Hermès is expanding its network of factories. "This is our 23rd leather goods workshop in France," said Axel Dumas, managing director of the luxury brand, on Friday, September 13, on the sidelines of the expensively renovated building's inauguration in Riom, central France. Since the beginning of the year, the luxury brand, which manufactures its leather goods exclusively in France, has occupied two former tobacco factory buildings in the city's center, which were operated by Seita until 1975, when the Gauloises and Gitanes cigarette production site was moved to the city's outskirts, before their definitive closure in 2018 by Imperial Tobacco.
What the people of Riom used to call the "manu" (short for "manufacture") was a "ghost ship," explained the town's mayor, Pierre Pécoul. It took four years of work to transform the former industrial site, located in the heart of Riom, a town of 19,000 inhabitants some 15 kilometers north of the city of Clermont-Ferrand. In 2019, Hermès had approached the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Entreprises agency, responsible for economic development in the region, to help it find a production site close to the neighboring town of Sayat, where the brand has operated a leather goods business for the last 20 years.
Hermès was quick to express its desire to find an existing site for redevelopment. "The first time we visited the tobacco factory in Riom, the group's real estate managers fell in love with it," said the public agency's Sonia François and Vania de Oliveira. Listed as a historical monument, the site, owned by a developer who had once planned to build a hotel there, was bought by the Riom Limagne et Volcans conurbation. Before being sold for “the same amount” to Hermès, explained Frédéric Bonnichon, president of the local authority.
Since then, the luxury brand has spent around €25 million in investments – without public funding, according to Le Monde's information – to transform the 1930s building into a production workshop with the help of the Tracks agency. It will also house an apprenticeship center similar to the dozen such centers it has created in France since 2022, to train 1,600 people for the saddler-leather worker Certificate of Professional Aptitude (CAP, a 2-year vocational training diploma). In this 7,000-square-meter, light-filled building, some 280 people are expected to work – in the medium term – to produce Constance, Bolide and other Birkin bags entirely by hand.
Over the past 10 years, the brand, which employs 23,242 people (including 14,320 in France), has opened an average of one new workshop per year. However, despite an intensive increase in production capacity, the brand is still struggling to replenish its bag stocks and reduce customer waiting times in stores around the world. For some items, the wait is several months.
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