Hermès blind stamp checker, read the year off your stamp

They tell you which cycle the letter belongs to. Hermès has run the alphabet four times: plain 1945 to 1970, circled 1971 to 1996, squared 1997 to 2014, and plain again from 2015.

Either it is vintage (1945 to 1970) or recent (2015 onward). Those two runs use overlapping letters, which is why the checker returns both rather than picking one: an unframed A is 1945 or 2017, and nothing in the stamp itself separates them. Two things follow from the same change. After 2014 Hermès stopped running the letters in order, so a modern stamp has to be read from a lookup rather than counted along the alphabet. And a plain R with no square around it is a known transition rather than a fault: 2014 should carry a squared R, but the frame began to be dropped inside that year, so the checker returns both 1962 and late 2014 for one. The rest of the bag settles it quickly, because hardware, lining and model tell you at once which end of the range you are at.

No. Counterfeiters reproduce blind stamps. Authentication looks at leather grain, stitch angle and tension, hardware weight and plating, and the tooling of the stamp itself.

A craftsman code or a production number, and not a date. The professional authenticators' handbook we work from is blunt about it: accounts differ on what the rest of the code means, and the only thing it treats as settled is that the first letter is the year. Every dealer and authentication reference we checked says the same in its own words, that the characters identify the artisan or the atelier section and that only Hermès holds the directory. Not one publishes a key, so a page that offers you one goes beyond every available source. Only the single framed or unframed year letter records when the item was made.

Read the shape more carefully than the letter. A worn circle can pass for a square, and that moves the answer by about twenty-six years. If in doubt, choose “I'm not sure” and the checker returns every year that letter can mean.

The blind stamp is the fastest route to an answer. Find the single letter, note whether anything is drawn around it, and enter both above: a plain letter is 1945 to 1970 or 2015 onwards, a letter in a circle is 1971 to 1996, and a letter in a square is 1997 to 2014. That gives you the year the piece was made rather than the year it was sold. The range starts at 1945 rather than an estimate, for two reasons: our sourced year table prints Z as the last year before the circles begin, in 1970, and a 26-letter run ending there has to start in 1945. Independent authenticator references give the same range.

It is what people mean when they search for a Hermès serial number, yes, though Hermès does not call it that. The marking goes by blind stamp or date stamp, it is pressed into the leather without ink, and it is a year letter with craftsman characters beside it rather than a running serial. So there is no Hermès serial number to look up in a register, and the letter is the part that carries a date.

On the Birkin and the Kelly, yes. Until about 2015 the stamp sat on the underside of the lock strap, the tab the strap loops through. After that it moved inside the bag, to the top edge of the interior side wall where the bag opens, usually on the left gusset near the back flap. The professional handbook we work from states that move twice, and four independent dealer references describe the same thing. What none of them gives is a clean cutover date: some say 2015 and some say 2016, and one reports the change arriving on exotic skins first, with two Kelly bags bought in the same year carrying the stamp in different places. So treat it as a move that happened around 2015 rather than on a single date. Nothing describes the same move on any other model, so on other styles placement still varies and you check under the flap, on the interior leather and around the strap attachments.