Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…But it would all be irrelevant if the brand didn't translate out of the horse era and into the car era, which was not Thierry Hermes' doing, nor was it his son's doing. Thierry dies in 1878. His son, Charles-Emile, takes over. He apprenticed coming up in the shop in exactly the same way that Thierry apprenticed. He just apprenticed for his dad. By the time he takes over, he's been working in the shop as a craftsman for 20 years. By the way, this family tradition and way of business continues to this day. Axel Dumas and Pierre-Alexis Dumas, who are the two descendants of Hermes, the sixth generation that are running the company today, Axel is the CEO and Pierre-Alexis is the artistic director, apprenticed in the business. When they were teenagers for five years after school, they went to the atelier, they learned the saddle stitch, they made bags, they made items with their hands. Obviously, they also learned the business from their parents, but they're not learning the business the way that the Arnault children are learning the business at LVMH as executives. They're learning with their hands as craftspeople how to make this stuff, which is wild. Axel is the CEO of a $200 billion plus company. It's crazy. To bring it back to the late 1800s, I think the point you're making here is, when Charles-Emile was apprenticing, there was no other example of what this company could become. He thought, why don't I carry it on in exactly the same manner, Thierry, that you did? There's not this grand ambition to innovate and change with the times, it's well how do I learn exactly your craft exactly the way you do it and then continue that? Right. The business and the craft are intimately intertwined, they cannot be separated. This is a playbook theme I want to pull all the way forward, but it's so critical to understand about Hermes and what really in my mind differentiates it from LVMH. LVMH, as we talked about on that episode, has world class best in the world business executives who partner with world class best in the world creatives. At Hermes, these are not different people. Obviously, there is a different CEO and artistic director that are both members of the same family and who are cousins. But in spirit, they're cut from the same cloth, they apprentice as creative craftspeople, and they collectively and the family, is in charge as much of the creative side of the house as they are of the business side.…

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