Long before Hermès became shorthand for luxury, it was a harness workshop. Thierry Hermès founded the house in Paris in 1837, making bridles and harnesses for European carriage trade. He set up shop near the Grands Boulevards, where his clientele included European aristocracy who needed equipment as reliable as it was refined. The craftsmanship was good enough that Hermès won recognition at Parisian industry fairs within a few decades, building a reputation for quality that the brand still trades on today.
That early emphasis on the harness is easy to overlook now, but it's the reason Hermès leather goods are built the way they are. Saddlery demands stitching and leatherwork that can survive constant friction, weather, and weight, not just look good sitting on a shelf. The saddle stitch technique developed for harnesses, that same hand-stitched, two-needle method, is still used on Hermès bags today for exactly that reason.
From horses to handbags
As cars started replacing carriages in the early 1900s, Hermès had to adapt or risk becoming a relic of a horse-drawn era. Thierry's grandson, Emile Hermès, saw the shift coming early. According to company lore, he came across a zipper during a trip abroad and recognised its potential for leather goods, eventually securing rights to use it in France. That single decision helped push Hermès from a saddlery into a full leather goods and fashion house.
The brand's first handbag arrived in 1892, but it was the 1920s and 1930s that really cemented Hermès as a fashion name rather than just an equestrian supplier. The house introduced silk scarves in 1937, starting with the now-iconic carré, and expanded into ready-to-wear, jewellery, and homeware over the following decades. Also from this period came the Sac à dépêches, a structured bag designed for carrying documents, which would later evolve into the Kelly.
The Kelly and the Birkin
The Sac à dépêches got its famous rename almost by accident. In 1956, a paparazzi photo showed a visibly pregnant Grace Kelly holding the bag in front of her to shield her bump from cameras. The image ran in magazines worldwide, and the demand that followed was enough for Hermès to formally rename the bag the Kelly in her honour. It remains one of the few instances of a fashion house naming a product after a client rather than a designer or muse chosen internally.
The Birkin has an even more specific origin story, and it's one Hermès still tells today. In 1984, actress and singer Jane Birkin sat next to Hermès executive Jean-Louis Dumas on a flight from Paris to London. The contents of her straw bag spilled out mid-flight, and she mentioned she'd never found a leather weekend bag that actually suited how she travelled, spacious enough for a young mother but still elegant. Dumas sketched a design on the back of an airplane sick bag during that same flight. The result, refined afterward, became the Birkin, and it's arguably the most recognised status bag in the world today.
A house that stayed independent
Unlike most heritage fashion houses, many of which were absorbed into conglomerates like LVMH or Kering over the past few decades, Hermès has remained family-owned and independently run for nearly two centuries. It's currently guided by the sixth generation of the Hermès family, and the family holds a controlling stake specifically to protect that independence from takeover attempts, including a well-publicised standoff with LVMH in the early 2010s.
That continuity shows in how deliberately the brand controls production, distribution, and even how few bags it makes each year. Each leather bag is still made by a single artisan from start to finish, which caps output in a way mass manufacturing never would. That's a large part of why demand still outpaces supply, and why waitlists for certain bags are less a marketing tactic than a genuine production constraint.
Why the history still matters at resale
Nearly two hundred years on, Hermès is still run on the same principles it started with: hand-craftsmanship, controlled scarcity, and a refusal to compromise on materials. That's exactly why authenticated pieces hold their value so well on the secondary market, and why buying pre-owned Hermès isn't a compromise so much as access to a house that was never designed to mass-produce anything.
It's a history you can actually carry.
