Since the beginning of 2026, the financial press has been listing appointments like a high society column: a CEO leaving for a competitor, a CFO moving to a different company, a boss appointed in an emergency after a profit warning. Each move is commented on in isolation, often through the lens of a game of musical chairs between major houses. This is an incomplete reading. These appointments are not just HR news. They are the concrete way in which luxury and retail boards are steering the sector's first real downturn since the financial crisis.
A sector slowing down for the first time in ages
The global personal luxury goods market stood at €358 billion in 2025, down 2% at current exchange rates, one year after growth that seemed guaranteed. Bain & Company and Altagamma call it the first slowdown in the sector since the Great Recession, excluding the Covid episode. The sector lost nearly 20 million active consumers in one year, with the global customer base falling from 400 million to 330 million over three years. The recovery expected in 2026, of between 2% and 4% growth, remains very uneven across regions: the Americas are driving the momentum, Europe and the Middle East are pulling performance down, and China is starting a cautious recovery that is far from guaranteed.
The half-year results published at the end of July confirm this normalization. LVMH posted revenue of €38.6 billion in the first half of 2026, down 3% as reported, with recurring operating income of €8.7 billion, down 4%. The group maintained an operating margin of 22.5%, which shows real resilience, but the trajectory is no longer that of previous years. At Kering, the appointment of Luca de Meo as CEO, effective since September 2025, was accompanied by an assertive discourse of disruption: debt reduction, cost reduction, rationalization of certain brands, with a strategic roadmap presented in spring 2026.
It is in this context, and not despite it, that major houses have multiplied appointments to key positions since the beginning of the year.
What the wave of appointments reveals
Taken individually, these appointments seem anecdotal. Put together, they sketch a clear movement: luxury boards are restructuring their executive committees to face a cycle they know to be different from the previous one, and they are doing so by pulling two very distinct levers: continuity and disruption.
At LVMH, Yann Musquin was appointed CEO of the Perfumes division, replacing Romain Spitzer, who himself joined Kering to take over as CEO of Bottega Veneta after ten years at the head of LVMH Fragrance Brands. A leader who proved his worth at a sector giant went directly to strengthen a competitor in full reconstruction. Kering has also proposed to its shareholders the appointment to the board of directors of a former Chanel executive and the CEO of a major international hotel group, two profiles from outside the historical core of fashion and leather goods.
At Diageo, the scenario is even more radical. Following the departure of the CEO in 2025 in the wake of a profit warning, and an interim period managed by the CFO, the group chose to appoint Sir Dave Lewis, former CEO of Tesco, renowned for his aggressive turnarounds. His appointment, effective January 1, 2026, was accompanied by a reduction of more than half in the group's dividend and a forecast organic sales decline of 2% to 3% for the current fiscal year. Diageo's board did not look for a successor within the inner circle of wines and spirits. It consciously chose a disruptive profile from a different industry.
These are two opposite governance logics, and that is precisely what standard media coverage does not say: in this context, an executive appointment is never just a simple job replacement. It is a choice that the board makes, implicitly, about the nature of the upcoming period. Choosing a profile from within the company or from a direct competitor is a bet on continuity and detailed expertise in the trade. Seeking a profile from outside the sector means accepting that no internal experience is sufficient to face what is coming, and that a capacity for disruption is needed that the inner circle does not naturally produce.
The mirror of wines and spirits
The wine and spirits sector is experiencing a comparable strain, with its own markers. French export volumes fell in February 2026 to their lowest level in at least twenty-five years. US import tariffs of 15%, which came into force in August 2025, caused exports to the United States to drop by 20% to 25% over the subsequent period, following an already sharp decline of 21% in 2025. In China, anti-dumping duties on cognac and other spirits reduced sales by 20% in the same year. This is a sector suffering a demand shock and a geopolitical shock simultaneously.
The boards' response there is strangely similar to that of the luxury industry. At Rémy Cointreau, the succession of the CEO who departed in 2025 was not entrusted to a cognac veteran, but to an executive who spent seventeen years at Chanel and then a mandate at Shiseido at the head of a fragrance and beauty region. At Pernod Ricard, the group's CFO, in office for twenty-three years, is preparing to leave the group to become CFO of Chanel starting October 2026, replaced internally by a new generation of group executives. The direction of flow is striking: wines and spirits are recruiting from luxury, luxury is recruiting from wines and spirits, and both sectors are drawing, at the exact same time, from the same talent pool of executives accustomed to driving strong brands under pressure of margins and desirability.
What this reveals goes beyond a simple game of musical chairs. Wine and spirits boards are no longer recruiting primarily based on product knowledge or historical experience. They are recruiting for a specific capability, proven elsewhere: elevating a brand, turning around a trajectory, making decisions in a context of pressure on prices and volumes. Industry pedigree is ceasing to be the primary criterion. This is exactly the kind of analysis a board must know how to perform even before opening a search: distinguishing what an executive's track record actually proves from what it merely suggests by industry proximity.
What this changes for executives and boards
For a board recruiting a CEO, CFO, or executive committee member today in luxury, retail, or wines and spirits, this period imposes a preliminary question, more important than the search itself: what kind of mandate is this really. A mandate of continuity, which requires a detailed knowledge of the house and its history. Or a mandate of disruption, which requires the ability to make decisions quickly, even if it upsets established habits. Confusing the two leads to poorly calibrated choices: a continuity profile placed on a disruption mandate wears itself out trying to preserve an existing setup that needs to be shaken up; a disruptive profile placed on a continuity mandate damages balances that did not need to be disrupted.
For the executives themselves, the signal is just as clear. A board that recruits from outside the sector, as at Diageo, sends an explicit message to its shareholders and its market about the severity of the situation and its determination to act. A board that recruits an internal profile or one close to the industry, as at LVMH for its Perfumes division, sends a message of stability and continuity. Neither choice is inherently better than the other. What matters is the alignment between the diagnosis of the period and the profile chosen to navigate it.
The Laroze Partners Perspective
It is precisely this preliminary diagnosis that, in our view, constitutes the real governance issue behind every executive recruitment in a context of industry tension. Recruitment is never the first question to ask. The first question is to know what the board really expects from the upcoming period, even before thinking about the profile that could embody it. A mandate poorly diagnosed at the starting line almost automatically produces a bad choice of executive, even when the selected candidate is excellent on paper.
This approach lies at the heart of the Laroze Pattern®, our method for strategically reading career paths, leadership behaviors, and performance dynamics. It helps us distinguish exactly what a track record proves from what it merely suggests through simple industry proximity. A leader coming from the luxury sector is not automatically equipped to turn around a spirits house facing margin pressures, in the same way that a continuity profile, however brilliant, is not necessarily the right one to face a geopolitical or tariff shock. What we look to read is not the title of the last position held, but the real nature of the decisions taken, how a leader managed a disruption or supported continuity, and what that reveals about their ability to do the same elsewhere, in a different context.
In a sector where the growth benchmarks of the last ten years no longer hold, this strategic reading becomes a decision-making tool for the board before it becomes a candidate selection tool. This is the area where we support boards in luxury, retail, and wines and spirits: helping them clarify what they really expect from their next leader, before searching for who that could be.
What is really at stake
The successive appointments since the beginning of the year in luxury and wines and spirits are not the symptom of a sector in disarray. On the contrary, they are proof that the strongest boards are actively steering through a difficult period through the choice of men and women they place in key positions. Continuity or disruption, intimate knowledge of the sector or an external gaze: this choice, made consciously, is today one of the most decisive acts of governance for a luxury or spirits house board.
Your executive committee is going through a period of sector tension
If your board is preparing to recruit an executive in this context, the question to settle first is not that of the profile, but that of the mandate. Let's talk about it before opening a search.
