Hold Tight Hermes.

Seems the Hermes heirs now have a bit of regret of taking their family business public. Via derivatives/equity swaps, Mr. Arnault now owns 17% of Hermes. As Karl Lagerfeld noted, "If you don't want to be taken over, don't put your business in the public market."

What tends to happen with family businesses is that by the third generation the heirs want to cash out or they run the company dry. Hermes happens to have made it to the 6th generation and posted a profit of 421.7 million euros last year.

In the March 5th 2011 NY Times article, Off the Catwalk, The Battle For Hermes, the Hermes Chief Executive notes,

“There is a part of our world that is playing on abundance, on glitz and glamour,” Patrick Thomas, the Hermès’s chief executive, said during an interview the week before Mr. Galliano was fired. “And there is another part that is concentrated on refinement, and basically making beautiful objects.”

Hermès counts itself among the latter, and it wants to stay that way. “We don’t want to be a part of this financial world which is ruining companies and dealing with people like they are goods or raw materials,” said Mr. Thomas, the first chief executive at Hermès who is not a member of the family. “It’s not a financial fight, because we would lose that. It’s a cultural fight.”

RIP Carol Sedestrom Ross:

The below tid bit of an interview with Carol is taken from HAND/EYE magazine.
I love what she say about Push vs. Pull movements.
-It gives me hope that the demand for well-crafted garments will grow.
-Supports my complicated beliefs about green marketing.


Carol Sedestrom Ross: The Arts and Crafts Movement eventually died in the US, I think because the public was not particularly interested in handmade things. It was the first time in history that you could buy mass produced things and use them and throw them away and get more of them. I think that artists are always the first to respond to social change so it doesn't surprise me that Charles Rennie Macintosh and William Morris and other artists of the Arts and Crafts Movement were the ones saying:" Wait, wait, we can make these things, too". But nobody was paying any attention to them, we do now but not then. That was a "pushed movement" then, in marketing terms, the artists were trying to push their ideas onto other people. What is happening now is what is called a "pulled" movement because the public is very tired of mass produced things and prefers handmade so it is pulling the movement forward. There is now a huge appetite for craft in the US. I heard a lecture last Friday by John Naisbit who wrote Megatrends. He is most famous for his "high tech, high touch" concept, that is, the more technology we have in our lives the more things we need to touch to remind ourselves that we are human. It was the industrial revolution which started the craft movement and now it is the technological revolution 100 years later that is really pulling it forward.


Jo Litson: The more time people spend with their computers the more they need the other side.