Over the weekend, Shein officially acquired Everlane for $100M.

Somewhat ironic: the sustainability-oriented "Radical Transparency" brand, sold to the king of ultra-fast fashion. The transaction essentially covers Everlane's $90M debt load. Holders of equity get nothing.

Everlane was founded in 2011 on a thesis of breaking traditional retail markups. It raised $100M+ in equity, including from L Catterton in 2020 when the brand was doing ~$200M in revenue. Revenue in 2025: ~$170M. Lower than when L Catterton invested. The story ran in reverse.

The wrong take, and it's already appearing, is "The Death of DTC." The right take is narrower and more specific: apparel is a structurally unforgiving category. Grüns just went from launch to a $1.2B Unilever acquisition in 30 months on DTC subscriptions. Huel crossed $350M in revenue and sold to Danone for $1.15B driven by world-class digital execution. The DTC distribution model isn't broken. The apparel DTC model has a problem that has nothing to do with distribution.

You don't subscribe to a t-shirt brand. Loyalty has to be re-earned every single season. The moment the story stops feeling fresh, or a better one arrives, the customer leaves. Everlane's thesis was radical transparency. That felt genuinely novel in 2012. By 2020 it was a marketing category. By 2025 it was furniture.

Everlane built one of the great brand moments of the last decade. The market priced it accordingly for years. Then the moment passed, and the business underneath it wasn't enough.

L Catterton paid $680M to take Thorne private in October 2023. Less than three years later, they're exploring a sale at $4B, nearly 6x entry price.

When Thorne was public, the market treated it like a commodity vitamin company. No value assigned to the clinical credibility. No premium for 42 years of trust with healthcare professionals. No multiple for the 47,000+ clinicians and 100+ professional sports teams that relied on the brand. That was the misread. L Catterton came in at a 94% premium to market price and called it explicitly what it was: a public market misprint.

At acquisition, Thorne's revenue mix was 60% B2B, healthcare professionals and retail. L Catterton went the other direction. DTC consumers: 4M at acquisition, now 7M. A 63% surge. Most DTC brands at this scale are burning out on CAC and retreating. Thorne didn't, because they have something most DTC brands never build: 42 years of clinical credibility that makes customer acquisition structurally cheaper and retention structurally higher.

The macro tailwind arrived on cue. The MAHA movement and Gen Z's obsession with preventative health hit at exactly the right moment. Revenue at acquisition: ~$300M. Revenue in 2025: $500M+. 2026 target: $650M.

For exit comps: Nutrafol, which L Catterton also scaled, sold to Unilever at 10x+. Nestlé Health Science bought Persona, another L Catterton wellness brand. At $4B, Thorne is being priced at ~6x revenue. That's a software-adjacent multiple for a supplement business, and the argument for it is the same as it was at acquisition: the clinical credibility moat is real, durable, and was never correctly priced by the public market.

L Catterton saw the misread in 2023. The sale process in 2026 is them collecting on it.

One of the most undertold stories in CPG right now.

Maya Smith opened a salon in Germany in 2011 with €5,000. Her husband Brian was a US Air Force veteran on military assignment. There were no curly hair services for the military community overseas, so she built one. That salon became a product formulation. The product formulation became a mass retail brand.

Last month, VMG announced a minority buyout at $38M in revenue and $7.3M in EBITDA. Zero institutional equity raised before this deal.

2011: Salon opens in Germany. Product formulations begin. 2017: Returns to the US. Target nationwide. 2019: Walmart. CVS. Walgreens. Boots. Superdrug.

Maya described the journey plainly: "We were able to just keep the brand healthy long enough to be able to pursue looking to do some fundraising."

Keep the brand healthy long enough. That's the whole strategy. Not a viral moment. Not a celebrity partnership. Not a category-defining narrative. Just execution, season after season, for fifteen years, until the business was worth acquiring on its own terms.

VMG's recent track record maps directly: Drunk Elephant to Shiseido, Briogeo to Wella. Both community-driven, retail-proven. The Doux fits the pattern exactly. Textured haircare has been called niche for decades, despite representing one of the most loyal, high-spending consumer bases in beauty. The market got that wrong too. Maya just had to wait long enough for it to get it right.

Every investor claims their value add is real. Most of the time, it isn't.

Brian Bernstein has heard every version of the corporate VC horror story. Deals dying in committee. Parent companies becoming de facto competitors. IP getting absorbed. Strategic agendas quietly overriding founder independence. He doesn't argue with any of it. Most of it happened.

Rich Products Ventures is trying to do it differently and the case starts with one structural fact: they invest off the balance sheet. No LPs. No three-to-five year return windows. No pressure to manufacture exits that aren't ready.

But the more interesting argument isn't the capital structure. It's the infrastructure behind it. Rich's is an 80-year-old food company. Over 95% frozen. Dozens of manufacturing plants. Cold chain expertise that took decades to build. Food service and retail distribution across 110 countries, including colleges, universities, and institutional channels that most big CPG companies have never touched. When Brian says they can plug a portfolio company into that infrastructure, he means it literally. Not a phone number handoff. Sitting on the calls. Following up. Making it work.

Three things from the conversation worth taking with you:

Patient capital changes the decisions you make. No LP pressure, no forced exit timeline. The brands that need time to compound, The Doux just proved what fifteen years of patience looks like, need investors whose structure matches that timeline.

The freezer aisle is having its most exciting moment in decades. Premium frozen is one of the least crowded white spaces in consumer right now. The consumer who buys $15 olive oil and $40 supplements hasn't been given a reason to upgrade their frozen choices yet. That's changing.

The ones worth taking money from will tell you exactly what they can't do. Brian's version of this is unusually direct. If you're a brand that needs broad consumer marketing support or a large field sales force, Rich Products isn't the right partner. That honesty is the tell.

Not every corporate VC is the same. The ones worth talking to lead with their constraints, not just their assets.

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Most DTC deals crossing my desk right now are turnarounds dressed up as growth stories. This one is the opposite.

The team made the hard call to pull back on paid acquisition until the unit economics worked. Now they do. What's left is a profitable, recurring-revenue business with obvious expansion paths (cat segment, cross-sell, retail, product adjacencies) and no operational fires to put out.

Reach out if you'd like the teaser.

Email: [email protected]

In 2019, more than 90% of American men said they never wear makeup. By 2024 that number had fallen to 75%. 68% of Gen Z men used facial skincare products in 2024, up from 42% just two years earlier. Sephora's tinted moisturizer sales for men up 65% in a single year.

And there's still no dominant men's makeup brand.

The framing shift is what made this possible. Concealer isn't vanity, it's looking rested in the 8am Zoom call. Tinted moisturizer isn't self-expression, it's looking like the best version of yourself on camera. The same Gen Z man optimizing his sleep with an Oura Ring, his nutrition with AG1, and his recovery with a HYROX training protocol is now optimizing his appearance. Self-improvement, not beauty. That reframe changed everything.

TikTok did the distribution work. Looksmaxxing, the practice of systematically maximizing your physical appearance, migrated from niche internet forums to mainstream Gen Z culture. Not as a stigma. As a performance optimization framework. The same logic as biohacking, applied to how you look.

The K-beauty precedent tells you where this goes. South Korea ran this adoption curve a decade ago. BTS normalized skincare and subtle makeup for men across Asia. Today Asia is 38.6% of the global men's makeup market. The US is following the same curve, roughly ten years behind.

The numbers: $7.1B in men's grooming overall in the US. The makeup subcategory: $1.8B globally in 2025, projected $4.2B by 2034, growing at nearly 10% annually. Sam Kaplan at Five Seasons Ventures flagged it on a recent episode as a category he's actively watching.

The skincare gateway accelerates the timeline. Once a man is already moisturizing, exfoliating, and wearing SPF, adding concealer doesn't feel like crossing a line. It feels like the next logical step in a routine he already has.

Nobody has built the Dollar Shave Club of men's makeup. Nobody has built the Hims of complexion. A modern DTC-first brand with a clear identity, performance-first positioning, and a distribution strategy built for how Gen Z actually shops.

The category has been unlocked. The brand hasn't been built yet. Who does it?

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.

Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/fanbi/