BUY. ADVISE. RESTRUCTURE.

If your brand is doing $5M–$50M in revenue and you're dealing with a messy capital stack, a lender getting aggressive, or a retail transition that's bleeding cash, that's exactly where we work.

Revenue-based debt, Shopify Capital, MCAs, trade creditors, broken boards, founder fatigue. We've navigated all of it, on both the equity and advisory side.

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Every week: the podcast episode, the stories that matter in consumer, and one trend we're watching.

Recent Issues

The Real Reason DTC Brands Are Selling Right NowInside a Messy Cap Table RestructuringWhat Lenders Look For Before They Get AggressiveThe Retail Transition Playbook Nobody Talks AboutFounder Fatigue: When It's Time to Bring in Help

IN THE MONEY

The weekly show with the most interesting $5M–$50M founders, operators, investors, and acquirers in consumer.

What If the Consumer Has Already Decided?

Jul 8, 2026

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5 min read

What If the Consumer Has Already Decided?

Danone paid $1.5B for an Australian protein smoothie and $1.2B for a UK meal replacement brand in 90 days, not for the products, but for the consumer relationships those products had already earned. Khloud is outperforming LesserEvil's Target velocity on an audience Khloé spent twenty years building before a popcorn bag existed. A Greek egg white drink with better macros than anything on the US market is blocked from American shelves by a regulatory technicality (the consumer trust is already there, the format isn't). Michael Rolland got Yough! into Target because sell-through data told the buyer what a pitch deck never could. And Balenciaga just joined Substack because they're paying for the trust a reader already extended to a writer, and no programmatic ad unit can buy that.

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The Real Opportunity Is Never the One in the Headline

Jun 30, 2026

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5 min read

The Real Opportunity Is Never the One in the Headline

CHAMP's $50M investment in Rhoback reads like an apparel funding story. It's actually a bet on athlete ownership as a distribution engine. L Catterton's ~€1B HYROX talks read like a fitness events story. It's actually a bet on the status symbol that money alone can't buy. Steph Curry's $400M Li Ning deal reads like a US retail expansion. It's actually a bet on becoming Jordan Brand for 1.4 billion people. Morgan's second consumer brand reads like a founder repeating a formula. It's actually a master class in knowing what's not worth doing again. And the GLP-1 story everyone's been telling is about weight loss. The real story is about to be a global whey protein supply shock. In every case this week, the headline number is the least interesting part of the story.

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Format Is Strategy: The White Space Hiding in Plain Sight

Jun 22, 2026

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5 min read

Format Is Strategy: The White Space Hiding in Plain Sight

BRUNT found 17 million tradespeople that the entire challenger brand wave walked past. Stars + Honey looked at a protein bar category built almost entirely for male performance athletes and saw half the population being ignored. Feel Peptides looked at a $100M+ gray market running on crypto payments and fentanyl-adjacent supply chains and saw a compliance and brand arbitrage hiding in plain sight. Joe Welstead looked at a electrolyte market with hundreds of flavors and built the one with none. And the private wellness club is finding the white space between Planet Fitness and nothing, the third place the affluent 2026 consumer has been looking for. The white space is almost never a new category. It's the customer, the format, or the frame that everyone else overlooked.

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The Market Prices Things for Death Too Early

Jun 12, 2026

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6 min read

The Market Prices Things for Death Too Early

The DTC mattress category was declared dead: Koala just listed on the ASX at A$332M in revenue and A$12.3M in net profit. Miss Mouth's Messy Eater survived a Thrasio bankruptcy and sold to Church & Dwight for $325M: a 30x return on the original acquisition price. Tillys was being priced for mall-retail extinction at ~$135M market cap against $550M+ in revenue: then posted its first profitable quarter since 2021 and the stock surged 60% in a session. And a flour mill built in 1890 that survived the Dust Bowl, two World Wars, and every diet fad of the last century finally closed: but the miller behind it is pivoting into functional ingredients rather than dying quietly.

Fan Bi

Better Keeps Moving. The Brands That Win Move With It.

Jun 3, 2026

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6 min read

Better Keeps Moving. The Brands That Win Move With It.

Brami looked at the low-carb orthodoxy that defined American diet culture for a generation and recognized it had the Mediterranean paradox completely backwards, then built the fastest-growing national pasta brand in America on two ingredients. Proper Wild looked at a $1B energy shot category that hasn't changed since 2004 and saw the last major CPG category where clean-label disruption hasn't arrived yet. Banagua put cans next to bananas in the produce section and skipped the beverage aisle entirely. Stephen Vlahos's COVID shutdown forced him out of hospitality and into bag-in-box wine, the format his friends called a mistake turned out to be the whole strategy. And Beyond Meat is the cautionary tale: the brand that defined "better" for a generation and got stranded when the definition moved. The consumer didn't stop caring about what they put in their body. They changed their mind about what better means.

Fan Bi

May 27, 2026

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5 min read

The Founder IS the Distribution Channel

The old model: build the product, find the audience. The new model: build the audience, then the product finds its way to market. 4AM's founders built 230,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram before they had a retail shelf, then walked into Target with four sold-out production runs as proof. Neutonic exists because Chris Williamson and James Smith spent a decade building audiences that trust them on exactly the topics the product is designed for. George Clooney and Rande Gerber don't need to pitch a distributor, Casamigos made the introduction for them. Jason Burke spent ten years becoming the person that store managers would answer the phone for. And the cabbage trend is being built on TikTok by dietitians who don't have a product to sell, yet.

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Edge is Recognizing the Misread Before Everyone Else.

May 20, 2026

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6 min read

Edge is Recognizing the Misread Before Everyone Else.

Everlane was priced as the future of retail for a decade, until it wasn't, and the equity went to zero. L Catterton looked at a public market that was pricing Thorne like a commodity vitamin company and paid a 94% premium on the misread, now exploring a $4B exit in under three years. Maya Smith built in a category the industry called niche for fifteen years, until VMG looked at $7.3M in EBITDA and recognized it wasn't niche at all. A corporate VC explains why patient capital, with no LP clock forcing the exit, is the structural advantage most founders never think to look for. And the men's makeup category has been unlocking for five years with no dominant brand to show for it yet. The pattern: the market misprices things constantly. The businesses worth studying are the ones built by people who saw the correction coming.

Fan Bi

May 11, 2026

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7 min read

Domain Authority Is the New Moat

LMNT locked in Huberman, Attia, and Rogan in 2021 when their audiences were a fraction of today's size, the cost to replicate that strategy now is 10–20x higher. Bathhouse is raising $41M to build the physical infrastructure for a category that Huberman spent four years educating millions of people about for free. MOSH is backed by two decades of Maria Shriver's Alzheimer's advocacy before a single bar was sold. Sam Coxe set a 10x margin rule before she had a product, survived 145% tariffs without blinking, and built $4M revenue per employee. And Brunello Cucinelli is growing 20% in the Americas while logo luxury retreat, because their customer was never buying a trend.

Fan Bi

May 4, 2026

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6 min read

The Fifty-Year Overnight Success

A 17-year-old borrows money from his football coach to buy a sub shop. Fifty years later, Blackstone pays $8B and files for a $12B IPO. A burned-out Wall Street banker buys a failing snack brand for $250K and sells to Hershey for $750M thirteen years later. A 22-year-old college dropout buys a roadside jerky stand on a $150K loan, apprentices under an 80-year-old butcher, and is now tracking toward $1B+ in revenue. A 253-year-old watchmaker gets revived by a father and son, the greatest living independent watchmaker, and a movie star who was already buying the watches before anyone offered him a deal. And a working capital lender explains why cash is the silent variable that kills good brands before they get enough time to become great ones.

Fan Bi

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BUY. ADVISE. RESTRUCTURE.

Get the Newsletter

IN THE MONEY

What If the Consumer Has Already Decided?

The Real Opportunity Is Never the One in the Headline

Format Is Strategy: The White Space Hiding in Plain Sight

The Market Prices Things for Death Too Early

Better Keeps Moving. The Brands That Win Move With It.

The Founder IS the Distribution Channel

Edge is Recognizing the Misread Before Everyone Else.

Domain Authority Is the New Moat

The Fifty-Year Overnight Success

In The Money: eCommerce, DTC and CPG