Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…This was in the late 80s, early 90s. 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. It is in that high of a steam. I said, oh, well, why? She said, look, by the time we're at this era, nobody else was left that did this. Everything we talked about in the 1970s, all these other brands all went in this complete other direction. 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. If that's important to you, there's no place else. You can't ply your trade doing that anywhere else. I asked her then. I was like, okay, well, as for the products and to the clients, to the customers, why does that make a difference? What she said is what you'll hear the family talk about all the time. She said, look, it's about soul. This product has a soul. Somebody made that thing with their bare hands. That means something. There's nobody else, certainly at Hermes at scale, that does that. 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. You can get custom stuff, small boutique stuff. Beatrice is a worldwide master, you can get that from her. But the idea that a $200 billion company at scale would be doing this. There's nobody else. Yeah, it's nuts. It's completely insane. The people who don't work for Hermes, your options are in the dozens. If you go as a customer and you want something like a saddle stitched bag, wallet, or something like Hermes would make in that traditional pre war, early 20th century fashion, there aren't that many other artisans out there. Hermes employs 7000 of them. I don't know how many other ones there are, 1000, 2000. It's not like Hermes has cornered the market. They're hiring more people and training them as fast as they can. They're trying to preserve this market that otherwise would have entirely been zero. It's a pretty crazy thing that they've managed to scale even to the scale that they're at. The other thing Beatrice said to bring it back to Jean-Louis, he is a legend. He really cared. The idea that he would follow the consultants, it was just so completely anathema to him. He's the artistic director and CEO of the company. She ran into him in the elevator in the Faubourg right after she started. He looks at her and said, you're Beatrice Amblard, welcome to Hermes. He knew everybody by name. When she ended up leaving in 1997 to open her own store, he called her. He was genuinely shocked. Nobody ever leaves. What are you going to do? She explained that she wanted to be entrepreneurial, start her own thing. Shortly after the San Francisco Chronicle did an article about her, he found the article, read it in France, cut it out, and mailed it to her with a note of congratulations handwritten.…

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