In February 2024, the Acquired podcast released what became one of its most popular episodes ever: a four-hour history of Hermès. Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal traced the company from its 1837 saddlery origins through six generations of the Hermès-Dumas family to its current standing as a $200 billion company.
What made the episode different from the usual luxury-brand coverage was the sourcing. David didn’t just read the annual reports. He sat down with people who had done the work. One of those people was our founder, Béatrice Amblard.
From the Faubourg to Clement Street
David introduced Bea’s story midway through the episode, during a section on Jean-Louis Dumas and the artisan culture he protected from management consultants who wanted Hermès to outsource production like Gucci.
Bea was hired as an artisan at Hermès Paris at the start of Jean-Louis’s tenure. She worked in the atelier at 24 Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the most storied address in luxury. When Jean-Louis’s son Pierre-Alexis, now Hermès’s artistic director, came to train as a teenager, he sat next to Bea at the bench.
When Hermès opened its San Francisco store, Bea moved to the West Coast. Not to sell. To repair. She was the sole artisan responsible for every repair on the West Coast of North America. One person in New York handled the East Coast. That was it. They came from the Faubourg, and a few of these people went around the world.
David asked Bea what made Hermès special as a place to work. Her answer was unequivocal: when she was training and decided she wanted to go into this field, Hermès was the greatest company anyone could hope to work for. It wasn’t even close.
He then asked why hand craftsmanship matters to the customer. Her answer has stayed with us: a product made by hand has a soul. A product made on an assembly line does not.
Jean-Louis Dumas himself knew every artisan by name. When Bea was new, he ran into her in the elevator at the Faubourg and said, “You’re Béatrice Amblard. Welcome to Hermès.” When she eventually left in 1997 to start her own shop, he called her personally, shocked. Nobody ever leaves. Later, when the San Francisco Chronicle profiled her, Jean-Louis found the article in France, cut it out, and mailed it to her with a handwritten note of congratulations.
Why This Matters for Heirloom
Ben Gilbert put it plainly: if you want something saddle-stitched in the traditional way, your options outside Hermès number in the dozens. Hermès employs 7,000 artisans. The independent makers doing this work worldwide might number 1,000 or 2,000.
He named April in Paris, Bea’s former shop, as one of only a handful of makers doing Hermès-caliber work independently. That’s the lineage Heirloom Leathercraft carries forward.
The saddle stitch that Ben described in the episode, the one where you can barely see the hole, where the thread seems to vanish into the leather, is the same stitch we teach in every class and use on every piece that leaves our bench. It’s not decorative. It’s structural. Two needles, one thread, each stitch locked independently so if one breaks, the rest hold.
Hermès has proven that hand craftsmanship doesn’t just survive at scale. It’s the reason for the scale. Jean-Louis Dumas understood this. Bea understood it when she trained at the Faubourg. And it’s what we practice every day at Heirloom.
The Tradition Continues
Bea now teaches the next generation of artisans at Heirloom Leathercraft in San Francisco. The same techniques. The same standards. The same insistence that every piece have a soul.
If you want to learn from someone who sat at the bench in the most famous atelier in the world, join one of our classes. If you want to see the work, visit the shop.
Listen to the full episode: Acquired — Hermès: The Complete History and Strategy
