Kering names LVMH fragrance chief Romain Spitzer as Bottega Veneta's new CEO

Kering has named Romain Spitzer chief executive of Bottega Veneta, the group said in a statement, with Spitzer taking over on 1 September 2026 and reporting directly to Kering group chief executive Luca de Meo. The role carries a seat on Kering's executive committee and is based in Milan, where Bottega Veneta is headquartered.

Spitzer is arriving from across the industry's other giant conglomerate: until now he was president and chief executive of LVMH Beauty's Fragrance Group, according to Kering. His three decades in luxury began at Guerlain in 1995 as a product manager, ran through spells at Jean Paul Gaultier Parfums and Yves Saint Laurent Parfums, and continued at Parfums Christian Dior, which he joined in 2006 to head its fragrance business unit. He went on to lead LVMH's fragrance brands from 2016, a remit that later expanded to take in Maison Francis Kurkdjian and Acqua di Parma alongside Dior's own perfume business.

De Meo called Bottega Veneta "one of the strongest and most distinctive Houses in luxury, with exceptional craftsmanship, a unique creative identity and remarkable growth potential." Kering framed the appointment as the start of a new phase for the house, built around sharpening desirability, deepening client relationships and improving retail execution while protecting the craftsmanship and creative identity that define it -- the kind of language any group reaches for when installing a new chief executive, worth reading as stated intent rather than achieved fact until Spitzer has had time to act on it.

What stands out is the profile Kering picked for the job. Spitzer has never run a leather-goods or ready-to-wear house; his record is in scaling and coordinating a stable of fragrance and beauty brands at once, across product development, manufacturing and distribution, rather than a single maison's design studio or store network. Choosing him over someone with a hard-goods or ready-to-wear background reads as a bet on portfolio management and commercial discipline over category-specific pedigree -- and it extends a wider pattern at Kering since de Meo took the group's helm last September, with leadership reshuffled at several houses as he pushes each business to tighten its own commercial execution.

For floortok's tracking of Japan's luxury-boutique map, Bottega Veneta's footprint there still runs through a single flagship, on Ginza's Namiki-dori -- a market where inbound tourism has done more than most in the past two years to reshape who is actually buying luxury goods and how. Whether Spitzer's stated priorities of desirability and client connection translate into anything concrete in a market split between loyal domestic clients and free-spending visitors will be one of the more tangible tests of what “retail excellence” comes to mean in practice, well before it shows up in Kering's group numbers.

Spitzer has six weeks before he starts. Whether a career built managing a portfolio of fragrance and beauty houses converts into running one leather-goods and ready-to-wear maison is the question Kering has put to the market with this appointment; the first evidence will be what, if anything, changes at Bottega Veneta's stores -- Ginza's included -- once 1 September arrives.