Maxingvest

Maxingvest

Founded in 1949 and still fully controlled by the Herz family, Maxingvest is the parent of two operationally independent subgroups: the Tchibo coffee-and-retail chain and the Beiersdorf AG personal-care group, home to Nivea and Eucerin. The holding company emerged from the Tchibo business that Michael and Wolfgang Herz’s father co-founded, and it now functions as a management holding that preserves and develops value across both platforms. Maxingvest’s deployment is concentrated in its two core subsidiaries. It owns 100% of Tchibo GmbH, which spans coffee roasting, non-food consumer retail, and a growing sustainability-linked logistics operation — Tchibo is a founding member of the Zero Emission Maritime Buyers Alliance (ZEMBA). In Beiersdorf AG, Maxingvest controls over 50% of voting rights, giving it de-facto stewardship of the global skincare franchise. Beyond the operating companies, the Herz family owns direct real estate, including Little Springs Farm in Georgia, USA and commercial properties in Hamburg. The holding’s geographic footprint runs from Hamburg headquarters through Tchibo’s Central European retail network and Beiersdorf’s worldwide distribution. Maxingvest does not publicly disclose assets under management or total deployment. The professional team includes Managing Directors Michael Herz and CFO Frédéric Pflanz, Chairman Reinhard Pöllath, and Supervisory Board member Wolfgang Herz. The family’s philanthropic capital is housed in two separate foundations — the Joachim Herz Stiftung and the Max und Ingeburg Herz Stiftung — which hold securities portfolios and support education, science, and culture. Little Springs Farm represents a standalone land asset in the U.S. For the fiscal year 2024, the firm reported profitable growth. The structural differentiator is the permanent-control architecture: rather than a diversified family-office portfolio, Maxingvest concentrates the Herz family’s capital in two majority-controlled industrial assets and governs them through a single management holding. This turns the family office into the corporate headquarters of a consumer-goods conglomerate, with no external fundraising, no fund-structure layer, and no path to a liquidity event for its anchor holdings.