Carnet.
The truth about the houses you admire,
from the table where they're run.
Cher connoisseur,
Behind every house is a room where the real decisions are made. Welcome in.
Most business writing treats luxury as a category: a product line, a price tier, a marketing aesthetic. The longer I spend looking at how these houses actually run, the more I'm convinced that framing misses the point entirely.
Luxury is a different way of running a business. It violates standard logic on purpose, and the violations are the strategy.
Carnet is where I pull on these threads. Not the surfaces of luxury, the leather, the bottle, the boarding pass, but the mechanics underneath. How capital is allocated when revenue takes years to arrive. How scarcity is engineered without curdling into resentment. How a brand decides what to own outright and what to leave to someone else. The decisions look like aesthetics. On closer inspection, they're balance sheets.
The pieces published here will move across houses, sectors, and decades. Some will be about brands you've worn or drunk; others about decisions made in rooms most people never enter.
The window display is for everyone. Carnet is a seat at a table most people never see.
Bienvenue à Carnet.
The Power of Not Owning Anything
How Four Seasons built a brand worth billions without owning the buildings, the boats, or the plane.
Read the full essayRecent entries
A growing collection of essays, case studies, and interviews on the strategic, financial, and operational logic that underpins the world's most enduring luxury houses.
Why Scarcity Is the Most Misunderstood Strategy in Luxury.
From Louis Vuitton to Dior, the art of wanting what you cannot have, and the deliberate business logic behind it.
Aging, allocation, and capital: how Moët & Chandon turns time into a strategic asset.
Inside the world's largest champagne house, where capital is measured in vintages and inventory is the asset that future revenue is built on.
The Birkin Index: how a handbag beat the stock market.
Inside the resale machine that turned the Hermès Birkin into an asset class, and the strategic choice Hermès makes by refusing to capture any of it.
LVMH Holds Every Card. KERING Holds the Ace.
How the world's two biggest luxury groups built opposite versions of the same business.
Quiet resilience versus dramatic rescue: how the two largest luxury groups in the world handled the 2024 slowdown, and the two very different philosophies behind it.
A beautiful way to end the ivory trade.
Saving elephants, one necklace at a time. Inside Alexandra Mor's Tagua collection, the first fine jewelry line built around a seed that looks like ivory.
Why Carnet exists.
An introduction to the journal. What it will cover, what it will not, and the kind of reader it hopes to find.
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One considered essay on the business of luxury, once a month.