LONDON — Nicolas Bos, who will take over as chief executive officer of Richemont on June 1, has spent his career juggling art and commerce — and has loved every second.
Currently CEO of Van Cleef & Arpels, Bos rejected the top job at the group when Richemont chairman Johann Rupert first approached him, but eventually buckled.
“A while ago I asked him to consider the role, and he thought about it for a few months,” said Rupert during a call following Richemont’s fiscal 2024 results on Friday. “Then he told me, ‘No, I’m having too much fun at Van Cleef, and I don’t need all the hassles of being a CEO.’”
When Bos finally accepted, Rupert made him promise to keep having fun. That might be his biggest challenge yet given that Richemont is now a 20.62 billion euro company, and his boss is still the charming, and demanding, Rupert.
In his new role, Bos will directly and indirectly oversee all the Richemont maisons, functions and regions, with a special focus on the jewelry houses, finance and human resources. He’ll join the senior executive committee next month, and be proposed for election to the board at Richemont’s annual general meeting in September.
Bos has been working at Richemont for his whole career and worked with the original team that helped to transform Van Cleef & Arpels from a small, loss-making company into a major, international jewelry brand.
Today, Van Cleef is a pillar of Richemont’s money-spinning jewelry division, which notched 14.2 billion euros in sales in fiscal 2024, a six percent increase year-on-year at actual rates and a 12 percent uptick at constant exchange.
The jewelry brand complements Cartier, and is close to Rupert’s heart. It was Rupert who originally purchased a majority stake in Van Cleef & Arpels in 1999 in a deal valued at 460 million Swiss francs. It took a decade to become profitable, and Bos was there nearly every step of the way. Even at the time of acquiring the stake in Van Cleef, Rupert saw its potential, saying he believed that one day Van Cleef could be as big as Cartier was at that time. And he was clearly right.
A graduate of the ESSEC Business School, Bos joined Richemont in 1992, initially working with the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris.
In 2000, he joined Van Cleef, where he held different positions, including creative director and head of North America, until he became global president and CEO in 2013. Since September 2019, he has also been overseeing Buccellati.
Born and raised in Paris, Bos is a father of two daughters and has a passion for arts, theater and literature. On his watch, Van Cleef has been a sponsor of the arts and a great supporter of education initiatives.
In 2017, he told WWD that his mission was to broaden Van Cleef’s appeal, and make sure the wider public knew all about the brand.
“Of course, we could produce pieces just for a handful of collectors, but at a certain point, if you are invisible to the rest of society — or at least to those who are interested in the artistic process — you risk losing your raison d’être,” he said.
“The jewelry industry ran that risk in the ’80s and ’90s, when it became a little inward-looking, a little less visible, perhaps a little less creative. You saw less of it in museums and in the press, and it established fewer connections with fashion and design,” he added.
Bos said that Van Cleef has made every effort “to boost the profile of the category and help foster vocations. Twenty years ago, that was a real question: Will we be able to train a new generation of jewelers and gem-cutters?”
Van Cleef invests in education through L’École des Arts Joailliers (the School of Jewelry Arts) and supports the Jewelry Gallery at Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
“It’s important to show that jewelry is not just selling expensive big stones to very wealthy people, it’s thousands of years of history,” he said.
He is just as passionate about the commercial end of the business. During Friday’s call, Rupert revealed that it was Bos who urged him to buy the Italian jewelers Buccellati and Vhernier in 2019 and earlier this month, respectively.
“We wouldn’t have bought Buccellati if Nicolas hadn’t harassed me, and we wouldn’t have bought Vhernier if he hadn’t harassed me as well,” said Rupert.
Asked on Friday’s call why he was so keen on Vhernier, Bos said the brand really has a “special style and is very complementary to Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, and Buccellati. It’s very modern, sleek, and very much inspired by 20th century contemporary sculpture.”
He said the brand has also been “very well run by the Traglio family, and we had been talking with them for a while. I think they are extremely happy to continue their journey under the Richemont umbrella.”
Bos said that Vhernier will continue as a “small operation to start with, but we’ll see how it can grow.”
“The style is very specific and the customers are very loyal. We think there is room to grow it in the portfolio,” added Bos, who will undoubtedly fill Richemont’s jewel box with more gems in the years to come.
