Hermès
For three years, Sean was a consultant for the French luxury goods house Hermès, working directly with Artistic Director Pierre-Alexis Dumas and his senior team in Paris to develop a prospective new business line. Sean was responsible for designing and developing the original concept as well as building the business proposal to be presented to the Executive Committee. First, though, he needed to immerse himself in the distinctive culture of the luxury goods industry’s most respected company, one founded on craftsmanship that remains profoundly human in its core values. He met designers and craftsmen, to learn how the integrity of the materials determined the product to be made from them; writers and artists, to see how they translate these values to other forms; and product managers and finance heads, to understand how to build a product line around the objects rather than the market.
Sean continues to be the correspondent and resident voyageur for Le Monde d’Hermès, wandering the globe to capture in words and images the House’s unique view of the world. He has traveled to Phnom Penh to meet a woman resurrecting traditional Cambodian dance after the decimation of master dancers under the Khmer Rouge, to a hillside in Kerala to meet the last known practitioner of an unusual form of puppetry, to Istanbul to ask its residents to tell the stories of their lives, to a forest outside Amsterdam to meet a typographer who in this computer age still believes in the flow of the human hand across the page, to the high Andes in Peru to discover the wonders of Inca stonemasonry, and to Bhutan to watch the national sport of archery.
Click on the covers below to see some of his articles and photographs in the Hermès magazine.
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