Unilever just sold Welly, the colorful-bandage brand it bought in 2021, to Forward Consumer Partners, with founder Eric Ryan returning to the board.

A modest deal. But it's another data point in the biggest structural story in consumer right now: the great unbundling of Big CPG.

The Welly arc: launched April 2019 by Ryan, a serial CPG founder, as a Target exclusive. Fabric bandages in reusable tins (we're a repeat, happy customer). ~$10M in year one. 10,000+ doors by 2020. Unilever bought 51% in January 2021. And then, for five years, nothing. It never reached the scale to merit a mention in a Unilever filing or earnings call. A $20–30M brand inside a €60B company.

Look at what Unilever has done in 18 months: spun out ice cream as the Magnum Ice Cream Company, merged its entire Foods division with McCormick, sold its Latin American laundry businesses, offloaded 20+ beauty brands to Yellow Wood, and sold Dollar Shave Club (bought for $1B) for a fraction to Nexus. The same thing is happening at Kraft Heinz, Kellogg, Kellanova, J&J, Hormel. Every earnings call says "portfolio focus."

What it means for operators and buyers: the conglomerate roll-up era of 2015–2021 is being reversed, and the brands coming out are frequently healthy businesses that simply couldn't get attention inside the parent. A founder plus a focused fund can run Welly as a business again.

Expect a lot more of these. The divestiture cycle may produce some stunning deals, and the brands that fit the sub-$50M profile this newsletter lives in are exactly the ones a conglomerate is most eager to be rid of.

Bethany Menzel was a Vancouver influencer with a problem: sun-obsessed, in a city that barely gets any.

So in 2020 she launched Saltyface with two products designed to be used together, a Tanning Water for the face and Freckle Paint. Skincare that happens to tan. Last week, Gauge Capital, a mid-market PE firm, acquired Saltyface into the tanning platform it's been quietly building.

The sequence:
May 2023: Loving Tan from Australia, salon-grade, high-intensity, event-driven tanning.
July 2024: Coco & Eve, also Australian, Gen Z body-care-and-tan. Gauge paid $100M+ for a majority on ~$120M of revenue, growing 35%, profitable, no debt.
October 2026: Saltyface, skincare-coded face-tan for the clean-beauty consumer.

Three brands, three positionings, three customers, one shared back office and over-aching thesis. The category tailwind is the "skinification" of tanning, the move from a seasonal product to a year-round skincare step. Same shift we've watched in body care (Saltair), hair (Rōz), and now tan: a functional category being rebuilt as a daily ritual with skincare-grade positioning and pricing.

And it's the Welly story from the other side. While Unilever sheds the brands it can't focus on, a specialist PE fund is building the focused platform with a trend thesis.

Mikayla Nogueira worked the makeup counter at Ulta before she had 21M followers. Last week, her brand raised $15M a year after launch.

Nogueira built her audience the old-fashioned way for a new medium: applying makeup on camera for years. Tutorials, reviews, the unglamorous mechanics of making product work on a real face. The credibility isn't borrowed from fame, the fame was earned from the credibility. After last week's Outset post-mortem, that distinction is the whole game for a creator-led brand.

point of view launched in March 2025 with Ani Hadjinian as CEO (ex-Augustinus Bader, Bobbi Brown). The DTC launch did ~$1M in minutes. First-year revenue passed $20M. Then Sephora nationwide, with first-week sales 80% above Sephora's own forecast, the retailer with the best beauty data in the world underestimated the demand, because the demand lived on a feed it doesn't see.

Six weeks later: a $15M Series A led by Silas Capital, the creator-beauty specialist behind Bella Hadid's Orebella, Molly Sims' Yse Beauty, Makeup by Mario, Violette_FR.

The positioning is genuine white space. POV doesn't sell skincare and it doesn't sell makeup. It sells the step between them: skin prep. The thesis is that makeup performs better on properly prepped skin, so the products are engineered to grip. Drench It, Glaze It, Whip It, Drip It, Chill It, named like instructions from someone standing behind you at the mirror (or camera). Silas's partner called them "makeup-gripping solutions that address real white space."

The setup is as strong as this category gets: a founder whose authority is native to the product, an operator from the top of prestige beauty, a white-space positioning, and a capital partner who has produced this movie several times. Compare it to The Outset: a famous face with no feed, a nice moisturizer with no white space, a backer with the right machine and the wrong ingredient.

Andrew Faris runs a growth agency with a waiting list. His advice to most brands: don't hire one. Manage your own ads.

The line he draws is $50K a month in ad spend. Below that, the agency math simply doesn't work and he'll show you why. An agency needs to charge roughly $5K a month minimum to function. Below $50K in spend, that fee either eats your margin or forces the agency to spread its attention so thin the service is bad. Either you pay more than your stage can afford, or you get a crappy service. There's no third option.

The uncomfortable part: the median Shopify business spends well under $50K a month. The median Shopify Plus business probably does too. Which means almost everyone reading this should be managing their own ads, and almost certainly 90% of them aren't.

Andrew's deeper argument is about ownership, and it's the reason this episode belongs in this issue. Meta is probably the largest single line item on your P&L. It is your responsibility as the owner to understand deeply how that money moves through your business. The agency carousel, "this agency didn't work, that agency didn't work", is what happens to founders who never developed a first-principles point of view on their biggest expense. Listen to the manual-bids argument. Listen to whoever hates manual bids. Test both in your own account. Develop a view. Then, when you're big enough that the math works, you'll actually know whether your agency is good.

Even at scale he turns people away. A brand doing $18–20M in revenue hit his inbox this week but with half the business in retail and Amazon, their spend was low enough that he told them the fee would be hard to justify. He knew he'd improve the account. He still wasn't sure they should pay him.

Three things from the conversation worth taking with you:

The full BFCM playbook: with five weeks to go, this is the practical part of the episode. What to set up now, what to stop doing, and where most brands blow the margin.

What separates his top-quartile clients from the bottom. It isn't creative volume or budget. It's whether the founder understands the account well enough to make the agency better.

Brand is not the brand book. The same distinction Rick Desai drew a few weeks ago from the investor side, now from the person spending the money.

The best agencies know exactly who shouldn't hire them. That's how you know they're worth hiring.

🎧 Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify.

Quick ask: do you manage your own ads, or use an agency? One word: "own" or "agency", hit reply. After Andrew's episode, I'm curious how this list splits.

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