Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Right. I think it's tied into this short term, long term perspective thing. The reason I say it's fun is the family wants to keep doing this. If it weren't fun, they would probably maximize value, they would hit the short term bid, and they would sell to Bernard. But they don't. Yup, I love that. The splinter in my mind is that you can sell what on the face of it seems like the same type of products as someone else, but build two entirely different businesses. Louis Vuitton and Hermes, on the face of it, do the same thing. As soon as you start digging in, you realize that these companies could not be more different. All of the puzzle pieces that fit together to create Hermes is an entirely different puzzle than the pieces that fit together to create Louis Vuitton. It's a great reminder that just because you are in the same product category as someone else, you don't have to build a similar business, and you might not even be competing with them. There's a large number of people for whom Louis Vuitton and Hermes are not actually in a consideration set together ever. I think that's fascinating. Right. These are Mutually exclusive brands for a lot of people. Certainly not all, but a lot of people. I was thinking about that too a little bit in the context of, oftentimes in a market, the best way to compete with your best competitor is to do the exact opposite of them, it's not to compete with them.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.