Can’t afford a Birkin bag? You can still own a piece of the company that makes it.
This week on Ticker Take, we spoke with Markus Hansen, a portfolio manager at the global money manager Vontobel. He invests in the world’s most exclusive brands for a living.
How does he find winning stocks in the luxury market?
Hansen says look for companies that are willing to play the long game because consumers have big appetites for brands with a rich history.
“You can’t buy time,” he told me. “So building that heritage is one of the biggest moats around.”
Indeed, some of the companies in his portfolio have been around for more than 100 years. Hansen notes that while most companies want to sell as much as possible, these businesses deliberately limit supply to protect exclusivity. That scarcity buys them something investors generally like to see: pricing power.
That said, Hansen notes are only 30 to 35 listed luxury companies around the world, with some being mixed investment stories. So he keeps regular tabs on management and checks store trends. More than anything, he looks for companies that successfully keep growth in check even when times are good. “It’s a very hard thing to do,” Hansen told us. But he says that restraint protects exclusivity.
Here are 5 of his long-term holdings. As always, this is not financial advice.
Hansen says Hermès is the brand every other luxury house wants to be. Founded in 1837, now on its sixth generation of family ownership, it doesn’t even call itself a luxury company. Instead, it calls itself a house of artisans. One handbag can take up to 24 hours to hand-stitch, and the artisans who make them train for five to six years first. In Hansen’s words, it’s almost the antithesis of AI. But what investors get is a business with operating margins near 40 per cent, a debt-free balance sheet, and demand that never quite catches up to supply.
Richemont (CFR)
Richemont is the Swiss holding company behind Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels. Cartier has been dressing European royalty since the 1840s, a legacy Hansen says still shows up the moment a piece turns up on Antiques Roadshow. Branded jewelry is only about 20 per cent of the global jewelry market, but it’s grabbing share faster than everything else in it.
Ferrari makes cars, technically, but Hansen treats it like pure luxury. Enzo Ferrari started the company in 1939 mostly to fund his own racing habit, and it still caps output at around 14,000 cars a year. That’s a rounding error against roughly 95 million cars sold worldwide. Two-thirds of buyers already own a Ferrari. Margins run above 30 per cent, more than double a typical automaker’s, and Hansen keeps coming back to Enzo Ferrari’s own rule: always build one car less than demand.
Brunello Cucinelli (BC)
Founded in the 1970s and still family-run, Brunello Cucinelli built an empire on cashmere and what Hansen calls “quiet luxury”: no visible logo, but you know exactly what it is. The company plans to double its revenue over the next decade. And in China, where other luxury names have stumbled lately, Hansen says Cucinelli is still growing at double digits.
Formula One Group (FWONK)
Hansen isn’t buying the F1 teams, which he says burn cash like most sports franchises. He’s buying the organizing body, the NFL-style entity that holds an 80-year license to run the sport and gets paid through hosting fees, advertising and media rights, all of which tend to outrun inflation. F1 only became a full equity stock in December 2025, and Hansen calls it part luxury because it comes from the same scarcity playbook as everything else on this list. It also just picked up control of MotoGP, which he sees as a smaller, faster-growing version of the same story.
The Ticker Take
The common thread for these stocks might seem like the price tag on their items. But, Hansen suggests it’s actually restraint. That is, a discipline to stay scarce to ensure a great brand ca become a decades-long compounder.
Jon Erlichman is a BNN Bloomberg contributor and the host of Ticker Take on YouTube.
