How long owners hold brands

How this was computed

• Source: ownership links recorded against a brand, where the relationship is owns or majority and the link is verified or reported. 12,405 brand links exist in total: 12,150 are ownership, 188 are licences, franchises or distribution deals, 66 are minority stakes and 1 is a joint venture. Only the 12,150 ownership links are measured.
• Licences are excluded from every period on this page. Of the 188 live licence links, 88 carry a start date; they are not analysed further.
• A link is live if it has no end date and ended if it has one. Live links: years held to date = 2026 minus the start year. Ended links: end year minus start year, only when both dates exist.
• Dates are stored in full, but 948 of the 2,092 dated live links carry a year-only date (1 January), so all periods are whole calendar years and good to about one year at best. A holding of "0 years" can mean anything under about a year.
• A recorded holder can be a subsidiary, so a transfer inside one group can appear as a change of owner. The start date is when that holder's link began, which for an in-house brand can be its founding, not an acquisition (Tiffany & Co. is an example).
• Bands and medians come from whole years. Medians are shown only where at least 5 links are dated; smaller cells show counts.

What can and cannot be measured

9,878 live links have no start date and 42 ended links have an end date but no start date. None of these is measured, and nothing is estimated or filled in for them.

Likely direction of the bias. Brandtree does not know why the dates are missing, so this is a reasonable expectation, not a finding. Links are most often dated when a tracked deal or a documented acquisition set them. Undated links are probably, in many cases, older or long-standing holdings whose start was never recorded. If so, the true median for all live links would be longer than the 10 years shown, so the figure above is more likely biased low than high. Brand ownership that began recently is also easier to document, which pushes the same way. We cannot say by how much, and the missing links may differ in ways we cannot see, so no figure here is extended to the undated links.

Ended periods. They are biased the other way in one respect: a holding can only appear here once it has ended, and long, still-running holdings are in the live table instead. Ended periods therefore tell us about completed holdings only. The 42 ended links without a start date are probably also long holdings, which again would make the median shown low.

Years held to date (live links)

2,092 dated live links out of 11,970. Median 10 years; the middle half is 5 to 18 years; the range is 0 to 117.

By category

Top-level category of the brand. Each row states how many of its live links are dated; coverage varies, so compare medians with care. Medians are shown only where at least 5 links are dated.

Longest-held brands with a recorded start

The 15 longest of 2,092 dated live links. A long period can reflect a brand built in-house by its owner, not an acquisition.

Completed holdings (ended links)

138 of 180 ended links have both a start and an end date. Median 17 years; the middle half is 8 to 28 years; the range is 0 to 184.

Shortest and longest

Several of the shortest periods are the same deal recorded across a group of brands, or a holder that bought and resold in one transaction chain, so they are not independent observations.

Owners with the most ended brand links

Counted over all 180 ended ownership links, dated or not. A count of brands that left a holder says how many were recorded, not how active the holder is, and a holder that records its history in more detail will appear higher. Medians appear only where at least 5 links have both dates.

What this does not show

• It does not show how long owners hold brands across the whole record: 9,878 of 11,970 live links (82.5%) are undated and are not estimated.
• It does not say why a brand was held or sold, and it does not compare owners by quality.
• It does not capture a brand that changed hands only because its parent company was bought; the holder on record stays the same in that case, so the holding looks longer than the brand's time under any one group.
• Periods are whole calendar years; 948 dated live links carry only a year.