Saint-Vincent-de-Paul (France) – In a large building of wood and concrete, behind large bay windows, nearly 200 recently trained craftsmen make Hermès bags, in a new factory inaugurated on Friday near Bordeaux to meet the strong global demand for luxury goods.
In this space of 5,800 square meters where eight workshops are spread, including one dedicated to training, the silence is barely disturbed by delicate hammer blows. Each of the 185 artisans (260 in the long term) is focused on its production. “We are focused on our bags, on what we do”, explains to AFP Gilles Bousquet, 37, former logistics specialist at Decathlon, converted into leather goods since September 2019.
It is a particularity of the group: the recruitment of craftsmen is done without criteria of age, sex or professional experience. Many of the employees thus had a previous professional life, sometimes far removed from leather goods. The starting salary is not communicated but it is “very much above the minimum wage”, according to Guillaume de Seynes, general manager of the upstream pole and group participations. Gilles Bousquet, like all the artisans at Hermès, followed an 18-month in-house training course. “The first time I sewed, it marked me,” he recalls amused, “I had never held a needle between my fingers”.
15 hours minimum for a Kelly bag
Just a few meters away, in the training workshop, the new class of 40 people, who have just arrived, are learning how to sew at the saddle stitch, one of the basics of the profession. These neophytes will then have to learn over the months to cut, polish, sand, polish, prick, dye … before being allowed to make their first bag, the Kelly, on their own.
It takes a minimum of 15 hours of work to make a Kelly bag. It is “the most famous model, the oldest and especially the model which concentrates the most know-how”, explained to AFP Guillaume de Seynes. A Hermès bag, whatever the model, is made from start to finish by the same craftsman. Finalizing his very first bag, “it’s something”, admits Gilles Bousquet, “we are going one step further”. After the Kelly, some of his colleagues began to train on another bag of the brand, the 24/24. “Be proud of your work, it is the secret of the quality”, declared Axel Dumas, the boss of Hermès, before cutting the ribbon of inauguration of the manufacture.
The Saint-Vincent-de-Paul building, called the Guyenne leather goods store, was built on a former embankment storage area by the architect Patrick Arotcharen. It is the 19th manufacture of the group which produces all its leather goods in France and which has to face an ever-increasing global demand for luxury products. “We are in a sustained growth rate”, which for Hermès means “an increase in the number of craftsmen, training and therefore a new site”, according to Guillaume de Seynes.
In July, the group announced an “exceptional” semester with sales amounting to 4.235 billion euros, up 70 percent from 2020 and 29 percent from 2019 before the pandemic. The Saint-Vincent-de-Paul manufacture will eventually, like all the group’s leather goods, have its own school which will issue a national state diploma, a leather goods CAP. The first Hermès school of know-how opened at the beginning of September in the leather goods industry in Fitilieu in Isère. Since 2010, Hermès has opened nine leather goods factories in France, bringing the number of saddlers and leatherworkers within the group to over 4,000. Three other manufacturing projects are underway, in Louviers (Eure), Tournes (Ardennes) and Riom (Puy-de-Dôme) (AFP)
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