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Cartier International SNC, is a French luxury goods conglomerate that designs, manufactures, distributes, and sells jewelry, leather goods, and watches.

Cartier is regarded as one of the most prestigious jewelry manufacturers in the world. As of 2021, the brand appears to be steadily on the rise and Forbes Most Valuable Brand List shows that Cartier has moved up three spaces, from 59th in 2018 to 56th in 2020. With a growth of 14% value over the previous year, a brand value of $12.2 B, and revenue of $6.2 B.

Cartier has a long history of sales to royalty.[King Edward VII of Great Britain referred to Cartier as “the jeweler of kings and the king of jewelers. Cartier bought it from the Plants in exchange for $100 in cash and a double-stranded natural pearl necklace valued at the time at $1 million.By this time, Cartier had branches in London, New York, and Saint Petersburg and was quickly becoming one of the most successful watch companies in the world.

 

Recent Development

In 1981, Alain Dominique Perrin was appointed Chairman of Cartier SAA and Cartier International. The next year, Micheline Kanoui, the wife of Joseph Kanoui, became head of jewelry design and launched her first collection “Nouvelle Joaillerie.” In 1984, Perrin founded the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain to bring Cartier into the twenty-first century, by forming an association with living artists.

In 1986, the French Ministry for Culture appointed Perrin head of the “Mission sur le mécénat d’entreprise” (a commission to study business patronage of the arts). Two years later, Cartier gained a majority holding in Piaget and Baume & Mercier. In 1989/1990, the Musée du Petit Palais staged an exhibition of the Cartier collection, “L’Art de Cartier.”Perrin founded an international committee in 1991, Comité International de la Haute Horlogerie, to organize its first salon, held on 15 April 1991. This has become an annual meeting place in Geneva for professionals in this field. The next year, the second exhibition of “L’Art de Cartier” was held at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

 In 1993, the “Vendôme Luxury Group” was formed as an umbrella company to combine Cartier, Dunhill, Montblanc, Piaget, Baume & Mercier, Karl Lagerfeld, Chloé, Sulka, Hackett, and Seeger.In 1994, the Cartier Foundation moved to the Rive Gauche and opened headquarters in a building designed for it by Jean Nouvel. The next year, a major exhibition of the Cartier Antique Collection was held in Asia. In 1996, the Lausanne Hermitage Foundation in Switzerland exhibited “Splendours of the Jewellery”, presenting a hundred and fifty years of products by Cartier.In 2012, Cartier was owned, through Richemont, by the South African Rupert family, and Elle Pagels, a 24-year-old granddaughter of Pierre Cartier.

From 1976 to 2003, the company lent its name to special editions of several models of the luxury US automaker Lincoln.