Ben Gilbert: commitment

Transcript context

…I'm going to channel my inner Pierre-Alexis here, the current artistic director of Hermès. I think it still has relevance if you want your object to be permanent. If you want an object that you own to represent something wholly different and antithetical to the Amazonification or the Walmartification of items these days, you want it to be made like this. Yup. Something that made this really special for hundreds of years, if not still, is that it had to be done by hand. If you want something of this quality, this gets this interesting idea, is handmade stuff better? Not necessarily. Axel even says this in an interview. He says in 2019, today, hand stitching is the highest quality, so machines are non negotiable. When the quality of a machine stitching gets better than hand stitching, we will do it. We are not a museum. David, this is where you're getting your, we are not a museum quote from. But it really gets to this element of, why are handcrafted goods desirable? In this case, it literally creates something higher quality, more durable, certainly more aesthetically pleasing, since when done well, you can't see that hole in between the thread and the leather. It's a pretty special process. For everyone who's wondering, okay, but what is the rest of creating one of these bags look like, start to finish, a Kelly bag, and we'll talk about working in a little bit but similar story, is made by one craftsman. One craftsman starts with 36 unique pieces of high quality leather. As much as possible from the same animal and matched exactly.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.