The Brenninkmeyers: The Secretive Family Behind C&A, Cofra and Redevco

The Brenninkmeyers are the clearest example in Europe of a family that outgrew the business its name is attached to without ever selling it. C&A, the clothing chain founded in Sneek in 1841, still runs about 1,300 stores across Europe and employs roughly 50,000 people, but the family’s wealth now sits mostly in property, asset management and private equity under Cofra Holding, a Swiss company that few of C&A’s customers have heard of. The story is one of extreme secrecy, an unusually strict family rulebook, a retail formula that worked for 150 years and then stopped working, and a sixth-generation reset that is still under way. It is part of the Netherlands Company Stories hub.

How did two linen pedlars from Westphalia build C&A?

C&A began in 1841 when brothers Clemens and August Brenninkmeyer, travelling linen merchants from Mettingen in the Tecklenburger Land of Westphalia, opened a warehouse in the Frisian town of Sneek; the company’s name is simply their initials. The family had traded textiles since the seventeenth century and belonged to a network of Catholic pedlars, known as Tödden, who walked from Westphalia to the Dutch provinces each season to sell cloth.

The early decades were slow. A first shop in Sneek opened in 1860, branches followed in Leeuwarden and Amsterdam in the 1880s and 1890s, and the family only stopped peddling altogether in 1897. The breakthrough came with a pricing decision rather than a product: around 1906 the firm moved to fixed, visible prices and margins of 25 per cent or less, at a time when 50 per cent mark-ups were normal in clothing. Volume replaced margin, and the ready-to-wear formula that defined C&A for the next century was set. Bernard Joseph Brenninkmeyer (1871–1945) is regarded within the family as the architect of that formula.

Expansion then followed the railways and the big cities. The first German store opened in Berlin in 1911, a London store on Oxford Street in 1922, and the United States in 1948. By 2017 the chain had roughly 1,575 stores in 18 European countries, and it had become one of the largest clothing retailers on the continent by store count. What made the growth unusual was that it was financed entirely from within: the Brenninkmeyers never listed C&A, never took outside equity and, for most of their history, never spoke to the press.

What are the family rules that kept C&A private for six generations?

The short answer is a rulebook known inside the family as Unitas, a Catholic faith, apprenticeships that start young and, until the mid-1990s, a shareholding reserved for male descendants in a direct line from Clemens and August. Those rules explain how a family that is now said to have about 500 members across a dozen branches has avoided the fragmentation that breaks up most dynasties by the third generation.

Several practices stand out. Sons, and from the 1990s daughters, who wanted to join the business entered early and worked their way through stores in different countries before being considered for senior roles; the family’s own history describes relatives from Mettingen arriving as apprentices. Shareholding was separated from employment: a family member could be an owner without working in the business, but not the reverse for long. And ownership was spread across many hands rather than concentrated in one branch, which has made a single family member selling out practically impossible.

The secrecy was equally deliberate. For generations the family refused interviews, published no accounts beyond statutory filings and ran its affairs from private holding companies. That reticence has a dark chapter too: a 2016 historical study commissioned by the family documented how C&A profited from expropriated Jewish property and forced labour in Germany during the Second World War, something the family acknowledged publicly when the report was released. Philanthropy, centralised in 1995 through Porticus and Benevolentia, has been the public face of the family since; Charlotte Brenninkmeijer was appointed chief executive of Porticus in November 2024.

What is Cofra Holding and what does it actually own?

Cofra Holding AG is the family’s umbrella company, registered in Zug, Switzerland, and it describes itself as a six-generation family enterprise whose businesses combined manage more than €40 billion in assets for the family and external clients as of October 2026. It sits above four main operating pillars plus a growing clean-energy portfolio.

The first pillar is C&A Europe, the retailer, run from Düsseldorf and Vilvoorde by chief executive Giny Boer since 2021, the first woman and only the second non-family member to lead it. The second is Redevco, a real-estate investor and manager that grew out of C&A’s own store property book and now invests in retail parks, urban mixed-use and logistics across Europe. The third is Anthos Fund & Asset Management, a B Corp-certified values-based investor that began as the family office and now also manages money for pension funds, foundations and faith-based organisations. The fourth is Bregal, the private-equity arm, which in the United States has invested in fishing companies such as American Seafoods and Blue Harvest Fisheries alongside its European mid-market funds.

What matters for understanding the family is the weighting. Cofra has stated that retail is only one of several places its capital works, and the public profile of the group is now shaped far more by Redevco fund launches and Anthos sustainability reporting than by store openings. In April 2025 the family began a process to open its roughly €35 billion in assets to outside investors for the first time, a step that would have been unthinkable to earlier generations and one that effectively turns parts of Cofra into an asset manager rather than a pure family vehicle.

Why has C&A been retreating across Europe?

C&A has been shrinking because its mid-market, store-led formula was squeezed from both sides: fast-fashion chains such as Inditex and Primark took the price-conscious shopper, while online marketplaces and Shein took the convenience shopper, leaving C&A with large stores in secondary high streets and a customer base that was ageing. The retreat is not new, but it accelerated in 2025.

The pattern of market exits is long. C&A closed its 109 British and Irish stores in 2000–2001 after years of losses, and left Denmark the same year. It exited Argentina in 2009, sold its Chinese business to a private-equity buyer in 2020, sold C&A Mexico to Grupo Alfar in June 2023 after an earlier sale to Grupo Axo collapsed, and watched its Serbian unit go bankrupt in 2022 after a customs-fraud case closed 14 stores. Brazil, where C&A Modas is listed on the B3 exchange with roughly 330 stores, is the one non-European business that still carries the name in a meaningful way, and it is run as a separate public company.

Within Europe, March 2025 brought the announcement that 24 French stores and 57 shop-in-shop concessions would close, and the Spanish network fell from about 80 stores in 2023 to 73 by mid-2025. The company has not published European revenue, consistent with its private status, but the direction is visible in store counts: from roughly 1,575 European stores in 2017 to about 1,300 today. Reputation has also taken knocks; in February 2026 Greenpeace reported elevated PFAS levels in one of C&A’s puffer-jacket lines and criticised what it called a lack of transparency. Readers interested in how the Dutch high street has changed around C&A will find the decline of HEMA and Blokker a close parallel.

How has Redevco turned old C&A shops into a property business?

Redevco exists because C&A, unusually for a retailer, owned a large share of the buildings it traded from, and the family decided in the late 1990s to run that property as a business in its own right rather than as a cost centre of the stores. Today Redevco manages retail, urban mixed-use and increasingly logistics and retail-park assets across Europe for Cofra and for third-party investors.

The most telling recent move is the launch of the Redevco European Retail Parks Evergreen fund, which reached a first close of about €500 million in cornerstone commitments in 2026, with the WAY Retail Park in Seville among its early acquisitions. Retail parks, with their out-of-town locations, large car parks and tenants such as discounters and DIY chains, are the one retail format that has consistently performed in the post-pandemic years, and Redevco is positioning as a specialist in it. In the Netherlands, Redevco has also moved into financing, providing a €49.2 million green loan for a sustainable logistics development in Tiel.

For the family, Redevco is a hedge against C&A. When the retailer closes a store, the building often stays in the group and can be re-let, redeveloped or sold. That is why C&A’s retreat is less financially painful for the Brenninkmeyers than it would be for a retailer that leased everything. The same logic applies to Dutch rival family retailers; the Van Eerd family behind Jumbo has pursued a comparable strategy of owning the real estate under its stores.

Who runs Cofra now and what did the October 2026 reshuffle mean?

Cofra announced in October 2026 that Florian Brenninkmeyer would become chair of the board of Cofra Holding AG, taking over from Martijn Brenninkmeijer, and that Henry Schirmer, a finance executive with a background at large consumer and industrial groups, would join as chief financial officer. Both appointments continue a pattern that has defined the group since the 2010s: family members keep the chair and the ownership, while professional outsiders run finance and the operating companies.

That division is sharper than it looks. C&A Europe has been led by non-family chief executives since Alain Caparros succeeded Philippe Brenninkmeijer in 2017, with a brief interlude under Edward Brenninkmeijer in 2019 before Giny Boer’s appointment. Redevco, Anthos and Bregal have professional management teams and external investors to answer to. What the family retains is the ability to set the overall capital allocation, decide how much to reinvest in retail versus property or private equity, and approve big strategic moves such as the 2025 decision to accept outside money.

Note the spelling: the family uses both Brenninkmeyer and Brenninkmeijer, roughly along German and Dutch lines, and both appear in Cofra’s own announcements. Cofra Holding’s day-to-day executive team has likewise been led by a non-family chief executive in recent years. The group also funds significant charitable work through Porticus, which operates separately from Cofra but draws on the same family capital, and it owns the Draiflessen Collection museum in Mettingen, opened in 2009, which documents the family’s own history.

How does the family’s wealth compare with other Dutch dynasties?

Because Cofra publishes no consolidated accounts, the family’s net worth is a matter of estimation, but the €40 billion-plus in assets managed by its businesses and the roughly €35 billion that reports in 2025 described as investable family assets put the Brenninkmeyers among the wealthiest families in Europe, and almost certainly the wealthiest connected to the Netherlands, even though much of the family now lives in Switzerland, Germany, Britain and elsewhere.

The comparison with the Heineken family is instructive. Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken is routinely described as the richest Dutch citizen because her wealth is visible: it sits in a listed company whose share price anyone can check. The Brenninkmeyers, by contrast, hold almost everything privately and spread it across hundreds of people, so no single family member appears near the top of individual rich lists even though the family as a whole is larger. The same is true of the Van der Valk hotel family, whose decentralised ownership hides the scale of the whole.

The differences in origin also shape behaviour. Heineken’s control rests on a 50 per cent-plus stake in one company, which concentrates risk and influence. Cofra’s wealth is diversified by design: the 2025 decision to let outside investors into its platforms was presented as a way to grow Anthos, Redevco and Bregal faster, not as a sign of strain. For a family with 500-odd members and a shrinking core retail business, turning the investment arms into fee-earning managers is a way to keep paying dividends to a growing shareholder base without depending on clothing margins.

What role does the Netherlands still play for a family based in Zug?

The Netherlands remains C&A’s largest historical home market and the base of Redevco and Anthos in Amsterdam, but the group’s holding company, its chair and much of the family’s capital sit in Switzerland, which makes the Brenninkmeyers an early example of the headquarters mobility that has since affected Shell, Unilever and others. Cofra moved its holding to Zug decades before the recent wave of departures.

For Dutch policy makers the family illustrates a long-running tension. The Netherlands wants to be home to family businesses with a global footprint, and C&A’s Dutch stores, Redevco’s Dutch property and Anthos’s Amsterdam staff are real economic contributors. But the ownership structure that makes the family resilient, with a Swiss holding above national operating companies, also means the ultimate decisions about Dutch jobs and stores are taken in Zug. The debate over the Dutch headquarters exodus is in part a debate about whether structures like Cofra’s can be encouraged to stay.

The family has, for its part, kept visible Dutch commitments. Porticus runs a substantial grant programme from Amsterdam, Anthos manages money for Dutch pension funds and foundations, and C&A’s Netherlands business continues to invest in store refits and its online shop and app. Whether that is enough to keep the Netherlands at the centre of a group whose next chair, CFO and capital-raising plans were all announced from Switzerland is an open question.

What can founders and investors learn from the Brenninkmeyers?

The main lesson is that the business that makes a family rich is rarely the business that keeps it rich, and the families that last are the ones that recognise this early enough to diversify without selling the original. The Brenninkmeyers started turning C&A’s property into Redevco and its surplus cash into Anthos and Bregal while the retailer was still healthy, which is why the 2025 store closures were a strategic adjustment rather than a crisis.

A second lesson concerns rules. The Unitas framework was restrictive, sometimes unfairly so, and the family dropped its male-only shareholding rule only in the 1990s. But the underlying principle of separating the rights of owners from the privileges of employees, and of requiring every family executive to earn a role through apprenticeship, is why there are no public feuds, no forced sales and no single branch able to hold the others hostage. Founders designing a shareholder agreement for the next generation can borrow the principle without the exclusions.

The third lesson is about secrecy and its limits. Decades of silence protected the family from takeover speculation and press scrutiny, but it also left C&A slow to respond to public criticism, from the wartime history it eventually commissioned research into, to the labour-conditions and chemicals controversies of recent years. The decision to open Cofra’s platforms to outside investors will force more disclosure, and the family’s challenge is to keep the discipline that came with privacy while accepting the transparency that comes with other people’s money. Investors looking at the next generation of Dutch founders, from Coolblue’s Pieter Zwart to Adyen’s Pieter van der Does, will find that most of them have chosen the opposite path, taking outside capital early and accepting public scrutiny as the price.

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