The Brand that Time Can't Touch

On timelessness, the power of a woman's investment choice and the luxury of restraint.

Jane Birkin with her namesake Hermès bag. Source: CNN

Introduction

On 15 April 2025, Hermès briefly overtook LVMH in market value—becoming, for a moment, the most valuable luxury company in the world. A single brand quietly overtook a 75-brand empire. €248 billion to LVMH’s €245 billion. (Business Insider)

To most, this may have just been a headline, but to those who’ve been watching closely, it felt inevitable. Hermès isn’t trying to win the race—it’s simply refusing to run it. While the rest of the luxury world scrambles for attention, Hermès remains unmoved. Singular. Devoted. Immune to the algorithm.

Perhaps most poetically, the very company that once tried to quietly consume it—LVMH, led by Bernard Arnault—was briefly eclipsed by Hermès. A reminder that slow power, the kind rooted in legacy and lineage, eventually makes itself known.

In 2010, LVMH began secretly buying shares in Hermès via equity swaps, triggering a quiet but fierce defence. The Hermès family consolidated their shares and built a legal fortress around the brand’s independence. (Le Monde) What emerged wasn’t just a victory—but a declaration: we don’t belong to the market. We belong to ourselves. In 2025, that philosophy seems to have paid off.

🐉 A Quiet Rebellion: When LVMH Tried to Swallow Hermès

The year was 2010. LVMH—the world’s most powerful luxury conglomerate—quietly began acquiring shares in Hermès. Not with a press release or a business proposal, but with silence. Through equity swaps and financial instruments, they amassed a 17% stake without warning. It wasn’t just aggressive. It was stealth.

By the time Hermès found out, it was nearly too late. What followed wasn’t a PR war or a public feud—it was something far truer to the Hermès brand management style: controlled, precise, and quietly resolute. The family behind the house, descendants of the sixth generation, moved swiftly to build a protective holding company. They took LVMH to court and they won. (Le Monde, The Guardian)

More than that, they made a statement that echoed louder than any advertising campaign could; that you can’t simply buy Hermès – it’s not something to be leveraged and they are not built for domination – they’re built for devotion. Does this sound familiar? This is the same philosophy that Hermès uses to sell their world-renowned handbags.

In a world where most companies would have taken the buyout, cashed in, and called it a day, Hermès chose self-preservation. It was the opposite of what luxury had become at the time—fast, globalised, trend-driven. Hermès didn’t scale to win. It scaled to protect its DNA. Fifteen years later, that DNA is what has outperformed the empire that tried to take it.

Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski, Creative Director of Hermès. Source: Vanity Fair

👩‍💼 Investing in Women: The Hidden Strategy Behind Longevity

One of the most overlooked elements in Hermès’ ascent—and one of its most quietly radical strengths as a family business—is its long-standing investment in women, not just as consumers but as creators, leaders, and decision-makers.

Unlike LVMH, which operates more like a dynasty—centralised, acquisitive, and expansive—Hermès functions like a household: intimate, consistent, and fiercely protective of its name, its pace, and its values. Most luxury houses currently rely heavily on a musical chairs game of male creative directors and business heads, but Hermès has consistently trusted women with its most central responsibilities. These are not token appointments or strategic optics—they’re long-term investments in competence, perspective, and taste.

• Véronique Nichanian, for example, has been the artistic director of Hermès menswear since 1988. That kind of creative continuity is almost unheard of in the fashion world. And it shows: Hermès menswear has never needed to shout or stunt. It has simply evolved, with quiet confidence.

• Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski, leading womenswear since 2014, creates collections that are powerful, minimal, and intelligent—clothing designed not to perform femininity but to inhabit it.

  
  

Women also hold senior roles across leather goods, marketing, and internal training academies—especially in the métiers that require nurturing craft over time. These are the unseen roles that don’t make headlines but do build institutional strength. Hermès understands something many other brands are only just beginning to grasp: that taste is an economy. More often than not, it's women who drive it—not only in what they buy, but in how they shape culture through their values.

Where other brands cater to trends, Hermès caters to discernment. Their core consumer doesn’t need a campaign to know what’s worth investing in. She knows already and the brand respects her for it. In that sense, Hermès isn’t just designing for women—it’s designed with them. That distinction matters. When a brand builds with women at its centre—not as a target market, but as part of its internal architecture—it stops needing to guess what long-term value looks like. It starts embodying it.

⭐️ Desire as Investment: What Hermès and Gold Have in Common

Women have been historically mocked for the materialistic way in which we spend – clothes, shoes, jewellery, handbags. The implication is always the same: unnecessary, indulgent, excessive.

Anyone who has grown up around South Asian women, however, knows a quiet but powerful truth. These so-called ‘frivolous’ purchases are often deeply strategic. They are investments—quiet acts of protection disguised as beauty. Gold and precious stones, for instance, have long served as a form of generational security. ​Indian women collectively own approximately 24,000 tons of gold, representing about 11% of the world's total gold reserves in jewellery form, according a report from the World Gold Council. The jewellery is worn at weddings, stored discreetly for emergencies, and passed down as inheritance. Whilst undeniably beautiful, it also remains a tool for autonomy which began during a highly patriarchal time where bank accounts and divorce were not easily available to women. Their jewellery holds both emotional and material value. Over time, it almost always appreciates.

Hermès operates with a similar logic. A Birkin isn’t just a bag. It’s an asset class. Scarce, hand-crafted, and often more stable than the stock market. Many women are drawn to Hermès for the same reasons they are drawn to gold. It lasts. It holds. It represents quiet, unshakeable power. Most importantly, it requires no explanation.

In this way, Hermès is not simply selling status. It offers something far rarer: certainty—in your taste, your future, and the idea that what you’ve chosen will remain meaningful long after the season has changed. The decision to invest in a Hermès piece is not a fleeting one. Much like the women who buy gold not only for themselves but also for their daughters and granddaughters, Hermès clients are not buying for the moment. They are buying to hold. To hand down. To build value over time, not just wear it.

⏳ Scarcity as Intention: Making Desire Feel Earned

Most luxury brands today are in a race to open their doors wider. More collaborations, more entry-level products, more social media visibility. They live on urgency— “buy now before the next cool thing drops.”

Hermès takes the opposite approach. It withholds. There are no e-commerce frenzies, no influencer seeding, no overt invitations into the brand. Clients wait months—sometimes years—to be offered certain items. You can’t simply walk in and buy a Birkin. In many cases, you have to be invited to want one. This strategy has created a kind of emotional scarcity that no marketing campaign could manufacture. The result is remarkable: people don’t just show off owning a Birkin—they show off being chosen for one.

On YouTube alone, there are hundreds of videos documenting how people secured their bags—step-by-step guides, purchase histories, theories on store visits, relationship building. There’s an entire content ecosystem not built around the product itself, but around access to it. To own Hermès is to be in a kind of inner circle—not of wealth, but of taste, patience, and restraint. It is not a transaction. It is a rite of passage.

Where most brands fight for attention, Hermès cultivates something far more enduring: longing. In an age of instant gratification, longing for anything feels rare.

🐚 Why It Matters: Power That Refuses to Perform

In a world obsessed with visibility, Hermès has chosen discretion. In a market chasing scale, it has chosen intimacy. Where others try to be everything to everyone, Hermès remains devoted to being itself.

This is why the brand’s brief moment above LVMH in market value wasn’t just financial news—it was symbolic. A quiet reminder that true value doesn’t need to shout. It just needs to last.

What Hermès proves is that permanence is power. That investing in women—whether as artisans, creative leads, or intelligent consumers—is not a niche strategy, but a blueprint for resilience. That building a business around time, rather than trends, allows it to outlast even the empires that once tried to consume it.

It’s easy to dismiss beauty, refinement, and emotional attachment to objects as frivolous. Women have always known otherwise. In gold jewellery, in vintage designer, in carefully chosen things that grow more meaningful with age—we’ve always known how to invest in what will hold us, quietly, for a long time.

Hermès hasn’t just sold us luxury. It’s sold us longevity. It has turned waiting into a privilege, restraint into power, and taste into a form of quiet self-possession.

In doing so, it hasn’t just kept up with the market. It has redefined what it means to lead it.