Tastemaker’s Note
Oil is the standout this issue → up 9.1%, its strongest two-week run in months. REITs took the hardest hit at -6.0%, pressured by rising Treasury yields. Bitcoin slipped -3.0% after a hotter CPI print rattled crypto markets. Gold held nearly flat, which in this environment reads as quiet strength.

Watches are the slow burn to watch: down -0.5% this month but up 8.3% over the past year, and the recovery is now broader than just Rolex and Patek Philippe. But now Audemars Piguet and watches outside the Big Three are also rising, which means the recovery is broad-based.

One year ago today, I started Extra Caviar the way any apprentice starts: with a few standards I wouldn’t bend on, and an openness to let the rest be shaped by the work itself. Over the course of twelve months, it has grown into an editorial voice backing the ideas that matter…

→ 52 issues delivered to your inbox
→ 52 ideas reshaping the world
→ 52 Thursdays spent learning the craft

They say habits aren’t built in bursts but through repetition. The most-cited study on the subject, from University College London, found it takes an average of 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic.

We’ve passed that mark more than five times over. At this point, Extra Caviar isn’t a habit. It’s a practice.

So for our first anniversary, it felt right to look at the houses doing the same thing at scale. While we spent the year learning, Rolex, Bvlgari and Kering spent it building classrooms.

In Valenza, Bvlgari just graduated the first class of its public jewelry school. And this month, Kering opened an academy with more than 1,500 students across Italy.

→ A €1.4 trillion industry has realized that its future doesn’t sit in a vault, but instead in the hands of the next generation.
→ The Rolex Watchmaking Training Center was created in 2023 to prepare the next generation of Rolex-certified watchmakers, and it welcomed its first class in fall 2024.
→ Bvlgari expanded its Valenza facility into the world’s largest single-brand jewelry production site, and one of the new buildings houses Scuola Bvlgari, the brand’s first publicly accessible training school, developed with Tarì Design School.

But you must be asking yourself why?

The driver is a skills shortage →
Altagamma and Unioncamere project Italy needs 276,000 people across motor, food, hospitality, fashion and design from 2024 to 2028, with companies struggling to fill half of those roles, even with youth unemployment near 20%.

→ In France, 10,000 craft jobs go unfilled each year.
→ LVMH predicted a shortage of 22,000 workers by the end of 2025, a third of them craftspeople.

→ The workforce aged: the masters who hold these skills are retiring faster than anyone is replacing them.
→ The pipeline broke: a generation was steered toward university and away from the trades, and many of the schools that once trained craftspeople shrank or closed.
→ And, the work itself is slow to learn and long undervalued, asking years of training before the payoff arrives → The result is knowledge that lives only in the hands of the people who have it, and can’t simply be hired off the market.

So the houses are doing the only thing left: training it themselves.

In Italy’s Vicenza jewelry district, a recruiting firm’s analysis notes that about 120 new entrants a year can’t replace the retirement wave building across a workforce of 18,000 to 20,000.

Jeweler Theo Fennell observed that many young people won’t spend years building the skills while earning less than their friends.

None of these are gestures of goodwill. They are investments, made by companies that understand that their most valuable asset is the knowledge they place in their people’s hands.

In a €1.4 trillion industry, the scarcest asset isn’t gold or leather. It’s the people who know what to do with it.

The future isn’t inherited, it’s taught.

Clint Brauer returned to his family farm after his father developed Parkinson’s. What began as a personal mission became Greenfield Robotics: robots designed to replace herbicides with mechanical weed control.

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When knowledge is shared, it multiplies across the workplace and beyond….

But when celebrations are shared, it’s simply contagious. So, thank you for sharing the year with us & a little indulgence to go around 🥂

P.S. Like my style (and taste)? Work with me.