Hermès Is Targeting a New Emerging Market: The American Suburbs
The French brand is analyzing Zip Code data to zero in on pockets of growing U.S. affluence
WILMETTE, ILL.—It used to be that if wealthy Americans wanted to buy Hermès RMS -0.07%decrease; down pointing triangle, they made a pilgrimage to a store in Manhattan or Beverly Hills or a glamorous European city like Paris or Milan. Now, the brand is chasing customers by meeting them where they are: Short Hills, N.J., and Wilmette, Ill. The luxury-retail executives refer to such wealthy suburbs, as well as smaller American cities like Nashville, Tenn., and Austin, Texas, as “emerging markets.”
The store in Wilmette, which opened in August and features a Spanish revival-style facade and dragonfly motifs, was built in an open-air mall across from a CVS pharmacy and down the road from a Jewel-Osco supermarket. Luxury neighbors Oscar de la Renta and Thom Browne recently opened up stores in the complex, too. Once Hermès moves in, other high-end tenants tend to follow.
The U.S. is emerging as a rare bright spot for luxury. Demand in traditional luxury strongholds like China and the Middle East has softened. In the first half of this year, the strongest region for sales growth for Hermès was in the Americas, where revenue grew at 15%. In another major market, Asia excluding Japan, the company’s revenues grew by just 2%.
The luxury brand is one of the most valuable companies in the world. Its market cap has at certain points surpassed that of rival LVMH, despite being a single brand. But the headwinds of the industry are shifting.
The U.S. accounted for almost half of newly created millionaires in 2025, according to a June UBS report. That year, the country was home to 35.7% of the personal wealth in the world, ticking up from nearly 35% in 2024, UBS found in its analysis.
“Wealth in the U.S. today is widespread and diverse,” said Diane Mahady, Hermès’ chief executive for the Americas. “The data will show you that there are billionaires in 47 states.”
The company, she said, sees “a lot of potential in the U.S. in terms of the number of stores.” Hermès openings in the past few years include stores in Scottsdale, Ariz., and Princeton, N.J. It currently has 45 locations nationwide, including a new store in Manhasset on New York’s Long Island opening this month.
Mahady recently presented a map at a meeting of global Hermès leaders that showed bubbles of wealth across America. “You know, the term ‘emerging market’ is probably a misnomer,” she said. “You see that there’s opportunity everywhere.”
Physical retail has always been at the heart of Hermès strategy. Its 300 rarefied boutiques are where the high-end brand, known for its leather craftsmanship and status handbags, derives most of its sales. Hermès made about 16 billion euros, or $17.9 billion, in revenue last year.
The company opens only a few stores a year in part because Hermès typically has one Parisian architecture firm do the design and each shop has to be different from the stores that have come before it.
“Our strategy would boil down to the singularity of every location,” Mahady said. “We don’t want any two stores to be the same.”
When the Hermès team decides where to build, a few factors come into play. They look at data demographics. They do a ZIP Code analysis of where existing clients live and where e-commerce clients seem clustered. They analyze shopping patterns and adjacency to other lifestyle destinations, for example a fantastic coffee shop or restaurant.
When Hermès opened in a redbrick former hosiery factory in Nashville last year, there was a Soho House and some popular eateries nearby, but not many other retail options.
“Businesses are moving their headquarters to Nashville, then their executive population also moves to Nashville, and we start to say, ‘OK, this maybe can be a place where our clients are moving to or enjoying living there, and that can be a place for us,’” Mahady said.
For the location in Wilmette, the calculation was different. Hermès’ downtown 6,000-square foot Chicago location was only a 35-minute drive away.
Executives were trying to solve a puzzle: They could see some clients in Chicago’s affluent North Shore suburbs weren’t buying from the downtown Chicago store. That store tended to attract customers from neighboring states like Wisconsin, Minnesota and Ohio.
Hermès executives theorized that North Shore shoppers might like having a store closer to them, the kind of place they could stop by while walking the dog or in between errands.
Now that the 4,400-square foot Wilmette store is open, Hermès executives see much more local clientele there.
Hermès employees are quick to bring up that theirs is a sixth-generation family business and artistic stewardship is part of the job: All of the company’s leather handbags must be made in France by family decree, which in part explains the extraordinary bottleneck for their bags, including the Birkin, which can retail for well over $11,000.
But Hermès is trying to diversify. Leather goods and saddlery accounted for 44% of the brand’s revenue in 2025. It is expanding clothing, silks and shoe offerings in an effort to draw more shoppers.
Store directors occupy an important position in the effort to grow the customer base. Many have been with the company for decades, and lean on extensive personal relationships. Hermès moves talented salespeople around the country often and they are responsible for client outreach.
When store managers who work in close proximity—say, at the Chicago and Wilmette locations—go on their quarterly buying trips to Paris, they keep an eye on whether the inventory they choose overlaps.
“We’re almost like a loose confederation of small specialty stores, and I think that creates such a rich culture for us,” Mahady said.
Born in Horseheads, N.Y., Mahady got her first retail position in high school, with a part-time job at Tallman’s Department Store in Painted Post, a New York second-generation family business specializing in big and tall and selling Carhartt, Red Wing and Dickies to factory workers in the foundry across the street.
She was hired by Saks after college and spent 12 years in various buying and planning roles, ultimately becoming a vice president in the men’s sportswear division. She also worked for LVMH and Coach before joining Hermès in March of 2021.
Hermès didn’t operate like other luxury retailers, Mahady realized. She had a lot more free rein to experiment with different sales models, without a need for a centralized directive or a one-size-fits all solution.
But it was crucial to get the store mix right. Stores needed to be distinct, but complement each other.
Each is decorated with photography and art pieces from the family collection, many of which are equestrian-themed. Each has to feel homey: Some clients end up dropping in for coffee or champagne several times a week, Mahady said.
And each has to blend into the community, said Pierre-Alexis Dumas, Hermès artistic director. It’s an extension of an ethos championed by Dumas’s father, Jean-Louis, who ran the company for close to three decades.
“He always told me we have to be American in America. We have to be Japanese in Japan,” Dumas said at a recent opening of another store, in the Williamsburg neighborhood in New York’s Brooklyn borough. “We have to engage in a dialogue. We cannot just come as conquerors.”