Laird Superfood has a market cap of $30 million. In the last 40 days it has acquired $111 million in annual revenue. That gap is the story and it's really a Nexus story.

Nexus Capital Management is a Los Angeles-based special situations firm with a $1.4B fund closed in September 2025. Their consumer playbook has become one of the most interesting in private equity.

2023: Bought Dollar Shave Club from Unilever, who paid $1B for it in 2016, and called it explicitly "a platform investment to build a broader personal care and grooming business."
2024: Acquired CK Snacks, a leading private label salty snack co-manufacturer. Same framing: "a platform investment."
2025: PIPE investment in Rent the Runway.
2026: Two acquisitions through Laird Superfood in 40 days.

March 12: Navitas Organics. $38.5M purchase price. $45.3M revenue. Profitable. 20-year-old superfoods brand. Funded by $50M Nexus convertible preferred.

April 21: Terrasoul Superfoods. $48M purchase price. $65.8M revenue. Bootstrapped since 2012. Amazon-dominant. Owns its own 115,000 sq ft manufacturing facility in Fort Worth. Funded by another $60M Nexus convertible preferred.

Nexus now owns ~72% of Laird Superfood. The combined platform: ~$161M in 2025 revenue across three brands. $110M in preferred equity deployed. $86.5M in acquisitions. Average acquisition multiple: ~0.79x revenue.

The playbook in full: find a distressed public company with brand equity in a credible category. Inject preferred equity to gain economic control while the common stock market cap stays small. Acquire profitable, bootstrapped brands at sub-1x revenue multiples using that preferred structure as the funding mechanism.

The public market values the Laird platform at $30M. The revenue base is $161M. Either the market is wrong about what this platform is worth, or Nexus has more work to do proving it can integrate what it's assembling. Probably some of both.

Tory Burch just made a $700M contrarian bet. Not to grow. Not to acquire. To buy out her PE partner and own more of her own company, two decades after she started it.

She founded the brand in 2004 with $2 million. Built it to $1.8 billion in revenue. 350+ stores. One of the most recognised names in American fashion. And at every point along the way, the path of least resistance was the same: sell.

LVMH. Tapestry. Capri. The consolidation machine that absorbed Kate Spade, Michael Kors, Versace, Coach, Jimmy Choo. Every one of those deals came with a promise of independence. Every one delivered standardisation.

Tory Burch watched that list grow for twenty years and kept saying no.

The comp she's following is Ralph Lauren. Started in 1967 with a $50,000 loan and a necktie drawer in the Empire State Building. Went public in 1997 with a dual-class share structure giving the Lauren family ~84% of voting power despite a minority economic stake. Spent decades buying back stock. Market cap now ~$24B on $7B+ of revenue. Still founder-controlled. Never absorbed. The brand still looks and feels like the person who built it.

Tory Burch is using different tools to get to the same place. $700M term loan. $300M revolver. $346M buys out General Atlantic, who came in through her 2012 divorce settlement. The rest refinances existing debt.

The credit markets pushed back, wider spread, steeper discount, because lenders see a business with revenue down 3.5% in FY2025 taking on leverage to fund an exit, not to invest in growth. She did it anyway. This is the same move she made in 2018 when she borrowed to buy out early investor Tresalia Capital. The pattern is consistent: every time she has the opportunity to concentrate ownership and reduce outside influence, she takes it regardless of the cost.

$60M+ in annual interest on a business navigating a soft luxury cycle. The bet only works if the cycle turns. But twenty-two years in, the track record of that instinct is hard to argue with.

Most founders at this stage take the exit. Tory Burch looked at the list of brands that did, and chose a different path.

In 2013, a Swedish PE firm bought a Danish juice bar for $48 million. That juice bar is now valued at $1.8 billion. The compounding story in between is worth understanding.

Kaspar Basse founded Joe & The Juice in Copenhagen in 2002. Deliberately not Starbucks, deliberately not Jamba Juice, an edgier, music-driven urban concept where managers got autonomy and the vibe was the product as much as the juice. Valedo Partners acquired it in 2013 for $48M, with Basse retaining 10%.

Then General Atlantic came in as a minority investor in 2016, with 175 stores and fewer than 5 in the US. What followed is a textbook capital structure compounding story:

Revenue grew 4x. Profitably. Store count doubled to 360. The US went from fewer than 5 locations to 70. Digital channels were built from scratch and now represent 30% of sales. Debt was paid down. Unit economics became, in GA's own words, "industry-leading."

November 2023: General Atlantic acquires majority stake, buying out Valedo entirely. The company that sold for $48M a decade earlier had 20x'd their investment.

April 2026: EIIC, the investment arm of Abu Dhabi's National Holding, buys a minority stake at a $1.8B valuation. General Atlantic remains majority shareholder but takes some liquidity off the table.

The EIIC investment isn't just capital. They already operate deep in UAE retail and hospitality. Joe already has locations across UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. The franchise infrastructure for the next 500 stores in the Middle East just got considerably easier.

Current state: $500M in revenue, 480+ stores across 23 markets, EBITDA margins above 20%, target of 1,000 stores by 2028. The Shake Shack comp is instructive, $1.45B revenue, ~600 locations, $4B+ public market cap. At Joe's 1,000-store target, you're looking at $1B+ in revenue and a credible path to $3B+ in enterprise value.

Three ownership transitions. Each one used to compound value and expand the capital base without losing the brand. That's the capital structure story underneath the juice bar.

Every family in the world is running on the same operating system. A whiteboard. A Google Calendar. And a lot of shouting.

Mei Lin Ng saw that and thought: this is not a personal failure. This is a category waiting to be built.

She spent two years talking to families before writing a line of code. Not surveys. Not focus groups. Real conversations, starting in Facebook communities in 2020, getting deep on what the actual friction was. Those same people are still subscribers today.

What she found wasn't what she expected. Parents thought the problem was mental load. The real problem was power struggles. A seven-year-old dragging their feet isn't disorganized, they're exerting the only control they have. Solve for the kid's independence, not just the parent's chaos, and you have a product people don't cancel.

That insight took two years to find. Most founders would have skipped it.

Hearth went on to raise $10M and do what most hardware companies need $40M to accomplish. They ran on pre-orders for three years before shipping a single unit. Their first major investor said no, watched them hit every milestone on a fraction of the budget they'd asked for, then came back.

Three things from the conversation worth taking with you:

Deep customer research before launch is the most underrated moat in consumer. Two years of conversations before a line of code. The founders who skip this step don't find out what they missed until it's expensive.

You can build hardware on a software budget, but only if the pre-order validation is real. Hearth didn't use pre-orders as a marketing tactic. They used them as a three-year proof-of-demand before committing to manufacturing. That sequencing is everything.

The neurodivergent community found Hearth before Hearth found them. That signal, an unplanned, high-retention customer cohort self-selecting into the product, is the kind of thing most founders miss because they're not paying attention to who's actually buying.

The family operating system was always going to exist. The only question was who was going to build it. Mei Lin spent two years making sure it was going to be her.

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Design-led DTC brand with a category-defining hero SKU, distinctive brand IP, and a loyal repeat customer base.

~$6M revenue. Premium positioning. Real brand. Not yet consistently profitable.
~80% DTC; rest across Amazon, marketplaces, and growing B2B/corporate gifting Strong organic community + cross-category collabs

Needs the right owner to either: scale paid + creative, or rebuild wholesale with discipline

Strong fit for:
Outdoor / lifestyle / travel strategics seeking design IP and a real brand
Accessories platforms looking to add a premium technical brand with omnichannel optionality

US honey production just hit an 86-year low. 116 million pounds in 2025. Down 14% from 2024. The lowest since records began in 1939.

Meanwhile, Americans consume 400 million pounds of honey every year.

The US was already producing less than 30% of its own honey before the collapse. The rest comes from Argentina, Brazil, India, and China, now subject to tariffs of 20–27%. And demand isn't slowing. It's accelerating.

US retail honey sales hit $1.1B in 2024. Raw honey up 7.6%. Organic honey up 9.1%. US restaurant menu incidence up 20% in four years. TikTok is running simultaneous viral formats, honey jelly, frozen honey, raw honeycomb, honey skincare. The MAHA movement has positioned honey as the pre-industrial, clean-label sweetener of the moment. Mike's Hot Honey built a $100M+ brand on it.

The supply side is worse than the headline suggests. Between summer 2024 and spring 2025, 1.7 million bee colonies died, 60%+ of US commercial beekeeping colonies. The worst die-off in recorded history. The cause isn't a bad weather year. Varroa mites, the primary parasite that destroys colonies, have developed resistance to amitraz, the miticide that commercial beekeepers have relied on for decades. There is no obvious replacement treatment in the short term.

Domestic production at historic lows. Import costs up 20–27% from tariffs. Consumer demand at an all-time high driven by wellness culture and social media virality.

The bees collapsed in 2025. Consumers and brands should expect to feel it in 2026. Any brand with honey as a core ingredient, or any retailer building a honey private label, needs to be modelling this into their COGS now, not after the next purchase order.

That’s it for this week.
If you liked this issue, forward to a friend who obsesses over brand strategy, capital flows, or exit timing.

In the Money – following the flow of capital in consumer

P.S. We love talking to brands interested in exiting in the next 3-18 months. If you know of any brands interested in exiting, or any firms trying to help port cos manage turnarounds, we'd love to share a POV.

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