Wanted: people who can learn to make €22,000 handbags

On a worktable in a Hermès atelier in a north-eastern suburb of Paris, Lionel Prudhomme points out prototypes of new limited edition bag designs the French luxury house is working on.

There is a version of the classic Kelly model with painted wood panelling, a clutch decorated with whimsical interplanetary designs — which sells for €22,000 — and several others where the leather is moulded into rounded shapes in brilliant blue and faded orange.

Housed in a modern glass and concrete complex, this leather goods workshop in Pantin, one of 21 that Hermès has throughout France, is the place where the vision of designers is transformed into products.

“The idea arrives as a prototype, but we will work to improve it so that it is reproducible every time,” the atelier supervisor said.

Like the bags he makes, master artisans like Prudhomme — who has been at Hermès for three decades and estimates he knows how to make at least 85 different models — are an increasingly precious commodity.

After years of rapid growth, driven by voracious demand from Chinese consumers, Europe’s luxury industry is facing acute hiring pressures for roles spanning everything from manufacturing to retail and management.

“These jobs often require many years of training, some more than ten years . . . but they are often seen as ‘dead end’ careers,” said Bénédicte Epinay, president of industry body Comité Colbert. “At the same time we are seeing a progressive disappearance of training programmes for these skills, with many classes getting shut down because there are not enough students.”

Building and maintaining teams of highly skilled artisans is a particular challenge for an industry where outsourcing to other countries is generally not an option in order to maintain the quality and cachet of origin that is used to justify top shelf prices — in the case of Hermès bags, sometimes with a waiting list that can stretch to years. Leather artisans spend at least 15 hours making each one by hand.

Pay is a well-guarded secret, but Hermès has said salaries for artisans begin “well above” the French minimum wage and can include shares in the company over the medium and long term.

The average annual salary of an artisan in France is €25,350, but at LVMH “median salaries in these professions are very significantly above” that level, the company said. Schemes through which employees can share in profits are also “very significant” at many of their houses. Louis Vuitton, for example, offers atelier workers the equivalent of an average of 18 months salary every year thanks to profit-sharing programmes.

By comparison a bank teller earns between €14,000 and €24,000 on average, according to employment website Glassdoor.

But in recent decades younger people in key production countries such as France and Italy have moved away from manual and vocational professions, as an older generation of craftspeople is retiring.

Lack of awareness of the range of roles available in the luxury sector is another issue, as is the perception that some jobs — particularly those in luxury food, drinks and hospitality — involve long hours, low pay and limited scope to progress beyond a certain level.

In France, an average of 20,000 vocational jobs excluding service and hospitality have gone unfilled every year for the past decade in the luxury sector, according to Comité Colbert. The specialisms with the greatest shortages include couturiers, jewellers and leather goods artisans as well as maintenance technicians and tractor drivers on vineyards.

Meanwhile, demand from companies is substantial and growing: LVMH, the world’s biggest luxury group controlled by billionaire Bernard Arnault, recruited 60,000 people globally last year and is looking to hire 15,200 in France alone this year, including 3,500 artisanal workers.

“I’d like to be able to say that we simply need vignerons, or couturiers, or IT specialists, but it’s very well spread [across all LVMH’s functions],” said Chantal Gaemperle, the group’s global head of HR.

Both Hermès and LVMH are doing outreach at schools and colleges, although the former relies more on word of mouth to attract candidates.

Hermès is unique among France’s big luxury groups in that all of its production is kept in-house as are its artisan training programmes. Across a garden courtyard from the prototype atelier in Pantin, about 50 Hermès trainees spend around 18 months learning their craft — from saddle stitching to setting tiny golden nails — in a teaching workshop before they can begin to work in the ateliers.

“In order to have 250 to 300 more artisans per year, we need to train around 450 to 500,” said Emmanuel Pommier, director of Hermès’ leather goods operation.

In 1992 the company had 250 artisans in workshops above the Hermès flagship store in Paris. Today the company has 4,700 leather craftspeople alone, spread across nine production sites in France, each housing up to three ateliers and a training school.

Most candidates apply to the apprenticeship programmes directly, Pommier said, but their profile has changed over the years. “Before it would have been more 16 to 18-years-old who came to us directly to train, but that is practically never the case anymore. Most have done another job first for a few years before coming to us, which is maybe less straightforward but means it’s more of an [informed] choice.”

By contrast, groups such as LVMH and Kering — owner of Gucci and Saint Laurent — choose to work with outside manufacturers on some products and to team up with vocational schools.

At LVMH, the group began to build up a network of partner training schools a decade ago but “by 2020 we realised there still wasn’t enough talent,” said Alexandre Boquel, director for métiers d’excellence at the group — a designation that encompasses 280 different types of roles across trade, artisan and service jobs and accounts for half of the group’s 200,000 global workforce.

“There is a real war for talent because our competitors also need to hire a lot . . . It benefits the industry, but there are definitely tensions in recruitment,” he said.

In a tight labour market, groups such as LVMH recognise that they need to cater to working conditions and pay — though they do not disclose by how much wages have been increased. Gaemperle said: “We are in an employee market now . . . so we will offer support on conditions in order to be competitive.”

In order to try to compensate, LVMH, Hermès and Kering have embarked on outreach programmes at schools and colleges. Beneath an LVMH banner hung outside the 19th-century town hall of Reims, in France’s Champagne region, a queue snakes around the cobbled square as about 100 people of different ages patiently wait. This is not a line to get into a Dior boutique or a fashion show, but a recruitment drive — one of five such events planned by the group around France this year, following a similar campaign in 2022.

Inside, LVMH employees try to entice applicants to jobs and training programmes ranging from fine watchmaking to hospitality — where Gaemperle noted the decline in candidates has been “pretty dramatic” in recent years. Finding strong candidates for high-end retail — which demands a high level of diligence, presentation and product knowledge — is also very difficult, she said.

Virtual reality headsets are used to show the mix of teenagers, young adults and mid-career workers a day in the life of a jewellery maker at Dior or a salesperson at Louis Vuitton. Staff conduct speed interviews and visitors are encouraged to drop their CVs into sealed boxes labelled for different types of roles.

The goal of the outreach is to help break down the divide between vocational and professional careers and to help compensate for the lack of exposure to these jobs in schools.

“Going back to the industrial revolution, there was a division that was made between engineers and artisans . . . it fractured and created a hierarchy that wasn’t there before. This kind of message still exists: If you’re good at school, you have to go to university to study, not into vocational jobs,” Boquel said.

“A 15-year-old can usually describe about 10 jobs, mostly the ones their parents did then things like football player and influencer. We have 280 to explain.”

But convincing enough young people to embark on careers as highly skilled craftsmen or oenologists remains a challenge. In Reims, three teenage girls hovered near a stand offering training in leather goods making.

Asked if they would apply, two looked unsure. The third, Ellie, 18, said the opportunities on offer were “pretty good, if you want to stay in a manual job”.

“But I am going to study psychology next year,” she said.