No crisis for luxury. In operation since January, the Louviers leather goods factory, a brick, wood and glass building, spread over 6,200 m² in Normandy and designed by the architect Lina Ghotmeh, should eventually accommodate 260 craftsmen. Saddlery and leather goods, the company’s core business, represented 43% of Hermès’ sales in 2022, which reached 11.6 billion euros.
“Growth year after year is around 7% in volume,” explains Guillaume de Seynes, managing director upstream division and holdings of the Hermès group. “We are on this very strong dynamic and we remain on a model of artisanal manufacture. To generate growth, we need to train and increase the number of our artisans,” he adds. Hermès has the particularity of recruiting without criteria of age, gender or experience. Many employees thus have a previous professional life.
“Despite the increase in our capacities – we now have 4,700 craftsmen for leather goods – demand seems to be always stronger”, he says. “For leather, we cannot create more than 250, 300 new jobs per year because it requires a lot of training,” said Axel Dumas, group manager during the presentation of the annual results. Since 2010, Hermès has opened ten leather goods shops in France, bringing the number of saddler-leather craftsmen within the group to 4,700. Four other manufacturing projects are in progress.