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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.
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“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.