Mediterranean × Commodities
The education of an Italian boy in a wheat-trade
Lead Long-Form Editorial · Releone Almanac · Issue One · Essay 07
I want to write about the most underestimated training a luxury-house founder can have. It is not design school. It is not a hospitality MBA. It is not a stint at LVMH or at Hermès or at Loro Piana. The most underestimated training, in my experience, is the one I had: fifteen years brokering international commodities at the deal-desk level — energy, refined products, sugar, precious metals — across Switzerland, Singapore, Geneva, and the Mediterranean basin.
Releone is the brand that emerged from that training. The reason the brand operates the way it operates — multi-year supplier contracts, premium-pay above market, founder-to-founder relationships, the willingness to absorb cost discipline that more conventional luxury startups do not — is that I learned all of that brokering wheat and oil and metals before I ever sold a jar of fish.
This essay is the explanation.
Zug, 2018
I was twenty-two when I joined Messodie International AG in Zug, Switzerland, as a junior risk analyst. Messodie was a privately held commodities trader specializing in refined-products arbitrage — diesel, jet fuel, gasoil, fuel oil — between European and Asian markets. The desk had twelve people. The senior trader had been brokering oil since 1986 and had survived the 1998 Russia crisis, the 2008 financial collapse, and four lesser shocks in between.
Three weeks into my role, the senior trader took a call from a Brazilian counterparty about a 50,000-ton sugar trade. The price had moved against the counterparty by about thirty cents a ton during the day. The Brazilian was upset. The senior trader listened. He did not interrupt for forty minutes. He asked one clarifying question. Then he said, calmly, in his Genevan-French-accented English, Je propose qu'on attende un jour. Si demain ça va mieux, on fait. Sinon, on parle.
The Brazilian agreed. They hung up. The senior trader looked at me. He said, Sometimes the best trade is the one that doesn't happen today.
I was twenty-two and I thought I understood what he was saying. I did not understand. It would take me three years to understand.
Three days later, the price moved another twenty cents in our favor. The senior trader called the Brazilian back. They closed the trade at a price that saved his firm $1.4M relative to the original quote. The senior trader thanked the Brazilian for being patient. The Brazilian thanked him for being patient. They hung up. The next time they did business — six months later — the price was twice as easy to settle. The relationship had been improved by the tension, not damaged by it.
That is the first thing the trade taught me. The relationship is the asset. The trade is the rent on the asset.
Geneva, 2021
By 2021, I was twenty-five and running positions myself at a different firm. Smaller desk. Three traders, an analyst, a controller. We had a Spanish counterparty in the refined-products space — a family-owned distributor in Cartagena who had been operating since the 1970s. The patriarch was in his sixties; his son was being prepared to take over.
In June of that year, a shipment ran into a quality-spec issue at the receiving terminal. It was not catastrophic. It was the kind of thing that gets quietly resolved between professional counterparties. The Spanish counterparty called me. He explained the issue. He asked for a $40,000 concession on the contract. The legal margin we had on the deal would have allowed me to refuse and let it go to dispute. The CFO at my firm was prepared to refuse. I went into our small conference room and looked at the file for forty minutes.
I called the Spanish counterparty back. I said, I'll do $80,000. Half is the spec resolution. Half is for the cost of the discussion not being a lawyer's discussion.
He paused for a long time. Then he said, Brandon. Esto, no se olvida.
This is not forgotten.
That deal cost my firm $80,000 against a contract margin that would have permitted $40,000. It cost me, personally, a portion of my year-end bonus calculation. The CFO was not happy with me for a quarter. By the end of the year, that same Spanish counterparty had directed three new pieces of business to our desk that he had previously been routing to a competitor. The total margin on those new pieces was $640,000. My CFO, eight months later, asked me how I had landed the increased volume. I said, Patience.
That is the second thing. Premium-pay above market for the right reasons returns above-market over time. Over time is the operative phrase. The discipline does not pay back this quarter. It pays back over decades.
What this has to do with anchovies
I started Releone in 2024. I was twenty-eight. The first supplier I sat down with was a Spanish anchovy operator on the Asturias coast. He was the second generation. His father had operated the cannery before him. The conversation should have been a procurement meeting. It became something else within twenty minutes.
He asked me what I was building. I told him. I told him about the Mediterranean fish-in-glass thesis, the OU-kosher discipline, the multi-pillar luxury house, the eventual apparel sub-brand and the spirits division. He listened the way the senior trader at Messodie had listened to the Brazilian, without interruption.
When I finished he said, in Spanish, Cuántos años tienes? How old are you. I said veintiocho. Twenty-eight. He smiled. He said, Mi padre tenía veintinueve cuando empezó. Es exactamente la edad correcta. My father was twenty-nine when he started. It is exactly the right age.
We did not negotiate price that day. We did not negotiate volumes. He toured me through the cannery. He introduced me to his children. We had lunch with his wife — fish, of course; anchovies on toast; the same dish I had had in Geneva and in Lisbon and in Venice; somehow better at his table than at any other table I had eaten it at. I left at six o'clock that evening having committed to nothing on paper, with a multi-decade relationship implicitly opened.
The negotiation followed three months later. It took two days. We agreed to a multi-year contract with price-protection both ways, premium-pay above the spot market, exclusivity on the OU-kosher production line he was about to build for us, and quarterly relationship reviews between him and me directly — not through procurement, not through legal, but founder to founder.
I got that contract because the trade desk in Zug had taught me that relationships are the asset, and because the trade desk in Geneva had taught me that premium-pay above market for the right reasons returns above market over time, and because the patience to listen for forty minutes before responding is the most underestimated discipline in any luxury operation.
The third thing
The third thing the commodities trade taught me is the most uncomfortable to write about, because it is a thing people do not say in public.
The third thing is: the apex of any category is occupied by families that outlast the brands that come and go around them.
The Sicilian Tonnara cooperative that supplies Releone's Bluefin × Tartufo flagship has been operating since the sixteenth century. The Spanish anchovy cannery on the Asturias coast has been in the same family for three generations. The Amalfi olive grove that supplies Releone's extra-virgin oil has trees that are older than my grandfather's grandfather. The González family in Jalisco — Releone's tequila partner from 2028 — is in its fourth generation. The notebook that the truffle hunter keeps in Alba is in its eleventh volume.
None of these families care about which brand is fashionable this year. They care about which brand will be working with their grandchildren. The brands that come and go around them — the celebrity tequila launches, the venture-funded specialty-food rollups, the private-equity hospitality vehicles — are noise. The families are the signal.
The lesson I took from the trade is that to be the brand the families decide to work with, you have to operate on their time horizon. You have to commit decades, not years. You have to behave as though you will be at this exact desk in twenty years, because the family at the other end of the contract is at this exact desk for life.
Releone is built to be a generational house. I am twenty-eight years old. My commitment to this brand is the rest of my working life. I will be running this house when I am sixty. I will be handing it to a successor — a real human one, by then — when I am seventy. The families I am partnering with are doing the same calculus.
You cannot run that calculus on quarterly numbers. You cannot run that calculus with venture-capital exit horizons. You can only run that calculus if you have learned, somewhere — for me it was the trade — that the time horizon is the entire game.
The fourth thing, which is the smallest and most important
The fourth thing the commodities trade taught me is that luxury is, finally, a commodity-trading problem.
The good is rare. The relationship is the asset. The patience is the discipline. The willingness to pay above the spot market for the right reasons is the differentiator. The discipline to absorb cost concessions when the relationship requires them is the difference between a firm that lasts thirty years and a firm that lasts three. The discipline to walk a deal back when the deal is not yet right is the difference between the senior trader at Messodie and his junior counterparts.
These are not luxury concepts. They are commodity-trading concepts. Hermès operates them. Loro Piana operates them. JP Morgan and Glencore operate them. Cesare Attolini operates them in Naples. Marco De Luca operates them in Amalfi.
Releone operates them in New York. The discipline is not in the marketing. The discipline is in the income statement, in the supplier contracts, in the cost of the glass, in the price I paid for the patience that the Asturian anchovy man required, in the multi-year price-protection clauses that protect both sides, in the willingness to walk away from a deal that was not yet right.
The luxury industry will tell you that what they sell is a story. The luxury industry is wrong. What they sell is a discipline that has been compounded over time. The story is the thing the customer reads. The discipline is the thing the brand has to be.
Releone is a discipline that emerged from a trade. The Mediterranean fish in glass is the visible part. The trading-desk decade is the invisible part. The brand is what happens when the two meet at a single counter in a small Manhattan apartment in February.
If you have read this far, thank you. The next jar you open will be slightly different.
This is the seventh piece in the Releone Almanac launch corpus. Brandon's professional history is documented at /about/founder. Subscribe to receive future Almanac pieces in print: /almanac/subscribe.
— Brandon J. Sellam Paris · Livorno · New York · Geneva · Zug Depuis MCMXCV