In December 2025, Kering agreed to pay €115 million for a 20 per cent stake in Raselli Franco Group, among Europe’s largest independent jewellery manufacturers, with a path to full ownership by 2032. Months earlier, Prada had taken a stake in the tannery group Rino Mastrotto, and Chanel had moved into the Como silk maker Mantero Seta. The press treated each as an industrial footnote. Read together, they mark the final phase of a contest for the last independent hands in European craft.
The buyers in that contest are about to change.
Capgemini’s World Wealth Report 2025 estimates that $83.5 trillion will pass to Generation X, millennial and Generation Z heirs over the next two decades. The industry has priced that figure as future demand: a generation of clients waiting to be acquired. It has misjudged the inheritors. This capital was formed inside families that built enterprises, and it grew up watching the most durable houses of the century secure their power upstream, in the tannery, the mill and the atelier.
I call this heir capital: inherited wealth that regards the finished object as a consequence, and directs its ambition towards ownership of what produces it.
Key Takeaways
- Kering’s staged purchase of jeweller Raselli Franco, Prada’s stake in tannery group Rino Mastrotto and Chanel’s move into silk maker Mantero Seta mark a contest for Europe’s last independent workshops.
- Capgemini puts the coming wealth transfer at $83.5 trillion over two decades. Haider argues the industry has misread it as future demand.
- He calls it heir capital: inherited wealth that treats the finished object as a consequence and wants to own what produces it.
- 81% of inheritors plan to switch wealth firms within two years of inheriting, and UBS finds only 26% of family offices with a succession plan consulted the next generation from the outset.
- Many workshops face their own succession gap, so stakes are coming to market, and heirs who arrive as patrons can outbid conglomerates on patience rather than scale.
- A house that owns neither tannery nor atelier risks becoming a tenant, paying rent on the craft its story calls heritage.
- Who: The heirs of enterprise-building families, the luxury groups buying their suppliers, and the family-owned workshops between them.
- What: A shift in ambition from owning luxury goods to owning stakes in the tanneries, mills, ateliers and fields that make them.
- When: Now, as the great wealth transfer gathers pace and many workshop owners look for successors, with consequences running to 2050.
- Where: The tanneries of the Veneto, the silk houses of Como, the ateliers of France and the flower fields of Grasse, with Gulf and European capital behind the buyers.
- Why: Because pricing power in luxury lives upstream, and heirs who hold the making will shape what the houses can sell.
The Durable Houses Wrote the Lesson in Plain Sight
Chanel began buying its makers in 1985, with the button and costume jewellery maker Desrues, and has since gathered the embroiderer Lesage, the feather and flower maker Lemarié, the glove maker Causse and the Scottish cashmere specialist Barrie. Hermès built its own chain of tanneries across France, Italy and Louisiana. In 2013, LVMH paid €2 billion for 80 per cent of Loro Piana, a company that keeps its own vicuña reserve in the Andes.
The detail that matters sits inside the transaction. When Chanel acquired the Bodin-Joyeux tannery in 2013, Bruno Pavlovsky, the head of its fashion business, said it would go on supplying rival houses. To own the workshop is to see what competitors are making, and to hold a hand on what they cannot make without you. Scarcity at this level was never manufactured in the boutique. It lives in the hide, the loom and the trained hand, years before any client sees it.
Inheritance Arrives With Its Own Judgement
Across twelve years in Gulf and European boardrooms, I have watched the question from the younger end of the table change its object. A decade ago, it concerned which house deserved the family’s custom. It now concerns which workshop might accept the family’s capital.
The data confirms what those rooms revealed first. Capgemini found that 81 per cent of inheritors plan to switch wealth firms within one to two years of inheriting. UBS reports that among family offices with a succession plan, only 26 per cent consulted the next generation from the outset. A generation left outside the design of its own inheritance has formed its judgement elsewhere, and it carries no allegiance to the brands its parents wore. Its single test of any house is ownership of the making. Few brands could answer it about themselves with confidence.
Control Has Become the Measure of Standing
UBS’s Global Family Office Report 2025 found that 37 per cent of family offices expect a significant or moderate rise in direct private equity exposure. At the apex, that appetite is turning quietly towards the family tanneries of the Veneto, the silk houses of Como, the ateliers of the Loire and the raw material fields on which high perfumery depends.
Fragrance shows the logic most clearly. Since 1987, Chanel has secured the jasmine and May rose of Grasse through its partnership with the Mul family, whose land has been under flower for generations. The bottle carries the house’s name. The field decides whether the house can make it at all. In twelve years at The Fragrance Foundation Arabia, I saw the same instinct move through the Gulf, where the more serious families began asking about plantations of oud and distilleries of rose long before they asked about launches.
The supply is also coming to market. Many of these workshops face their own succession problem: second- and third-generation owners with no heir willing to take the bench. Brunello Cucinelli’s 2022 purchase of a 43 per cent stake in Cariaggi, its main cashmere supplier, belongs to the same pattern. Each transaction of this kind offers continuity to an old family and a position to a new one.
The motive is biographical as much as financial. An heir who holds a stake in the workshop that supplies three houses possesses a standing that no purchase in a boutique confers. The name appears nowhere. The judgement shapes everything the workshop releases. This is the logic of the collector carried into industry, the same instinct that led the Medici to keep painters within their household and left Florence with the evidence five centuries on.
The Brand Without Its Workshop Becomes a Tenant
Follow the arc to 2050. Should heir capital take decisive positions in the remaining independent workshops of Italy, France and Japan, pricing power will migrate upstream with it. The house that owns neither tannery nor atelier will pay rent on the very craft its narrative claims as heritage, to owners who neither advertise nor need its custom.
The art world settled this question long ago. The patron who funds a foundry, a print studio or a glassworks seldom appears in any catalogue, yet every edition that leaves the bench bears the imprint of that patronage. Over time the patron, rather than the dealer, determines which artists are cast, which techniques survive and which hands are trained next. Heir capital is carrying that position into the luxury supply chain.
The conglomerates sense this, which explains the urgency of their recent buying. Their difficulty is structural. They acquire on quarterly logic and integrate through procurement. The heirs acquire on a horizon of generations and arrive as patrons, which is precisely the relationship a fourth-generation artisan family will accept when it agrees to sell. In that negotiation, patience outbids scale.
The houses that understand this early will secure their own making, or invite the heirs in as partners on terms of their choosing. The remainder will discover their dependency only when the terms are revised.
By 2050, the oldest names in luxury will belong to whoever bought their workshops in this decade.
Related thinking on how Gulf families are turning energy fortunes into lasting cultural institutions can be found in Gulf Family Offices Have Stopped Managing Energy Wealth. They Are Building Cultural Empires.
Sources: Il Sole 24 Ore, “Kering invests in jewellery and takes over 20% of the Raselli Franco manufacturing group”; FashionUnited, “Why Kering is gradually taking control of luxury jewellery specialist Raselli Franco”, March 2026; FashionUnited, “Prada acquires ten percent of Rino Mastrotto Group”, June 2025; Il Sole 24 Ore, “Chanel takes over 35% of Mantero Seta”, April 2025; Capgemini, World Wealth Report 2025, 4 June 2025; UBS, Global Family Office Report 2025, 21 May 2025; CNBC, “Chanel stitches up French tannery deal”, 5 December 2013; FashionUnited, “Brunello Cucinelli buys 43 percent stake in cashmere supplier Cariaggi Lanificio”, March 2022.
We last reviewed this analysis on 9 November 2026.
