Adam Pritzker strolled through a spacious SoHo loft, pausing to admire a fake narwhal tusk. Handblown glass chandeliers from the Czech Republic dangled overhead, and vintage Moroccan rugs covered expansive hardwood floors.
The apartment, a minimalist luxury jewel box, was not Mr. Pritzker’s home, and the furnishings were not his own. Instead, these were the building blocks of what Mr. Pritzker, a 30-year-old scion of the Hyatt hotels family, hopes will one day be a consumer goods and hospitality conglomerate that caters to wealthy jet-setters around the globe.
The SoHo apartment is actually a store, and everything in it is for sale. Called The Line, it is among the first ventures of Assembled Brands, Mr. Pritzker’s holding company.
With $200 million under management and nascent operations in retailing and fashion, Assembled Brands is the vehicle for Mr. Pritzker’s sprawling ambitions. His new line of women’s clothing, Protagonist, is sold at Barneys. Next up is a foray into marketing and retailing at boutique hotels, another store in Los Angeles and the creation of new fashion brands.
In time, Mr. Pritzker aspires to create an empire spanning hotels, shopping districts and catwalks, much like LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
“What we’re particularly excited about is creating seamless experiences online and offline for affinity groups who are high earners with a very specific set of values,” he said. “We don’t think that anybody is really doing this.”
If successful, Mr. Pritzker will build on the business legacy of a family that boasts 11 living billionaires. Mr. Pritzker’s grandfather, Jay, who died in 1999, was the architect of the family empire. His father, John, is a billionaire hotelier. Another relative is Penny Pritzker, the commerce secretary.
Yet to create brands as durable as Hyatt, the foundation of his family’s fortune, Mr. Pritzker will have to translate his big ideas into sustainable, profitable companies.
“I tend to think of young C.E.O.s like athletes,” said James Coulter, founder of TPG and mentor to Mr. Pritzker. “You see skills you hope will scale in the big leagues. Adam clearly is a bundle of activity. But you don’t really know until the numbers come in.”
In person, Mr. Pritzker is a picture of youthful zeal, with a scraggly beard and unkempt hair along with a tailored pinstripe suit and luscious purple tie. The look of harried luxury represents a metamorphosis from his student days at Columbia. Back then, he was most often found with his head buried in a book like “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” by the urban studies scholar Jane Jacobs.
“He’s a dreamer,” said Marco Zappacosta, Mr. Pritzker’s college roommate and now chief executive of Thumbtack, a successful start-up. “He has big ideas.”
Yet even in college, Mr. Pritzker was plotting. He studied with Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia economist, and went on to work for Mr. Sachs at the Earth Institute after graduating.
“From the moment I got to know him, it was pretty clear he envisioned an entrepreneurial future,” Mr. Sachs said. “He added two parts to it — he’s very interested in the right kinds of technology. And he has always shown a lot of heart and ethical values in what he’s doing.”
Soon he wanted to try his hand at business and applied for a job at Ideo, the design firm. But “Adam’s ambition was greater than the opportunity that he would have gotten at Ideo,” said Mimi Chun, a former Ideo employee who interviewed Mr. Pritzker.
Instead, he helped found General Assembly, a real estate and education start-up. Ms. Chun quit Ideo and joined him. General Assembly was a hit, attracting $50 million in venture capital funding.
“He had an unshakable belief that what we were doing was going to be huge,” said Jake Schwartz, General Assembly’s co-founder and its chief executive. “What makes Adam Adam is that there was no hedging. There was no Plan B. He pushed everyone else to believe it, too.”
Then in 2012, Mr. Pritzker struck out on his own, leaving daily work at General Assembly to found Assembled Brands.
Starting with little more than a big idea, Mr. Pritzker assembled a team of longtime retailing and fashion executives. Soon they had started Protagonist, a line of women’s wear made in New York. Then came The Line, which offers expensive, largely monochromatic home and fashion goods. He has also used his money to invest in a public company, Speed Commerce, which fulfills online shopping orders.
In theory, the businesses will work in concert. Protagonist clothes are sold at The Line, and future endeavors will share common marketing and back-office systems. New products will be informed by data from existing customers. Yet despite his expansive vision, Mr. Pritzker admits to not knowing exactly how Assembled Brands will grow.
“You start with a very small group of customers who absolutely love what you’re doing, and you ensure that that group is happy,” he said. “I think the other stuff will really take care of itself.”
Where exactly Mr. Pritzker’s $200 million came from remains unclear. His stake in General Assembly is included. Other family offices have contributed cash, but he declined to identify his limited partners. Members of Mr. Pritzker’s family, eager to see another one of their own succeed, have contributed significant sums.
Though Mr. Pritzker tries not to trade on his name, it has clearly opened doors, giving him the network and confidence to mingle with the global financial elite.
He watched his father leave the family business and make his own money in private equity and hotels. And he watched as, in recent years, his family squabbled over the unraveling of the empire.
“Being a part of my family is a blessing and a curse,” Mr. Pritzker said. “When you walk into a room, sometimes the name walks in before you do.”
Though he was not involved in the family dispute, he claims harmony has returned to the Pritzker clan. “Really smart people solved a lot of these issues, and I think over all everybody is really happy and doing really well,” he said.
Almost as important to Mr. Pritzker as his family are his business mentors, like Mr. Coulter. Another confidant is Domenico De Sole, the former chief executive of Gucci. From afar, Mr. Pritzker admires David Geffen’s creativity and the operational savvy of the Rales family, which built the Danaher industrial conglomerate.
When it comes to financial smarts, “the master is John Malone,” he said, referring to the chairman of Liberty Media, famous for his tax planning. “He’s on another planet in terms of operational and financial intelligence.”
Berkshire Hathaway’s vice chairman, Charles T. Munger, is an idol “because he’s all about systems and mental frameworks, and using those frameworks very consistently and very clearly.” And Mr. Pritzker recently flew to Omaha to meet with Tracy Britt Cool, the young executive whom Warren E. Buffett, Berkshire’s chairman, has named chairwoman of several Berkshire companies.
But Mr. Pritzker is aware that he is trying to introduce brands into an overcrowded marketplace and create a family of interlinked companies when conglomerates have largely fallen out of favor.
It’s an audacious goal, and to codify his thinking, Mr. Pritzker produced a pamphlet describing the “100-year philosophy” for Assembled Brands that underscores both the uncertainty and ambition behind his company.
“We don’t know exactly what we will build,” he writes. “But with your courage and imagination, we can create something real, something big, something that lasts.”