1. The Best Brand: Hermès
This one’s just a no-brainer. Hermès is just the greatest luxury brand on the planet. All of its designs are both timeless and modern. The quality of the flagship product categories–leather and silk–is simply the best in the world. The brand is just beautifully led. And they manage very skillfully the key asset of every luxury brand: scarcity. Hermès products are scarce, which means they’re valuable.

Hermès is publicly traded in Paris but is still controlled by the founding family. Bernard Arnault of LVMH is said to desperately want to acquire the company, and the brand’s future is uncertain because of differences among the various branches of the family. Some analysts suspect that under LVMH, Hermès could easily triple its sales. Which I’m sure is true, and is exactly the reason why LVMH must never buy Hermès. I pray to every luxury god in the pantheon, from Pierre Fabergé to Yves Saint-Laurent, that Russian call girls everywhere will keep Louis Vuitton bags hanging from their shoulders and not replace them with Kelly bags. And so as its new owner I would keep Hermès humming just as it is. Its moat–the quality that makes a brand unique–sheer excellence.

I would only recommend that in perfumes and watches, sectors where it has less legitimacy, it would pursue more timeless products and focus less on seeming contemporary. In watches in particular, the example of Chanel, which went from a brand that just slapped its logo on top of crappy watches that watch aficionados disdained, to one which is now taken seriously in the luxury watch world, is inspiring.