With an empire that stretches from luxury to auctioneers to vineyards and football, Kering Chairman and CEO François-Henri Pinault continues to work towards building a sustainable, purposeful company.
By Nichola Marie
A well-known personality in the global business world, mega-billionaire French businessman and Chairman & Chief Executive Officer – Kering, François-Henri Pinault leads the company that owns renowned luxury fashion brands like Balenciaga, Gucci, and Yves Saint-Laurent. He is also president of holding company Groupe Artemis, which owns Christie’s Auction House, the Creative Artists Agency talent agency, Château Latour winery in France, and a 3,000-piece art collection with works by Picasso, Mondrian, and Koons. Ranked by Forbes as the 99th richest person in the world, he reportedly has an estimated net worth of $20.6 billion; the Pinault family is worth approximately over $40 billion. After taking control of his father’s luxury and lifestyle group, Pinault is credited with consolidating the company’s core focus and expanding internationally, spurring consecutive quarters of double-digit growth at Kering.
His stunning business legacy aside, Pinault invariably also makes headlines in the entertainment world on account of his glamorous wife, Hollywood actress Salma Hayek. Recently, Hayek made an interesting revelation saying she does not have a prenuptial agreement between herself and her French businessman spouse to divide assets. Declaring that they keep their finances separate, she also shared that she works to support “a lot of the aspects of my life and myself”, and that her husband finds her ambition to make more money going forward “kind of sexy”.
Hayek also dissed the old rumours that she had married for money, declaring, “When I married him, everybody said, ‘It’s an arranged marriage, she’s marrying him for the money’. I’m like, ‘Yeah, whatever [expletive], think what you want’. 15 years together and we are strong in love and I don’t even get offended.” She also revealed that her husband made her a “much better person” and helped her “grow in such a good, healthy way”.
Pinault, the son of business magnate François Pinault, had started dating Hayek after they met at a 2006 gala at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. The following year, he and Hayek welcomed their daughter, Valentina Paloma Pinault in 2007. Two years later, the pair wed in Paris on Valentine’s Day.
Growth Story
Pinault’s vision of modern, authentic and responsible luxury is at the core of Kering’s success and its ambition to become the world’s most influential luxury group in terms of creativity, innovation, sustainability and long-term economic performance.
Born and raised in Rennes in North West France, the second of three children, Pinault was just a year old when his father, François Pinault founded a timber and building materials business in 1963. In 2005, he inherited a retail conglomerate called Pinault-Printemps-Redoute from his father. He has since turned it into Kering, a $21.2 billion (2023 revenue) luxury company that owns brands like Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta and watch brand Girard-Perregaux. Pinault is also the president of the investment firm Group Artémis.
An alumnus of the prestigious HEC Business School in Paris, he began his career at PPR in 1987. He would rise to become manager of the company’s buying department in 1988. After serving in a series of executive positions at FNAC and CFAO, he was appointed Deputy Chief Executive Officer of PPR’s digital strategy in February 2000, which saw him oversee the launch of PPR Interactive. In May 2003, Pinault was elected Vice President of the board. The same year, he became Chairman of Artemis, Kering’s controlling shareholder.
In 2005, he took the position of Chairman of the board, succeeding his father. He would later describe taking over the company to ‘New York Times’ saying, “It was funny and dramatic and surreal. I knew it was coming, but I never expected it to happen so fast. I was still only 40 years old, and my father was 66 and in great shape, full of plans for PPR. But he had seen too many omnipotent fathers and what they did. I saw how hard this was for him.”
Shedding the group’s interests within the mass distribution sector, Pinault ushered in a new era for Kering as a pure-luxury player. It divested Puma, sold its 50% stake in Stella McCartney, and sold Christopher Kane back to the designer. It chose to focus on its influential portfolio of established labels including Alexander McQueen, Gucci, Balenciaga and Saint Laurent, as well as revitalising Bottega Veneta.
In 2013, Pinault rebranded the group’s name from PPR to Kering. This move re-emphasised the group’s new direction and break from past activities. He has also overseen the group’s active participation in digital technology, entering into a joint venture with Yoox.com to develop the luxury brands’ e-commerce capabilities and introducing a digital academy to help foster innovations within the group.
Radical Steps
With Pinault as CEO, Kering has taken radical steps, including its environmental profit and loss methodology developed in 2011. As ‘EuropeanCEO.com’ explains, “This tool measures the financial cost of the company’s business activities on the environment. In 2017, Kering said it was on track to reduce environmental profit and loss by 40 percent across its supply chain by 2025. Kering’s pioneering work in this area has earned it the title of the second-most-sustainable company in the world in Corporate Knight’s 2019 Global 100 ranking.”
Pinault has also explained that his mission has been to build a sustainable, creative, purposeful company within the fashion industry. Speaking at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit in 2019, he said, “Business is the way to contribute to a better world and to a better future. It is our duty, not only to be at the forefront of the sustainability crusade but also to share our findings and indeed this has nothing to do with competition.”
His vision for sustainability is believed to have been born out of his focus on long-term thinking. He has revealed that from day one of becoming CEO, he had a strategy in mind to transform Kering into what it is today. “I started implementing that strategy for the long term, step-by-step… Since then, we have been moving forward with no rush, but with the objective clearly in mind.”
Working consistently to reshape Kering into a pillar of strength in the luxury market, he has been reviving struggling brands, developing a niche in which to operate and expanding the company’s international reach. Alongside, Pinault has also helped to redesign France’s luxury market, positioning fashion as one of the country’s leading economic drivers, underlining its strong relevance.
Active Philanthropy
Pinault has developed Kering into a pioneer in sustainability with a deep commitment to women. Both these causes are known to be particularly close to his heart. He also chairs the Kering Foundation, founded in 2008 with wife Hayek, which supports women’s causes like combating gender-based violence and sexual abuse. Since it was founded, the Kering Foundation has trained 40,000 professionals to provide services to survivors, according to its website. An active philanthropist, in 2011 Pinault implemented a wide range of ecological and social initiatives, including environmental profit-and-loss statements and sustainable python farming. He also serves as Chairman of Kering’s Corporate Foundation for Women’s Dignity and Rights and is a supervisory board member of ELA (a European NGO campaigning for research in leukodystrophy).
In 2019, when France’s Notre Dame Cathedral caught fire, Pinault announced that the family would donate 100 million euros (around $109 million at the time), to help repair the country’s iconic landmark.
It’s Personal
Pinault was married to Dorothée Lepère from 1996 to 2004. They had two children together, son François, born in 1998, and daughter Mathilde, born in 2001. From September 2005 to January 2006 he dated supermodel Linda Evangelista; they had a son together, Augustin James Evangelista, born in October 2006. His fourth child, Valentina, was born to him and Hayek in September 2007. In 2024, his son François Louis Nicolas Pinault was named director of Christie’s, while his daughter Mathilde participates in horseback riding competitions and is an occasional model.
He relaxes by playing tennis twice a week and doing boxing training. He likes to return home to watch Stade Rennais, his family’s football team in Brittany. Pinault used to be a ball boy at the stadium of Les Rouge et Noirs in the 1970s, and investing in his hometown team is seen as his way of ‘giving back to Brittany, what Brittany has given him’.
Coming back to Hayek’s revelations, she had once joked that it wasn’t love at first sight. “I was embarrassed to be seen with him. I was very strong in the activism, and I didn’t want to lose credibility, and then he was just so charming, interesting and so much fun, and it just kept going and going. Love doesn’t have to be really difficult.” The French would agree!
