How we underwrite luxury.
Luxury is not one asset class. A 40-year-old family-held maison, a founder-led beauty brand at $80M revenue, and a reference-grade timepiece are three different risk profiles that happen to share a shelf. We underwrite them separately.
What we look for in brand equity
Pricing power that survives a downturn.
We test whether the brand has ever discounted, and what happened to volume when it raised prices.
Scarcity that is structural, not manufactured.
Waitlists produced by production constraints behave differently than waitlists produced by marketing.
Founder and family dynamics.
In this category, ownership succession is a primary risk factor and a primary source of opportunity.
Distribution control.
Brands that own their channel hold their margin. Brands dependent on wholesale surrender it in every soft quarter.
Category and geographic concentration.
Exposure to any single market — particularly one dependent on a single consumer cohort — gets discounted in our model.
What we look for in tangible assets
Provenance that is documented, not asserted.
Chain of custody, service records, original documentation. Unverifiable history is a pass.
Liquidity depth at the reference level.
We track realized auction and dealer clearing data, not asking prices.
Condition and originality.
Replaced components change the asset. We price that explicitly.
Carrying cost honesty.
Insurance, custody, servicing, and authentication fees are modeled into net return before we present anything.
What we decline
"We pass on brands whose value rests entirely on a single celebrity or founder persona, on assets we cannot authenticate to a documented standard, and on structures where our economics would conflict with yours."
We'd rather show you fewer opportunities than manufacture deal flow.
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