Why should it? McKinsey doesn’t have a consulting department nor does Microsoft have a software department. Marketing is Hermès’ core business.
At the carnival, standing atop the red carpet and greeting the 800 VIPs, including Anna Wintour, Jodie Foster and Martha Stewart, as they entered, was Hermès’ de facto head of marketing: Axel Dumas.
“Our business is about creating desire,” he says. “It can be fickle because desire is fickle, but we try to have creativity to suspend the momentum.”
To instill this ethos in the company, all new employees are steeped in Hermès’ desire-creating culture through three-day sessions called “Inside the Orange Box” (so named for the signature packaging) that trace the company back to Thierry Hermès and give a history of each of the product categories (or “métiers,” in Hermès-speak, which is French for a trade). Thus every Hermès employee can wax philosophical about the Kelly bag, the trapezoidal saddle bag from the 1890s that Axel Dumas’ grandfather transformed into a women’s handbag and that Grace Kelly made iconic.
But the main guardian of the Hermès mystique is the family itself.