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The tale of the four Benetton siblings--Luciano, Giuliana, Gilberto and Carlo--who launched their clothing empire by knitting sweaters at the kitchen table at night, has become legendary in Italy; they currently rank among Europe's wealthiest families. Color was the key to their success. Luciano, 67, the eldest, has said he couldn't bear to see young women in the 1960s dressing like their mothers and young men still decked out in gray. The bright, cheerful knitwear they produced was a hit in Italy, and soon they were exporting around the world, their products increasingly accompanied by provocative ad campaigns.
Today, however, the Benettons no longer view their $2.3 billion creation as a family company. They continue to hold a majority stake, but since taking the firm public in 1986, they have relied more on outside managers and this month announced that the family is withdrawing from management completely. Meanwhile, the family fortune has undergone a massive diversification. Through Edizione Holding, a family-owned company, the Benettons have bought stakes in operations as diverse as Formula One racing, Prince tennis racquets and a firm that refurbishes railway stations. Just last month they paid $7 billion to acquire a majority stake in Autostrade, the company that runs Italy's toll roads. (They already own the firm that runs the roadside restaurants.) Not all of their investments have been profitable: they lost an estimated $400 million on a mobile-telephone firm that collapsed.
The Benettons who founded the family business have 14 children among them, and the succession is already settled: the four siblings have set up a structure dividing all their assets into four parts. While there is no guarantee that their children will work together as well as they did, the clear division means no single member of the next generation will be able to dismantle the empire.
Otto OTTO GMBH & CO.
The Ottos' mammoth catalog and Internet retailing operation traces its lineage back to a postwar shoe factory in HAMBURG. Today the family also owns the majority of furniture seller Crate & Barrel
Annual Sales: $25 billion
At the end of World War II, Werner Otto fled with his family to Hamburg from their Soviet-occupied home in what is now Poland. He won a license from the British authorities occupying the town to start a shoe factory, and in 1949 he founded a mail-order firm that is now the core of the family fortune. His son Michael was 28 when he joined the firm in 1971, and he became chairman a decade later. At the time, Otto Versand was a thriving German business with sales of about $2.5 billion. Today, recently renamed Otto GmbH & Co., it's a worldwide colossus with sales of $25 billion.