The Brenninkmeijers have epitomized Europe’s reclusive old-money elite for more than a century. There’s the secretive accounts of flagship clothing retailer C&A AG, a wariness of publicity and opaque corporate structure — all overseen from an anonymous office park in Switzerland’s wealth hub of Zug.
Then came the growing realization that one of the world’s biggest dynastic fortunes needed a radical rethink as C&A struggled with online competition. A new generation of leaders is increasingly taking over the Brenninkmeijer business empire, accelerating a push to diversify assets and break away from a long-held tradition of just managing family wealth. There’s a drive to attract more institutional money, selectively hire more external talent — and take riskier bets.
The Brenninkmeijers trace their C&A empire back to 1841, when two brothers started a clothing warehouse in the Dutch town of Sneek. Fast-forward to today, and they’ve amassed about €35 billion ($39 billion) of assets spanning real estate to private equity through the Swiss firm overseeing their major assets, Cofra Holding AG. CEO Boudewijn Beerkens seeks to double that asset figure within the next decade, said a person familiar with the matter, and will need to attract larger sums of outside investor cash to meet that goal.
Redevco, the family’s real estate unit, is expanding into private credit and hunting riskier deals after opening up over the past decade to other rich families and institutional firms. Anthos Fund & Asset Management, the asset management division, has also struck its first partnership with external peers after becoming the Brenninkmeijers’ latest unit to take on outside money in 2022. It’s courting funds from foundations, family offices and other long-term investors. The private equity arm Bregal, which opened to outside money in 2016, is also growing.
The collision of old and new is playing out under the watchful eye of Beerkens, a former Wolters Kluwer and SHV Holdings CFO, and a handful of top executives from outside the family with experience at institutional firms. They confront the tough balancing act of growing the business and managing external investors while keeping onside a family typically unused to sharing information publicly.
The family’s own wealth through Cofra’s assets is at least $18 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, rivaling some of the world’s biggest dynastic fortunes.
“It wasn’t easy,” Anthos CEO Jacco Maters, 52, said of the firm’s decision to open up to outside capital. It “really required a mindset shift. It’s really about coming from a closed culture to a culture where you have to share what you’re doing, how your portfolios are looking.”
The firm is hiring to help get the word out. Anthos FAM and Redevco recently took on former Amundi SA and Credit Suisse executives to drive investor relations efforts, joining more than a dozen other new staff members at the two Amsterdam-based firms since early 2024.
“We’ve historically had no proper external capital team,” Redevco CEO Neil Slater, 48, who joined in 2023 from Abrdn PLC, said in an interview. “We’ve already had people reaching out to us, from Swiss family offices to Japanese pension funds.”
Cofra is among a wave of investment groups for billionaire families taking on outside money as their activities increasingly rival institutional firms in size and sophistication.
Few, though, present as striking a change of emphasis. And the changes have not all been plain sailing.
Some Anthos FAM employees were initially unsure over what they could disclose to external clients in the early days of it taking on outside money, Maters said. Other staffers at Cofra’s businesses who joined in recent years previously knew little of the group, making some hesitant at first about moving jobs. And outsiders continue to have misperceptions about the activities of the world’s biggest family investment groups.
With roots in the Netherlands and Germany, six generations of the dynasty have led their business empire through a tight-knit shareholding group that draws upon the family’s Catholic faith for its principles. Children of the current shareholders face a roughly 15-year apprenticeship before holding a stake in Cofra.
The shareholding group comprises less than 100 of the dynasty’s members. Some have more front-line roles than others. Martyn Brenninkmeijer, a former C&A executive, is chairman and handed over the reigns at Cofra to current CEO Beerkens, an extended relation of the dynasty who turns 62 this year. Johanna Brenninkmeijer, a sixth-generation member of the family, joined Cofra’s board of directors last year after also working at C&A. Johanna, who turns 43 this month, is a managing director for impact investments at Anthos FAM.
The dynasty’s younger members are now taking up executive roles at Cofra, too. Florian Brenninkmeyer — a Dutch variation of the dynasty’s surname — became the group’s CFO in January after working for more than a decade in Cofra divisions including C&A.
Elsewhere, family members also hold senior roles at Bregal, the dynasty’s biggest investment unit, which now has more than €19 billion in assets under management.
“They are one of the most successful European family dynasties,” said Marc Debois, founder of FO-Next, an advisory firm for family offices. “They have structured their governance so strongly.”
The descendents of founders Clemens and August Brenninkmeijer rode the rise of Europe’s expanding middle classes to become a leader in ready-to-wear clothing at affordable prices. Profit margins were thin, but high volumes and reinvesting earnings allowed them to build a
The boom in e-commerce. Online shopping in recent decades disrupted C&A’s growth, pushing the Brenninkmeijers further down the path of diversification. They’d already established their asset management arm in 1929 to manage their fortune. Redevco was spun out from the C&A’s property division seven decades later. In the early 2000s, Bregal was established. In that period, they also founded Cofra.
C&A forged the Brenninkmeijers’ reputation for secrecy through disclosing few public details over the years and — unlike some other large family-owned businesses — still doesn’t publish consolidated financials. The retailer took a rare step of tapping public markets in 2019 to list its Brazil unit, which has seen its share price decline about 30% since. True to its humble origins, the family has typically housed its offices in low-key parts of Amsterdam and Switzerland’s Zug.
The family’s push to open up is showing signs of yielding results. Redevco’s assets have almost doubled in the past decade after bets on French shopping centres, Portuguese hotels and Madrid’s iconic Mercado de San Miguel. During that time, it has partnered with firms including Wall Street giant Ares Management Corp. Bregal has reported similar growth since early 2021. Bearing part of the Brenninkmeijer name, the private equity firm's software and technology division bought a stake last month in Estonian transport software company Ridango for an undisclosed sum.
Redevco now seeks to raise as much as €500 million from external sources by the end of next year and is in early-stage discussions with potential Asia-Pacific and Europe investors, the person familiar with Cofra’s operations said. The firm also closed its first investment April 1 from a private credit platform launched this year, adding to a unit announced last year for snapping up distressed properties in Europe.
Anthos FAM is on the move, too. It wants to open a Germany office to bolster fundraising from European investors who mirror the Brenninkmeijers’ values, such as faith-based foundations, the person said, asking not to be identified because the details are private. The firm, which oversees between €5 billion and €10 billion, struck a partnership starting last year for a Spanish peer to access its investment strategies and earlier landed €300 million from a foundation with ties to Dutch royals, partly due to its focus on social impacts.
In a further sign of Cofra’s transformation, Anthos is now the process of launching a fund-of-funds for private equity investments with Bregal, the firms’ first joint vehicle.
“We are well-known in the markets where we’re active,” such as Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, said Maters, a former Allianz SE executive who took on his current role in 2018. “Now it’s time to get that traction and convert that in additional new clients.”