Back when Axel Dumas was in charge of retail operations for Hermès in France, starting in 2005, one of his tasks was to pay a visit to all the company’s stores. “My goal was never to get the address [before I went],” says Dumas, now CEO of the family-owned brand, which was founded in 1837, six generations of his family ago. “My theory was that if we have the right location, I’ll be able to find it by feeling.” He’d go to the center of whichever town was on his list that day and follow his nose, which is aquiline and adds to the resemblance he bears to François Truffaut’s New Wave muse Jean-Pierre Léaud. “I’d look for a nice area, where people were working. It was easy.”
The brick-and-mortar shopping scene has been panicky for years, as e-commerce nibbles at its foundations, malls crater and department stores try to dig themselves out of bankruptcy. Stores are boring, the conventional wisdom says. Multinationals like the Gap and Sephora roll out techy gimmicks like VR dressing rooms and virtual makeup assistants. If there is a buoy of good news bobbing above a pessimistic industry surface, it is Hermès’s orange box. Since the middle of the 2010s, as headlines have trumpeted “the retail apocalypse,” and as the fast-approaching metaverse threatens to become a dematerialized shopping mall, Hermès has leaned into physical stores.
