Cartier Inc (Incorporated, the standard American corporate form) was the formal legal name of the Cartier New York branch during the family's period of ownership. It appeared in American corporate filings and in the documentation accompanying pieces sold, commissioned, or serviced through the Fifth Avenue operation that Pierre Cartier built.
As with Cartier SA in Paris and Cartier Ltd in London, the designation was a legal entity name rather than a brand or retail name. Pieces were signed and presented simply as Cartier; Cartier Inc identified the specific corporate entity in formal documents.
The New York Branch and Pierre Cartier
It was Pierre Cartier who turned New York into Cartier's American operation of significance. He moved there in the early twentieth century, establishing a presence first at lower addresses before securing 653 Fifth Avenue in a celebrated 1917 transaction in which the asking price was partly settled with a strand of natural pearls. The building, a Beaux-Arts mansion, became the New York showroom for the rest of the family's ownership of the firm.
Pierre ran Cartier Inc with considerable independence from Paris. His client base was drawn from American industrial wealth: the Vanderbilts, the Huttons, the great collectors of the Gilded Age and the years that followed. He was a natural salesman and a tireless networker, building relationships with the kind of private wealth that had few European equivalents at the time. The New York branch acquired and sold jewels from dispersed European aristocratic collections through the 1920s and 1930s, placing pieces with American collectors who wanted both the prestige of the pieces and the assurance of the Cartier name.
The Transition Out of Family Control
Cartier New York was sold in December 1962 to Black Starr & Frost, ending more than half a century of Cartier family ownership of the American operation. The branch subsequently passed through the Kenton Corporation (Robert Kenmore, chairman) and other owners. The Paris and London branches were sold separately in the 1970s. The name Cartier Inc continued as the corporate entity under successive ownership, until all three branches were eventually consolidated under the Richemont group.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 3 (“Pierre, 1902–1919”) and ch. 11 (“The End of an Era, 1957–1974”)
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007), p. 144.
- Wikipedia: Cartier Inc
