Hermès was founded in 1837 as a harness workshop in Paris, which is probably the least watch-adjacent origin story in this entire project. The family business survived the death of the horse-drawn carriage by making saddles, then leather goods, then silk scarves, then basically everything a rich person can carry. Watches arrived late: Hermès sold them commercially from 1928 with movements and cases made by respected Swiss manufacturers, and only opened its own watch division, La Montre Hermès, in Biel/Bienne in 1978. It then spent roughly three decades as a design house selling pretty quartz watches before deciding to become a genuine watch manufacturer. That climb is the interesting part.
A harness shop that outlived the horse
Thierry Hermès opened his harness-making workshop in Paris in 1837, catering to the carriage trade at the height of its powers. The carriage trade then died, and Hermès did not, because the family kept adapting: saddlery, leather bags, the famous silk scarves, and eventually a luxury empire built on the idea that craft matters more than fashion cycles. The family never sold out, which is the defining fact about this company and will matter again later in this article. By the time Jean-Louis Dumas, a fifth-generation descendant, took charge in 1978, Hermès was already a byword for expensive leather goods with a waiting list. He is the one who decided watches deserved to be a real business rather than a side line.
Watches had been around the edges of the house for a long time. The first Hermès wristwatch was made in 1912 as a gift for Émile Hermès’s daughter, and from 1928 the maison sold watches commercially, commissioning them from established Swiss makers. (Rolex made a Daytona “Paul Newman” for Hermès, if you want a measure of how seriously the house was taken as a retailer.) These were Hermès watches in the same sense that a Hermès scarf is silk: the design and the taste were the product, and somebody else made the machinery.
The Hermès boutique on Avenue George V, Paris. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
La Montre Hermès and the people who drew it
In 1978 Jean-Louis Dumas founded La Montre Hermès in Biel/Bienne, the heart of Swiss watchmaking, to produce watches designed in Paris. The timing was spectacularly bad: the Quartz Crisis was at full blast, and a French fashion house opening a watch factory in Switzerland must have looked like a vanity project. The early output was quartz watches for women in styles that played to the brand’s equestrian heritage, and watch collectors treated them accordingly, meaning as fashion watches.
The saving grace was the talent Dumas put behind the drawing board. Henri d’Origny joined Hermès in 1958 to design silk scarves at the flagship on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and ended up designing more than twenty watches for the house, including its two defining models. His first watch was the Arceau in 1978, with its asymmetrical stirrup-shaped lugs and slanted numerals borrowed from the posture of a galloping horse. Then came the Cape Cod in 1991: Jean-Louis Dumas asked him for a square watch, and d’Origny, who disliked obeying orders, drew a rectangle with a square inside it instead, the shape riffing on the house’s anchor-chain motif. Martin Margiela added the double-tour wrap strap in 1998, and it became the signature. The third icon, the Heure H, arrived in 1996, designed by Philippe Mouquet, who simply turned the Hermès initial into a watch case and got away with it.
Later, the watch division got serious creative leadership. Philippe Delhotal, previously at Vacheron Constantin, Piaget, Jaeger-LeCoultre and Patek Philippe, became creative director of Hermès Horloger in 2008 with a mandate to develop mechanical watchmaking. Laurent Dordet, at Hermès since 1995, became CEO of the watch division in 2015. Under them the Slim d’Hermès arrived with typography drawn specially for it by Philippe Apeloig, the kind of typographic care you expect from a French maison and almost never get from a watch brand.
The siege of Hermès
In October 2010, Bernard Arnault’s LVMH announced it had quietly accumulated 14.2 percent of Hermès through cash-settled equity swaps, meaning the family found out from a press release. The Hermès heirs, who owned around 73 percent of the company between some sixty family members, responded by doing something no industrial dynasty had tried: more than fifty of them pooled about 51 percent of the company’s shares into a private holding company, H51, locking them up for twenty years with rights of first refusal so no share could leak to an outsider. The holding was operational by December 2010. LVMH kept buying anyway, reaching about 21 percent by May 2011 and eventually 23.2 percent, and Hermès kept suing, with the French market regulator fining LVMH in 2013 for failing to disclose the stake-building. In 2014 the fight ended the way these things usually end, with lawyers: LVMH distributed most of its Hermès stake to its own shareholders, promised not to buy Hermès shares for five years, and Groupe Arnault kept a rump 8.5 percent. Hermès is still family-controlled today, and the H51 structure is the reason.
Buying the machinery: from fashion watches to manufacture
The honest version of Hermès watch history is that for a long time the watches were the weak link in the luxury chain. They were beautiful objects with borrowed hearts, sold at prices the design justified and the movements did not. The turning point was 2006, when Hermès paid CHF 25 million for a 25 percent stake in Vaucher Manufacture Fleurier, the movement maker in Fleurier associated with Parmigiani (the Sandoz family foundation owns the rest). That single investment gave Hermès real mechanical calibers, including the H1837, and it was followed by a slow vertical integration: a 32 percent stake in case maker Joseph Erard Holding in 2011, taken over entirely by the end of 2013; dial maker Natéber in 2012; and the formal creation of Les Ateliers d’Hermès Horloger in 2017. Production now runs through Le Noirmont, with final assembly, strap-making and quality control at the atelier in Brügg.
Credit where due: Hermès actually did the work. Today the watch division is a genuinely integrated manufacture that makes its own cases, dials, straps and movements. But the honest caveat goes with it. Vaucher is a shared resource: the movements Hermès uses are built on the same industrial base that supplies Parmigiani and Richard Mille, so the technical story is “sophisticated part-ownership of excellent engineering” rather than “in-house genius.” And a large part of the catalog is still quartz, sold at luxury prices because the design and the orange box command them. Resale values are soft compared with dedicated watch brands. You are paying for Paris, not for the Geneva Seal.
Saddle, stirrups and harness: the equestrian vocabulary behind the Arceau’s stirrup lugs. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC0 (Metropolitan Museum of Art).
The icons, dated
The catalog is built around a small set of recognizable shapes rather than a sprawling lineup, which is unusual and mostly a strength. The Arceau (1978) is the stirrup-lug classic with the galloping-horse numerals, and it has become the platform for Hermès’s most playful complications: Le Temps Suspendu, which lets you pause and restart the time display, and Le Temps Voyageur, a strange and charming take on the world-time watch. The Cape Cod (1991) is the square-in-a-rectangle with the double-tour strap, still the brand’s best-known watch and a genuine design icon. The Heure H (1996) is the H turned into a case. The Slim d’Hermès is the thin dress watch with Apeloig’s custom numerals. More recently came the H08, a rounded-square sports watch, and the Cut, a geometric design with an integrated look. The H08 and the Cut are competent and good-looking, and they are also Hermès noticing that the industry is selling a lot of sporty integrated-bracelet watches. The playful complications are the better story: few brands would build a watch whose party trick is suspending time itself, which is exactly the kind of unserious idea a fashion house gets away with.
Why it matters
Hermès watches matter for a reason that has almost nothing to do with movements. At a time when collectors increasingly sort watches by caliber numbers and power-reserve figures, Hermès is the brand that treats the watch as a designed object first: the typography, the case shape, the strap, the joke. The Arceau, the Cape Cod and the Heure H are some of the only modern watches you can identify from across a room, and none of them look like anything else. That is worth something, even if the movement inside came from a factory you part-own with a family foundation. The fair price of admission is knowing what you are buying: design, craft, leatherwork, and the pleasure of a brand that does not take horology quite as seriously as horology takes itself. Buy the design you love and do not expect the secondary market to love it back.
Official site: hermes.com
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