Chanel Reveals the Making of Its $10,000 Traditional Flap Purse

VERNEUIL-EN-HALATTE, France — Chanel is lifting the lid on the making of its $10,000 basic flap purse.

For the primary time, the French luxurious home has opened the doorways to considered one of its leather-based items factories as a part of its ongoing push to advertise its pillar fashion. The transfer comes on the heels of final 12 months’s high-profile promoting marketing campaign for the 11.12 purse, starring Brad Pitt and Penélope Cruz.

Bruno Pavlovsky, president of style and president of Chanel SAS, stated that whereas the advert blitz helped to burnish the aura of the timeless bag, it coincided with a pointy drop in luxurious spending, significantly in China, and rising pushback in opposition to a sequence of value will increase which have positioned Chanel in the identical bracket as rival Hermès.

“This context has led us to regularly open up and clarify the scenario,” he instructed WWD. 

“We provide excessive value-added merchandise that require distinctive know-how and supplies, in addition to in depth coaching with passionate groups,” he added. “If we don’t present why it’s costly, individuals can’t know.”

No matter market fluctuations, the quilted purse is intrinsic to the home’s mystique, sustaining its draw throughout generations. “At Chanel, there may be No.5 and there may be the long-lasting bag,” stated Pavlovsky. “These are the 2 drivers of the model.”

Not like Hermès, which has established a community of immediately owned leather-based items workshops throughout France, Chanel has traditionally labored with a bunch of producers in France and Italy that collectively make use of a number of thousand individuals.

Although most of its suppliers additionally work with different manufacturers, Chanel has partnered with a lot of them for many years and supported them at essential junctures — throughout the coronavirus pandemic, for instance, or when the unique homeowners retire and hand over the administration reins.

Usually, that assist has come within the type of discreet investments. Amongst its most up-to-date acquisitions are stakes in two Italian corporations: costume jewellery and metallic equipment maker Leo France and shoe producer Gray Mer.

A French Specialty

These days, Chanel produces two-thirds of its luggage with factories that it controls, and one third with suppliers that stay impartial, Pavlovsky specified.

“At Chanel, now we have all the time favored a steadiness between the groups and factories that we management and people who we don’t management. I pay specific consideration to these we don’t management, as a result of they’re those that preserve our ft on the bottom,” he stated. “It’s what permits us to remain related to the market.”

Its signature purse is made solely in France. Les Ateliers de Verneuil-en-Halatte, or AVH, is considered one of its key manufacturing websites, resulting from its location an hour and a half’s drive from central Paris. Based mostly within the Oise division since 1990, the manufacturing facility moved into its present premises in 2021.

On a latest go to to the intense and ethereal leather-based items workshop on the sting of the Halatte forest, guests had been walked via the making of the bag, which entails some 180 steps.

The 270,000-square-foot manufacturing facility was constructed in accordance with exacting environmental requirements and produces a part of its vitality due to photo voltaic panels, stated Célia Barani, managing director of AVH. It’s dwelling to 470 individuals, together with 300 artisans who work in north-facing workshops on the second ground to ensure one of the best mild.

Within the atrium that homes the communal eating space, a big display screen broadcasts footage of the model’s newest runway show on the Grand Palais. On present days, all of the artisans collect there to see which of their luggage made the reduce, Barani stated.

The workshop focuses on producing the 11.12, a reinterpretation of the two.55 bag launched by founder Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel in 1955. It crested in recognition underneath the home’s late inventive director Karl Lagerfeld after he took over within the ’80s.

“Since then, it hasn’t modified. Its proportions stay the identical, and the manufacturing strategies are equivalent,” Barani stated.

Chanel likes to name it a “couturière” bag as a result of it’s sewn and turned inside out like a jacket, and comes not simply in leather-based — together with the type of ultrasoft lambskin utilized by glovemakers — but in addition seasonal supplies together with tweed, denim, sheepskin and embroidered designs created by the specialist workshops at its craftsmanship hub Le19M.

The place Generations Meet

Not like Hermès luggage, that are produced by a single artisan, Chanel’s basic bag requires the enter of some 30 individuals, from mannequin makers to preparers, cutters and assemblers, who work in clusters of 4.

“To totally practice considered one of our leather-based items artisans takes round 4 to 5 years,” Barani defined, noting that staff usually start by specializing in a single step.

“The intention is for every artisan to ultimately have the ability to make their bag from A to Z, nevertheless it’s very gradual. Our precedence is to protect this know-how via a system of apprenticeship, whereby skilled artisans work hand-in-hand with more moderen recruits in order that, over time, they learn to grasp all these abilities,” she added.

The ability has an on-site coaching faculty, which welcomes teams of 10 apprentices at a time and likewise offers on-the-job coaching for present staff, who’re 82 p.c feminine and vary in age from 18 to 65.

They embrace veterans like Sylvie, who’s been making Chanel purses for 38 years and is answerable for braiding their distinctive leather-based and metallic chain straps.

Confronted with a persistent scarcity of expert staff throughout the luxurious sector, Chanel welcomes each newcomers to the job market and other people looking for to vary careers, with new hires together with former florists and carpenters, in accordance with Barani.

The group has employed 1,200 individuals underneath age 30 per 12 months since 2022 as a part of the French authorities’s “One youth, one resolution” program. At AVH, it brings on between 40 and 50 artisans a 12 months, primarily to exchange those that have reached retirement age, stated Barani. In consequence, a 3rd of the workforce there may be underneath age 30.

Chanel has needed to modify to the expectations of those youthful staff, who demand greater salaries and extra versatile working hours, Pavlovsky stated. “COVID-19 marked an actual turning level when it comes to individuals’s expectations,” he stated. “Lots of people determined to vary lives and it’s been laborious for us to coach individuals to exchange them.”

Among the many more moderen recruits is Jennifer, who was once within the military and now stamps the gold Chanel brand inside the baggage.

The Verneuil-en-Halatte web site is dwelling to a supplies storage unit with greater than 900 leather-based and cloth references and 1,100 forms of {hardware} and thread. “All our supplies come from provide chains which can be traceable, sustainable and accountable. We work with tanneries in France, Italy and Spain that belong to our ecosystem,” Barani stated.

Every bag requires 20 items of leather-based, with offcuts recycled to make salpa, a bonded leather-based fiber materials used for prototypes, or heels for the model’s slingback footwear.

There’s a take a look at laboratory the place samples of supplies and completed luggage are put via their paces, and a restore workshop the place a weathered brown bag awaited rescue, its flap chewed by a canine.

A Hotline to Vogue

However what actually units the power aside is its improvement and design workshop, which is in fixed dialogue with the inventive groups on the design studio on Rue Cambon in Paris and the specialty workshops at Le19M, together with embroiderer and tweed-maker Lesage; embroidery workshop Atelier Montex, and Lemarié, answerable for flowers and feathers.

In tandem with the ready-to-wear schedule, AVH turns round eight collections a 12 months. A group of 40 individuals translate the inventive transient, which might come within the form of a sketch, an inspiration picture or a bag from Chanel’s sprawling archives.

“We’re really a style leather-based items firm,” stated Barani. “Retaining tempo with these ready-to-wear collections means you’re all the time working with new fashions and supplies. In consequence, you’re all the time studying. You by no means get bored.”

A living proof is the brand new 25 bag, which can also be produced on web site. Launched in March, it’s backed by a world marketing campaign that includes Dua Lipa and Blackpink’s Jennie Kim, nicknamed “Human Chanel” by her followers.

The medium-sized model in black grained calfskin retails for $6,400, broadly in the identical vary because the model’s earlier launch, the 22, which sells for $5,800. 

In the meantime, the value of a Chanel Medium Traditional bag has gone from $5,800 in 2019 to $10,800 in 2025, a rise of 86 p.c, in accordance with New York-based reseller Madison Avenue Couture, which touts it as an funding that outperforms gold and the inventory market.

For the previous few years, Chanel has elevated its costs in March and September to mirror inflation in uncooked supplies and harmonize its costs between completely different areas.

Pavlovsky stated the value in euros is raised annually. “We’re deciding how a lot it is going to be for 2025 and when the value improve will take impact, after which you’ve gotten the adjustment linked to the greenback change fee,” he stated. “We don’t transfer costs on a regular basis. We monitor currencies and on the whole, we time it to the launch of collections.”

Nonetheless, he reiterated that Chanel has no intention of adjusting its pricing coverage.

Relatively, it’s going to proceed to supply extra perception into its fabrication course of, one thing he believes will turn out to be more and more necessary because the European Union implements a brand new regulation requiring practically all merchandise offered within the zone to function a digital product passport.

This initiative, a part of the Ecodesign for Sustainable Merchandise Regulation, goals to reinforce transparency by offering complete details about every product’s origin, supplies, environmental impression and disposal suggestions.

“The day the digital passport is applied, it’s going to embrace necessary info to calculate the carbon impression of every product, however it’s going to in all probability additionally function extra marketing-oriented details about what makes the product particular,” Pavlovsky defined.

“The concept shouldn’t be to do that for 1000’s of merchandise, however maybe to progressively enrich these digital passports for sure merchandise with info that highlights the know-how that goes into them,” he added. “What you’re seeing as we speak is a glimpse of the long run.”