[Photo provided to China Daily]

Mussard and her craftsmen let their imaginations run wild for Petit h products, using everything from leather trimmings that have fallen off the cutting tables of a workshop to crocodile skin with irregular scales to air bubbles trapped inside glass crystals to chipped porcelain or the buckles of Hermes bags.

When searching through such materials, Mussard says, she thinks to herself: "What can we invent?"

Mussard credits her ability to look at things from different angles to her family roots. Aside from the pendants her uncle made for her by the sea, she shares another story.

During a trip to Canada when the WWI was raging, Mussard's great grandfather Emile Maurice Hermes found a zipperlike device on car-top carriers. He though it could be used in France to make other things. So, he returned to Paris with a two-year patent on the zipper and put it on leather jackets. The zip then became to be known as Hermes Fastener.