Allbirds raised ~$350M, peaked at a $4.6B valuation, and sold for $39M earlier this year. It almost single-handedly closed VC funding for footwear brands. BRUNT Workwear is about to reopen it.

Built for the 17 million tradespeople in construction, installation, maintenance, and repair across the US, a consumer the challenger brand wave has largely ignored. Founder Eric Girouard spoke to them directly, raised $44M from Stripes (the fund behind On Running, Reformation, and Erewhon), scaled to ~$250M in revenue, and is now exploring a sale at a $1B+ valuation.

The white space wasn't a new product category. It was a customer who had been buying workwear from legacy incumbents for decades because no one had bothered to build something specifically for them. The trades consumer is loyal, functional-purchase driven, and largely untouched by the DTC playbook that redefined every adjacent category in the last decade.

There's a broader cultural tailwind underneath the financials. Carhartt went from workwear to streetwear to luxury resale. Dickies appears in Supreme collaborations. Timberland boots are fashion. That cultural crossover is exactly what drives the strategic interest. VF Corporation needs a contemporary workwear challenger alongside Timberland and Dickies. Wolverine World Wide is watching its legacy workwear starve for digital community. Deckers, the powerhouse behind Hoka and UGG, knows exactly how to scale a hyper-focused category leader into a global lifestyle phenomenon.

The footwear category wasn't closed after Allbirds. It was waiting for the brand that found the right customer.

The protein bar category has a problem. It's almost entirely built for gym-goers and athlete identities, primarily male, primarily performance-focused. Half of the population ignored.

Stars + Honey just raised $24M from VMG to fix that.

Founded in 2023 by Daniel Rainey, bootstrapped until now, $50M projected in 2026. The product: collagen protein bars with 15g protein and under 200 calories. Grass-fed collagen peptides, non-gluten, non-dairy, no soy, no sugar alcohols, no seed oils.

But the format reframe is the real story. Most protein bars sell performance, macros, muscle, recovery. Stars + Honey is selling beauty: collagen for skin elasticity, hair health, and joint comfort. Same functional category. Completely different customer, completely different occasion, completely different shelf neighbor.

VMG has an exceptional track record in bars: backed Quest at seed (sold to Simply Good Foods for $1B+), backed Kind (sold to Mars for $5B), backed Perfect Bar (sold to Nestlé). Stars + Honey is in good company, and the white space it's targeting is one VMG clearly believes hasn't been properly addressed at scale.

The category wasn't saturated. The male-performance frame was saturated. The beauty-nutrition frame was wide open.

Peptide vendors received $32M in crypto payments in Q1 2026. Will surpass $100M in crypto volume for the year. That's how much product demand exists for anonymous gray market sellers, compounding pharmacies, and wellness clinics with minimal quality controls. Some China-based sellers pivoted directly from fentanyl distribution to peptides.

That's the market Feel Peptides just raised $3M to disrupt, led by Sugar Capital, early investor in Grüns.

The demand is driven by the same performance culture behind every other wellness trend this year. HYROX. Protein supplements. Biohacking. Looksmaxxing. The consumer is now experimenting with BPC-157 for gut healing, TB-500 for injury recovery, and ipamorelin for growth hormone release, paying with crypto because that's the only way to get it without a prescription.

The cannabis playbook is the template. Gray market. Crypto transactions. Anonymous sellers. Then regulatory normalization arrived, and the brands that had built compliance infrastructure, brand identity, and consumer trust before legalization captured the mainstream market. The brands that waited didn't.

The FDA placed restrictions on several popular peptides in 2023. RFK Jr.'s HHS is now explicitly reevaluating those restrictions, aligning with MAHA's philosophy of personal health sovereignty. The regulatory window is opening, and the brand that builds trust and compliance infrastructure before it does will own the category when it does.

$100M in gray market crypto volume is not a fringe signal. It's the demand curve of a mainstream category that doesn't have a mainstream brand yet.

Every electrolyte brand in the world launched with a citrus flavor. Then a berry. Then a watermelon. Then twelve more.

Joe Welstead looked at that and built Oshun with no flavor at all.

Not unflavored as a compromise. Unflavored as a strategy. Add it to anything, water, juice, coffee, hot or cold. No flavor fatigue. No SKU proliferation. No customer who doesn't like what you picked. A product that disappears into whatever you're already drinking and makes you feel better.

The pump dispenser was the same logic. Every competitor ships sachets and tubs because that's what supplement brands do. Joe looked at skincare and beauty instead. What lives on a bathroom counter? What do people use without thinking about it? What's frictionless enough to become a daily habit? A pump dispenser that sits on your kitchen counter and takes one hand to use. His wife was heavily pregnant when they tested the first sample, she could hold their toddler in one arm and use Oshun with the other. That was the test. If it passed that, it passed.

A friend tried it early on and told Joe he was thinking about the positioning all wrong. He wasn't selling electrolytes. He was selling clear skin and a clear mind, the feeling of being properly hydrated, not the minerals that get you there. That one conversation reframed the entire brand.

Three things from the conversation worth taking with you:

The answer to a crowded category is never another flavor. The white space in electrolytes wasn't a new formulation, it was a format nobody had tried because everyone was copying each other. Format is strategy.

Three months of real conversations before running a single ad made everything perform from day one. Customer research before creative spend isn't a delay, it's the reason the first dollar works instead of the tenth.

Skio's cancel flow has been the single biggest retention unlock of 2026. Worth hearing the specifics, the operational detail on what actually moves retention metrics is more useful than any strategic framework.

Joe runs Meta himself. No agency. Two co-founders, one product, profitable, growing, and turning down institutional investors because when you don't need the money, you get to be objective about what taking it actually means.

The category was full. The white space was hiding in the format.

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Something is happening at the top end of the wellness market.

The Portal just raised $5M to open its second location in Austin. $500/month membership. Invite-only. 15,000 sq ft with a rooftop pool, 30-person sauna, cold plunges, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, coworking, art gallery, podcast studio, and rooftop stage. It sold out its Marin membership before the physical space was finished.

It's not alone. Bathhouse: $41M raised from Imaginary Ventures, two 35,000 sq ft thermal wellness locations in NYC, expanding to LA, Chicago, Nashville. Remedy Place: $60M valuation, expanding to Boston. The Well: members-only wellness clinic combining Western medicine and Eastern wellness in NYC.

The pattern is the K-shaped economy playing out in physical space. Planet Fitness at $25/month is thriving. High-end private wellness clubs at $350–500/month are thriving. The middle is getting squeezed. The consumer driving the upper arm of the K is looking for something that didn't exist five years ago: a physical space that combines biohacking infrastructure, genuine community, intellectual programming, and social ritual, all in the same building.

The traditional third place was the coffee shop. The bar. The country club. The third place for the affluent 2026 consumer is somewhere you can do a cold plunge, have a meaningful conversation with a founder, take a movement class, eat well, and work for three hours without leaving.

The Soho House comparison is instructive, and worth being honest about. Soho House built the private members club for the creative class across 40 cities and has struggled to achieve consistent profitability despite enormous scale. The wellness club faces the same fundamental tension: the experience that justifies premium pricing requires expensive physical infrastructure that's hard to amortize across a membership base.

The demand is clearly real. The unit economics are the open question. Whether this becomes the Equinox of the 2030s or the Soho House of the 2020s is the most interesting bet in consumer experiential right now.

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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