Reporting and analysis on the luxury equities complex.
After a month of “the Birkin is dead” headlines, Hermès reported Q3 leather goods up 10.8% and accelerating, while LVMH Fashion & Leather Goods fell 5%. Why a flat China may be deliberate, why I bought this morning’s 8% drop, and the Ferrari Daytona SP3 press car about to sell...
A former LVMH executive told me “Nobody needs a Louis Vuitton bag. We made you want one.” Now Korean consumers are proving it. Hyunbaek-core (현백코어), Korea’s effortless old money style built on cashmere, neutrals and no logos, is spreading fast, and it spells trouble for loud...
What began as a French student protest over school conditions turned into a weekend of riots, burned town halls and looted luxury boutiques in Paris. Meanwhile, Loro Piana promoted its back-to-school collection at the Sorbonne and CNN celebrated Celine Dion’s Paris residency....
Monday night, Miss Tweed reported that Louis Vuitton was in talks to bring back Hedi Slimane. Within hours, LVMH called it baseless. The more interesting story is who owns the "independent" outlet that ran it: a former Coty CEO holds 9.09%, and the stated reason for selling that...
Nike is trading near a 12-year low, down more than 80% from its 2021 peak, and today the board added Alexandre Arnault. LVMH says he "has earned a reputation for helping iconic brands." The record says Moët Hennessy profit fell 25%, Tiffany's turnaround has never been disclosed,...
With LVMH near six-year lows, Intern Pierre walks Paris Charles de Gaulle Terminal 1, the highest-spend duty-free terminal in the Groupe ADP network. Burberry is hanging a few-hundred-euro scarf on plywood, trench coats are buried behind check, and Bvlgari's €46,600 Octo...
Ask me what the ultimate luxury is and the answer never changes: spontaneity and the ability to say no. Last week L Catterton, essentially LVMH's private equity arm, bought HYROX at a Bloomberg-estimated €600m to €1bn. I think HYROX is a fad. I also think the deal makes complete...
Six weeks before its July IPO, Reformation borrowed $92m to pay a $90m dividend, mostly to Permira. $117m of the $120m raised went straight back to lenders. Add a CFO gone before the S-1, six finance and accounting departures in ten months, €318 dresses made from wood pulp and...
LVMH closed at €423.75, a six-year low, the day France's Agriculture Ministry put the 2026 Champagne harvest at 1.34m hl, down 48%. Also this week: Hermès watches lose 57% of their value on resale, Trump's Bombardier post is a TACO trade, Vaccarello is out at Saint Laurent,...
An hour with a senior luxury wines and spirits insider on LVMH's Moët Hennessy division: structural decline in alcohol demand, Hennessy pricing in the US, the Tiffany acquisition, Africa, China and the Middle East, climate risk to Champagne, and governance inside the group. Full...
ESPN, TopGear and Motorsport.com all ran the same story: Lewis Hamilton found a Ferrari F40 that sat in a garage for 30 years. He didn't. Azimut AHE, a Luxembourg collector car fund, discovered the car in late 2025 and posted it in January. The barn find is Ferrari PR ahead of...
Grey Goose sold 740,000 Honey Deuces at the US Open and generated $17.2 million. In its third year as Official Champagne, Moët & Chandon showed up with Champagne, lime and a plastic tennis ball canister. Another Moët Hennessy marketing misfire, and a look at who's running it.
On March 15th, 2022, the EU banned exporting vehicles over €50,000 to Russia and Belarus. Since then the rules have only tightened, and since March 2024 manufacturers must contractually stop distributors from routing cars east. Despite this, I have tracked hundreds of Ferraris...
A response to the New York Post's Saint-Tropez obituary. The Riviera is fine, the crowd just rotated. The real story is where luxury demand is going: privacy, convenience and spontaneity, from Aman ejecting influencers to PS terminals and fractional private aviation. One of the...
August portfolio update. The FT says Ferrari "sold out" the Luce in two months, but deposits are not deliveries and the data says the real number isn't close. Why I covered my Ferrari short anyway, what Arnault's X debut signals about the Hermès matter, the Mediapart spyware...
The headlines say LVMH's fashion division returned to growth. The company's own slides show H1 2026 revenue down 3% and profit down 4%, with a -5% currency effect disclosed in a footnote. A breakdown of the half-truths, plus Korea's margin call wave, client feedback on the new...
Le Monde ran six parts on Bernard Arnault. He replied with an open letter, then opened a personal X account to thank his supporters, days before LVMH reports. The series is not the interesting part. The response is. A look at what followed when Peloton, BlackBerry, Enron, Lehman...
Jet2 is the best operator in a structurally squeezed industry, and that is exactly the problem. A proprietary survey of UK package holiday customers shows 75% feel more financially constrained, holidays top the cut list if budgets tighten, and a channel check in Kos found...
Rent the Runway completed an October 2025 recapitalization that cut debt to roughly $120 million, pushed maturity to 2029, wiped out existing shareholders, and bought about four years of runway. The founder is gone, an interim CEO is in place, and the turnaround pitch rests on...
A Morgan Stanley brand protection notice landed at 2:02 AM demanding removal of research posted to Intern Pierre. Why sell-side research is a loss leader rather than a product, funded through order flow, banking mandates, and corporate access. Then to LVMH, where wine and...
Ferrari announced the 12Cilindri Manuale at Cavalcade 2026: 1,499 units, €590,000 base, tailor-made throughout. But Ferrari's own spec sheet lists an 8-speed F1 DCT with clutch pedal and manual by-wire control, not a six-speed gated manual. Dealer emails funnel buyers toward the...
McKinsey, Bain and BCG have moved AI from pilot to daily infrastructure. Lilli, Deckster and Sage now draft the decks and scans that once trained junior consultants. So what does the €3M work product actually look like? Intern Pierre got hold of Bain's June 25th Altagamma...
Ferrari's CMO Enrico Galliera hands the role to BMW's Massimiliano Di Silvestre as Head of Classiche Andrea Modena also departs, signs of a deepening management crisis at Maranello. Field notes from Al Tayer Motors in Dubai, a collector's brutal rejection of a Luce sales pitch,...
Bain's Spring 2026 update leans on Middle East stabilization to carry its luxury recovery case, yet estimates the Gulf consumer base shrank 15%–25% after the Iran conflict spilled into the UAE. Rather than trust phone calls and tax-refund data, I flew to Dubai in 40°C June heat,...
Observations on LVMH from inside the Paddock Club at the Austrian Grand Prix, plus luxury store checks across Louis Vuitton, TAG Heuer and Burberry in Vienna during a 40°C heatwave. Sephora's Beauty Pit Stop, Pharrell's loud menswear, the watches that still aren't moving, and...
Pharrell's Louis Vuitton Spring/Summer 2027 show leaned hard into a surf theme, but nothing in the collection signals real change at LVMH. The bigger problem sits in wine and spirits: a former Rémy Cointreau veteran describes a cognac slump that is generational rather than...
A walk across the workshop floor of a Ferrari service center, where the mix of models in for service, cars on lifts, and aftercare throughput offers a ground-level read on owner behaviour, residual values, and the health of demand that quarterly deliveries alone don't capture.
A ground-level walkthrough of six luxury stores in Barcelona reveals a quiet slowdown: empty floors, absent sales associates, current-season markdowns, and pulled-back tourist spending. Burberry still hasn't moved trench coats to the front, Cucinelli's blends feel different,...
Several readers asked for my view on Liberty Media, the company that owns Formula 1. A cable-television vehicle has financial-engineered itself into a pure-play motorsport empire that now controls both F1 and MotoGP. The turnaround was real, but the easy levers have been pulled,...
Ferrari is set to unveil the 12Cilindri MM (manual) at Le Mans, a shift-by-wire gated manual built on Koenigsegg's transmission architecture and limited to roughly 500 examples, with one catch: buyers must also purchase a Luce, the model dealers are struggling to move. A primary...
A primary-research channel check on Brunello Cucinelli's scarcity narrative. The brand has overtaken the Zegna label on revenue and margin while guiding to a metronomic 10% growth year after year. To test whether that growth is genuinely full-price and demand-led, I visited a...
Ferrari officially unveiled the Luce Elettrica in Rome on May 25, 2026. Its first fully electric vehicle, priced at €560,000, designed by Jony Ive's LoveFrom studio, and built at a €200M facility in Maranello. Within hours, the internet labeled it a "pool vacuum," compared it to...
Primary research investigation into Brunello Cucinelli ($BC.MI) reveals 18,029 pieces listed as "new with tags" across major resale platforms, a 12.4x disparity versus LVMH-owned Loro Piana on The RealReal, a contracted disposal channel, and an Italy-controlled inventory ledger...
A former Tiffany & Co. Professional confirms on a primary research call that senior client-facing staff, grands vendeurs, have continued traveling into Russia throughout the Ukraine conflict to maintain top-tier client relationships. Combined with Laopu Gold's structural advance...
An hour-long primary research call with a former Burberry senior staffer reveals the gap between the corporate turnaround narrative and reality on the floor. The source confidently articulates heritage refocus, pricing-by-authority, and cultural-relevance marketing as evidence...
While the world fought over a €400 plastic pocket watch from the Audemars Piguet x Swatch Royal Pop collab, the real luxury trade was sitting in plain sight: private aviation. Intern Pierre initiates a long position in Bombardier ($BBD.B), the world's #2 business jet...
Naples, Florida channel check covering Brunello Cucinelli, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Hermès, and Ferragamo, framed by Bentley's marketing collaboration with the Gstaad Guy and the broader collapse of authenticity in the luxury category. Cucinelli's Naples location is three times the...
Ferrari's Q1 FY2026 looked like a beat until CFO Antonio Picca Piccon flattened the H2 step-up that anchored the bull case on operating leverage, guidance held, but the cadence shifted and the stock closed -4%. LVMH, the conglomerate that defined luxury consolidation, is now...
A channel check at Ferrari of Naples, the marque's largest US dealership, with 87 used Ferraris on the lot, an average client age over 70, and a sales associate who let slip what a new 12Cilindri allocation actually costs. What's happening on the floor is a real-time read on...
OFRM is -37.3% since the February 23rd short call. A Naples, Florida channel check across Walmart, Whole Foods, Publix, Sprouts, and CVS surfaced pouches missing expiration dates entirely (FDA Report ID 505176-I filed), empty shelves, discounted near-expiry inventory at Sprouts,...
LVMH's 2026 AGM at the Carrousel du Louvre saw revenue fall 5% to €80.8bn and profit drop 9%, with Bernard Arnault deflecting succession questions while Alexandre Arnault pitched Africa as Moët Hennessy's next growth engine. Why the FX excuse doesn't hold, why Africa can't...
Poland has fined a Kraków-based company 20M PLN (~$5.5M) for running more than 100 luxury vehicles into Russia in violation of EU sanctions between 2022 and 2023. Cars purchased from Western European dealers, papered for alternative destinations, and routed through Lithuania and...
Swiss watch exports fell 1% in March, with Saudi Arabia down 16.8% and Qatar down 24.7%, and Vontobel's Manuel Lang notes luxury sell-out in the Middle East is running closer to -50%. The Gulf, which carried watchmakers through 2025 at 2.21B CHF, is quietly imploding. Article...
Barcelona closed 2025 with 26.1 million visitors and €14 billion in tourist spending. Most of which, on Passeig de Gràcia, is flowing through a handful of luxury storefronts. Article #242 is a day of site visits across Loewe, TAG Heuer, Louis Vuitton, Brunello Cucinelli, and...
Every cycle has its signature accounting indignity. In the 1990s it was pro-forma earnings. In the mid-2010s it was community-adjusted EBITDA. In 2026, it is contracted ARR. Three-year ramped deals reported at their terminal value, with twelve-month opt-outs that make the...
At a Capital Markets Day meant to validate Luca de Meo's "ReconKering" turnaround, the most revealing announcement had nothing to do with Gucci. Kering's minority stake in Icicle, parent ICCF, under a new "House of Wonders" vehicle is a tacit admission the old luxury playbook no...
Ferrari ($RACE) is at 52-week lows with soft demand, a struggling F1 team, and a new lifestyle retail push on Bond Street. I flew to London to visit the 9,150 sq ft flagship in the old De Beers space and found an empty store, €700 moccasins stored without shoe trees, and a brand...
LVMH reported Q1 2026 revenue of €19.12 billion, missing consensus by €370 million. Every division declined on a reported basis. Fashion & Leather Goods down 9%, Perfumes & Cosmetics down 6%, Selective Retailing down 3%. Middle East demand collapsed 30-70% in March, but strip...
A primary research deep dive into Ferrari's first electric vehicle, the $535K+ Luce. Based on expert interviews with former dealership executives, dealer channel checks, spy shot analysis, and collector surveys, this article breaks down what the exterior looks like ahead of the...
LVMH reports Q1 2026 revenue on Friday after its worst first-quarter stock performance in history. The Middle East growth story is dead, US tariffs are escalating, China remains fragile, and Italian regulators just raided Sephora. A breakdown of why consensus estimates are still...
RH missed Q4 on both lines, adjusted EPS of $1.53 vs. Street's $2.22, revenue $30M short of consensus. Management blames tariffs and weather, but the real story is record capex into a frozen housing market, a guidance cut, key executive departures, and 2030 targets that require...
Italian police raided Sephora's headquarters over allegations of marketing anti-aging skincare to children under 10. It's the third LVMH brand investigated by Italian authorities in two years, following Dior's sweatshop settlement and Loro Piana's judicial administration....
Finnish startup Donut Lab claims to have built the world's first production-ready solid-state battery with 400 Wh/kg energy density and 100,000-cycle life. After reading the VTT test reports, examining the corporate structure, and speaking with a former employee, the numbers...
JFrog claims to serve 80% of the Fortune 100, but a primary research investigation, including customer verification calls and an interview with a former JFrog sales executive, suggests these enterprise logos mask shallow, procurement-level relationships confined to single...
Once Upon A Farm is down 34.5% since I recommended it as a short, and the 180-day lockup doesn't expire until August 4th. Insiders hold roughly half the outstanding shares. The company lost $17.2 million in 2025 while the CEO and CFO took home $5.5 million in compensation....
Ferrari has officially paused deliveries to the Middle East, the same region the company told investors would absorb increased capacity to offset slowdowns in Europe and China. Dubai, the most important hub for global luxury spending, is seeing tourist traffic collapse as the...
Ferrari's $3.9M F80 has an anti-flip clause banning resales for up to 18 months. Owners are already selling before taking delivery. I contacted a dealer listing an F80, the original owner just doesn't want it. Clients in Saudi Arabia are passing on allocations entirely. The...
Goldman Sachs launched its Ferrari Residual Value Index, a proprietary tracker monitoring used Ferrari listing prices across five markets to support their Buy rating on RACE stock. The index has declined roughly 12% year over year as of February 2026, though Goldman argues that...
Ferrari, LVMH, and Kering all pointed to the Middle East as a luxury growth engine on their most recent earnings calls, confirming hypercar deliveries to Dubai, flagging "significant growth" in the Gulf, and opening new boutiques across Abu Dhabi. Eighteen days later, Iranian...