Richemont Kept Trying to Escape Jewellery. It Kept Getting Dragged Back.

A Cartier Love bracelet locks onto your wrist with a tiny screwdriver and is meant never to come off. It is the perfect emblem of the company that sells it, because Richemont spent two decades discovering that its own grip works the same way: it can reach for almost anything, but it cannot let go of jewellery. In its FY2025 year the group's Jewellery Maisons — Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, Buccellati and Vhernier — grew 8% to €15.33 billion, while everything the group bought to escape that gravity eventually drifted back, or got sold off.² Richemont keeps trying to be a diversified luxury conglomerate. It keeps turning back into a jeweller.

The official story is a familiar one: a luxury holding company building a portfolio across watches, fashion and digital commerce, the way LVMH or Kering do. The truer story is narrower and more interesting. Almost every expansion that worked deepened hard luxury — jewellery and fine watchmaking. Almost every expansion away from it was reversed, and reversed at a cost. Cartier's halo is real, but it has a radius.

The core was never a clean purchase

To understand the gravity, start with how Cartier itself was assembled. The maison was founded in Paris in 1847 by Louis-François Cartier and stayed in the family until 1964, when it was sold off.⁴ What people call 'Richemont buying Cartier' is really a layered, decades-long pull. Anton Rupert first entered in 1968 with a 20% stake in Cartier America, exchanged for a license to make Cartier-branded cigarettes — luxury borrowing the name before it owned the house. After Robert Hocq, who had led a buyout group, died in a Paris car accident in 1979, Rupert took a majority stake and fused the separate Paris, London and New York divisions into one entity.⁵ Richemont itself was only spun off in 1988, from the Rupert family's South African industrial group,³ and formally consolidated its controlling Cartier stake in 1993.⁵ There is no acquisition date. There is a slow accumulation around a single magnetic asset — and that pattern repeats.

Adjacency that worked: stay inside the stone

When Richemont expanded and it stuck, it almost always moved within hard luxury. In 1999 it took a 60% stake in Van Cleef & Arpels — a deal valuing the jeweller at roughly CHF 460 million — then climbed to 80% by 2001 and full ownership by 2003.⁶ That is a jeweller buying a jeweller. A year later, in 2000, it spent around €3 billion to bring Jaeger-LeCoultre, IWC Schaffhausen and A. Lange & Söhne into the fold.⁶ That is a hard-luxury house buying fine watchmaking — the adjacent craft, the adjacent customer, the adjacent shelf in the same boutique. These moves didn't dilute Cartier's identity; they extended it into categories where the same buyer, the same heritage logic, and the same margins apply.

You can even watch the adjacency play out inside the Cartier brand itself. Cartier today sells not just high jewellery and watches but fragrances, leather goods and accessories.⁸ Each of those is a step out from the diamond — but a step the customer takes while still inside a Cartier boutique, still buying the meaning of the name. That is the safe radius: extensions that ride the halo without leaving the world it was built for.

The bet that proved the radius: YNAP

Then came the move that broke the pattern. Richemont went into online luxury retail — first a minority stake in Net-a-Porter from around 2002, then a majority acquisition in 2010, and eventually the full consolidation of the merged Yoox Net-a-Porter group in 2018.⁹¹⁰ This was not adjacency within hard luxury. It was a different business entirely: running a multi-brand digital marketplace, with its own logistics, discounting dynamics, and a customer who came for selection, not for a single revered name. The economics told the story bluntly. YNAP was carried as discontinued operations from August 2022,¹¹ and Richemont ultimately agreed to give it away rather than keep funding it: in October 2024 it signed to hand 100% of YNAP to Mytheresa, a deal that closed in April 2025 after European clearance. Richemont took a 33% stake in Mytheresa in exchange — no cash — and left €555 million of net cash inside the business it was offloading, plus a €100 million credit line.⁷ You do not load a departing asset with that much cash unless you are paying to be rid of it.

The contrast is the whole thesis. On one side, jewellery houses bought decades ago that grew into a €14.2 billion segment in FY2024 and €15.33 billion in FY2025, anchoring group operating margins above 20%.¹² On the other, a far-from-core digital empire that had to be unwound, with cash sent out the door to make the parting possible. Same parent, same ambition to grow — opposite math. The difference was not execution. It was distance from the diamond.

But wasn't YNAP just a badly-timed tech bet?

The fair objection is that this reads too tidily. Plenty of e-commerce ventures struggled in the same years; maybe YNAP failed because online luxury retail is structurally hard and discount-prone, not because Richemont strayed from jewellery. That's partly true — and it's exactly the point. The reason hard luxury sits so far from a marketplace is that a marketplace competes on selection and price, while Cartier competes on scarcity and meaning. The very forces that make multi-brand e-commerce a grind are the forces a jeweller's brand was built to defy. The honest counter cuts the other way too: Richemont's jewellery dominance owes plenty to a long bull run in personal luxury, not just to strategic discipline, and FY2025 group operating profit actually fell 7% to a 20.9% margin even as jewellery grew.² So the core is not invincible. But notice what the group did when forced to choose under pressure — it kept the stones and gave away the screen. When a company votes with its balance sheet, that vote is the thesis.

Richemont is sometimes described as a sprawling luxury conglomerate, and on an org chart it is. But its history is less a story of diversification than of a company repeatedly testing how far it can drift from a single asset — and being reeled back in by the math. It buys jewellers and watchmakers and they compound; it buys further afield and ends up unwinding the bet, cash in hand to make the exit clean.⁷ The Love bracelet was the right emblem all along. Richemont can reach for anything. It just can't get the screwdriver to work on jewellery — and it has spent twenty years and a great deal of money confirming that the grip was the point.