continue to expand without compromise?

“It’s maybe strange to say,” reflected Olivier Fournier, Hermes’ executive vice president of corporate development and social affairs. “But we have two patrimonies: The Hermes family and the craftsmen. The craftsmen today are the descendants of the craftsmen of 1837.”

It is a striking model: A company that places its artisans on the same pedestal as its founding family, which still holds a majority stake in the maison. Their reverence for craft runs deep. Hermes began in 1837, when Thierry Hermes opened a Paris workshop specialising in harnesses and accessories for horse riding. It is a “metier”, a term that in French carries more weight than “trade” or “profession”, evoking a field of work rooted in tradition, identity, and cultural pride.

Saddle making and leatherwork hold a respected place in French culture, as ingrained as bread, wine, or cheese. Equitation itself — the French art of horseback riding and one that emphasises harmony between man and horse — was inscribed by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2011.

That respect is still present today and cascades across every Hermes artisan’s bench. “The same saddle stitch used in 1837 is still used today,” Fournier said, explaining it’s the structural cornerstone of all their leather goods. “Our techniques haven’t changed… and they shouldn’t.”

The stitch itself is deceptively simple: Two needles, one waxed linen thread, passed in mirrored motion through leather. But the result is stronger than any machine-made seam. If one thread breaks, the other holds. The stitch can also be reopened and redone, making long-term repair possible. “We repair a lot of our objects,” Fournier noted. “It gives a new life to the object — a way for generations to pass a bag from grandmother to daughter to granddaughter.”

OF QUALITY AND SCARCITY

Few items embody the Hermes mystique more than the Birkin. Introduced in 1984, it was initially slow to gain traction. Today, it is among the most coveted accessories in the world. Earlier this year, the very first Birkin, made for Jane Birkin herself, sold at a Paris auction for €8.6 million (US$10.02 million; S$12.95 million), becoming the most expensive fashion accessory ever sold in Europe.

Scarcity is part of the allure. In September 2025, two American women filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that customers were required to spend heavily on other products before being “offered” a Birkin. The case was swiftly dismissed, but the attention only underscored its enduring demand.

In 2024, Hermes reported revenues of €15.2 billion — a 15 per cent increase from the year before — yet walk into a boutique and there is no Birkin on display. There is a waitlist. But more crucially, there is a production model centred entirely on an attentive human pace, and where each bag is made by one artisan stitch by stitch, from start to end.

“We are fortunate enough to have incredible customers asking for our bags, and we can’t supply the demand,” Fournier said. “Not because we don’t want to, but because the way we produce our bags takes time. And we don’t want to force the pace, the speed of this development. We make no compromise on quality.”

Luxury here is not engineered scarcity, but time itself.

MULTIPLYING SLOWNESS

Yet faced with surging demand, Hermes has chosen its own unique path: Not to accelerate production, but to multiply slowness.

“We roughly open one new workshop per year,” said Fournier. “We have to recruit the right people and train them up. Every artisan is trained over 18 months, and they are still learning every day.”

Each site is intentionally capped at around 260 artisans, a scale designed to preserve community, avoid the alienation of mass production, and protect the sanctity of the craft. Many artisans arrive from unrelated fields: Caregiving or teaching for example, and they enroll in L’Ecole Hermes des Savoir-Faire for training and apprenticeships before starting at a workshop. They are not chosen for leatherwork experience, but for dexterity, humility, and the ability to work collectively. In the hands of these artisans are movements that date back to at least 1837 when the house was founded.

THE FRENCH CULTURAL FRAMEWORK

What underpins Hermes’ philosophy is not just a commitment to craft, but to a humanist view of labour, one that rose out of the same cultural framework that gave France its national motto: Liberté, égalité, fraternité (“liberty, equality, fraternity”). 

In practice, this means treating production not as a cost to be minimised but as a dignity to be sustained. Workshops are built not as faceless factories but as communities where human ties form part of the structure. 

At the end of 2024, Hermes employed over 25,000 people worldwide, of whom over 15,000 are based in France — more than 60 per cent of its workforce. That same year, 2,300 new employees joined what the maison calls its community of Hermes men and women. Seventy per cent of all objects are made in France, across 60 sites in 11 regions — each organised into hubs, where savoir-faire (or know how) is passed on locally. “We try to look for areas in France where there was a manufacturing tradition,” said Fournier. “And so we create these jobs as it’s part of our social responsibility.”

Every new workshop creates around 300 jobs on average, a steady regeneration that extends far beyond the maison itself. The result is local renewal: Stable employment, comfortable working conditions close to home, and the pride of belonging to a metier with both heritage and future.

Hermes does operate 15 other production sites in Switzerland, Italy, the UK, the US, Portugal and Australia, but the centre of gravity remains in France. Choosing to grow slowly, at human scale, within the country’s cultural and social fabric is as much an economic strategy as it is a declaration of values.

What Hermes is offering, then, is not just a product but a worldview: That human skill, time, and care are still worth something in an age that’s rushing to forget them. 

“In recent years, people have become dissatisfied with obsolescence,” Fournier said. “Dissatisfied with marketing promises with nothing behind. They want authenticity, quality, and a story to tell.”

THE DIGNITY OF TRADITIONS

Three more leather workshops are planned in Loupes near Bordeaux, Ardennes (near the Belgian border), and Calvados in Normandy in the next few years. Together with L’Isle-d’Espagnac, they will form regional clusters, each allowing experienced artisans to transmit skills to younger colleagues. “The idea is to keep this regional logic,” Fournier explained. “Three to four workshops in one area, so we can transmit savoir-faire.”

There will be no overseas expansion, no globalised factories. As for viral false social media claims that Hermes bags are outsourced to factories in China, Fournier was direct: “We fight them. We have all the legal facilities to do so.”

“At the end of it all, it’s a question of respect,” he added. “Respect for the material. Respect for people. For us, it’s never just about selling bags — it’s about selling a culture. Made in France means something, and for us, it’s about remaining authentic and true to who we are.”

The exception is when there are specific skills that are not available in France. Some shoes, for example, are made in Italy while timepieces are made in Switzerland. “Depending on the creative process, we are sometimes very happy to find incredible singular know-how, like Vietnam for lacquerware, or in Nepal for beautiful cashmere shawls,” Fournier added.

Back at L’Isle-d’Espagnac, the afternoon light slanted across the workbenches. Odile finished turning out another Birkin. Perhaps it was one destined for an eagerly waiting buyer in Singapore, or Sao Paulo. She inspected the seam with quiet precision, then set it aside. Around her, younger artisans bent over their pieces, still making the same movements of the saddle stitch as the craftsmen did in 1837. She leaned over to one, offered a few words, then threaded her needles again.

The bag before her will take days to finish. And that, perhaps, is the only way true craft can endure: Not by racing the world, but by resisting it — at the speed of a stitch.