Hermès: Culture & Second-Hand Market

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We also discussed Hermès establishing a global CRM system. We talked about its relevance in preventing resales and black market sales. Apart from that, what do you think will be the key benefits for Hermès in knowing their customers better? How can they use this to adjust their strategies?

The global strategy involves better segmentation of the customer base. I know they use the CRM to organize events, for example, if they could target customers buying specific products like jewelry or watches and then organize commercial events. You might say every company does that. From my experience in internal control, the issue was the black market view. In the commercial department, they conducted studies on their customers, but Hermès has the advantage of customers coming to the store without needing to be called. They didn't face issues like needing more customers or knowing them better to attract them to the store. Financially, it wasn't necessary. There were no detailed studies on age, only general information like nationality. For example, knowing there are many Asian customers or a flow of Russians was more informative than being used for commercial targeting. It's unusual for a company not to have to delve into client information.

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Regarding the product mix per region, we discussed last time that overall it's 41% leather goods, 29% ready-to-wear, and 12% other sectors, including silk, watches, and perfumes. From your European perspective, would you say these consolidated figures of the product mix are similar across different regions? Or, from your experience, are there big differences? For example, is ready-to-wear 29% overall but a lot more or less in another country, or is it quite similar across different regions?

I would say there were differences, but they were not huge. The more mature a store or zone was, the fewer bags they sold. A new zone, for example, would be entitled to have more bags to sell to launch a bit. But as a geographical zone became mature, they could sell fewer bags. Now, we could probably say that all the zones are mature, so there shouldn't be many differences.

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