⚠ The Artisan Shortage & Input CostsLow threat

Owning the craft secures quality, but the craft itself is getting harder and costlier to sustain. The artisanal skills luxury depends on — fine leatherwork, watchmaking, tailoring — are in dwindling supply as older generations retire and fewer young people enter the trades, so the labour that underpins the product is scarce and increasingly expensive. The finest raw materials — top-grade hides, precious metals, gemstones — are likewise limited and prone to inflation, and competition for them among luxury houses is fierce.

LVMH invests heavily to counter both, funding craftsmanship schools and apprenticeships to renew the skills and integrating backward to lock up supply — investment that is itself part of the moat, and whose scale gives it first call on scarce inputs. But the structural scarcity of artisanal skill and premium material is a rising cost and a genuine constraint on how much LVMH can make: a house that cannot source the craft or the leather cannot grow the brand — a real ceiling on a ~€20B maison¹. A modest, slow-building pressure on cost and capacity.