40% of all wellness sales at Ulta Beauty come from one brand. It's a Kardashian's.

Lemme, Kourtney Kardashian's supplement brand, is now the leading wellness brand at the largest beauty retailer in America. Four years in: Kroger nationwide, Target nationwide, Walmart in 2,000 doors, a recent Starface collab, a [solidcore] partnership, and a creatine launch that's already the bestseller. The affiliate machine is 13,000+ creators generating 53,000 videos; TikTok Shop alone did $13M in November 2025.

When I wrote about Khloud a few months ago, I noted Lemme was tracking $200M and quietly becoming the Kardashian brand with the best retail fundamentals. What's now clear is why. And it's a product-development insight, not a celebrity one.

Every launch debuts on Kourtney's feed first. 200M+ followers see it before a single retail buyer does. That feed is the cheapest, fastest signal in consumer for learning product depth: which SKUs convert, which get reordered, which the creators pick up unprompted. Then the winners go to Target, Walmart, and Ulta with the demand already proven. It inverts the traditional CPG sequence of retail test, then marketing, and it's why the release cadence can be so aggressive.

The cadence: Matcha, Chill, and Focus at launch. Then Debloat and Sleep. Then Purr and Play, normalizing vaginal and sexual health, a category legacy supplement brands wouldn't touch. Then a GLP-1-adjacent metabolic gummy. Now creatine for women and NAD+ longevity capsules. Read that list against the wellness trends this newsletter has covered in the past year; GLP-1 wallet migration, the creatine boom, the shift to measurable longevity, and Lemme has launched into every one of them within months of the trend surfacing. That's Caraway's rolling-thunder calendar applied to supplements, with a 200M-person focus group running for free.

Who doesn't want to feel like a cook at The Bear? Yes, chef. Graza turned that feeling into a sale process targeting $450–600M.

The timeline: January 2022: Andrew Benin launches Graza DTC with two SKUs, Drizzle and Sizzle. Six months of inventory sells out in a day. Whole Foods calls immediately. By year-end: $4M+ in sales, Whole Foods nationwide, and ~$3M raised, the only outside capital the business would ever take.

2023: $19M. Target, Costco, Wegmans, Walmart. Copycats flood the market (a squeeze bottle is not a patent). 2024: $48M. Frizzle, the high-heat oil, launches. ~5,500 doors. 2025: sales triple, doors double to ~11,000, fifth-largest national olive oil brand. Graza launches wine, because customers were gifting Graza instead of wine. 2026: 28,000+ retail doors, and Lazard is hired to run a process on ~$200M of revenue and ~$30M of EBITDA.

Two things worth pulling out. First, the copycats didn't matter. The form factor was easy to copy. The brand that made the form factor mean something; the squeeze, the green bottle, the "yes, chef" energy on a kitchen counter, wasn't easy to copy. Design and identity turned a commodity container into a signal, and the copycats were selling a container.

Second, the comp. Grüns took a form-factor innovation (greens as gummies) to a $1.2B exit at Unilever. Graza is taking the squeeze bottle to the same destination on a similar playbook: one product insight, mass retail velocity, minimal capital, strategic exit. The through-line from both: in CPG, the format innovation is the on-ramp, and the brand is the moat. And $3M of total capital against a $600M target is one of the most efficient stories of the cycle.

In 2019, a Chinese sportswear company most people couldn't name, Anta, led a €4.6B buyout of a struggling Finnish conglomerate. The consensus read: they overpaid for a bag of tired brands. Some called it sportswashing. The brands were Arc'teryx, Salomon, and Wilson.

Last week, Salomon told investors it will pass $2.5B in revenue this year, headed to $3B by 2028. It grew 35% in 2025. Forty percent of sales are now "Sportstyle", the trail-running shoe as fashion sneaker.

The signal was visible a decade ago if you knew where to look. The XT-6 was a 2013 shoe built for 100-mile ultramarathons. By 2014–16 it was sitting in The Broken Arm, a Paris concept store. Then avant-garde designer Boris Bidjan Saberi. London skate brand Palace. Comme des Garçons, MM6 Margiela, Sandy Liang in New York. A decade of deliberate placement with people who set taste rather than follow it. Then gorpcore, wearing genuinely technical outdoor gear as urban fashion, Salomon trail runners with tailored trousers, made it mainstream.

This is the Onitsuka Tiger and On story from the other direction. Those brands run luxury economics inside sneaker companies. Salomon ran a luxury distribution playbook; scarcity, taste-makers, collaborations, on a product built for function, and the fashion premium followed. Technical credibility is the one thing a fashion brand can't fake, which is why the crossover works in this direction and rarely the reverse.

The owner, Amer Sports, IPO'd at ~$6.4B in 2024 and now sits at ~$15.4B, even with the stock down 20% in a year on 30% group growth, in a market that's been bruising sportswear across the board (see: Nike, in the last issue). A Chinese consortium nobody took seriously turned technical performance into luxury-adjacent fashion, and the people who called it sportswashing were looking at the balance sheet instead of the shoe.

$1.4 million in revenue. Three years in a row.

Michael Robinov dropped out of NYU to build Farm to People, paid himself $20K a year, and funded holiday inventory on zero-APR credit cards. At the end of 2019 he gave himself an ultimatum: if 2020 doesn't work, I made a mistake. Then the pandemic hit, and his modern CSA grew from 500 to 2,500 weekly customers, refrigerated by shipping containers he was bidding on against hospitals.

The part worth studying is 2021. Suddenly profitable, Michael made two bets at once, a new Bushwick warehouse and custom technology. Both cost double his projections. Three things had to land back-to-back for the company to survive: a Stripe Capital offer he clicked on against his dad's advice, a B2B check that arrived the same week, and a family bridge loan.

Staring into that darkness, the question was the one every founder in the doldrums faces: keep going, or stop? Here's what made the difference, and it's the thing I keep coming back to on the pod.

Customers kept reordering. The retention was real. The gross margins were improving. The engine wasn't broken. It just wasn't fueled yet. That is a completely different situation from grinding on a business with no retention and upside-down unit economics. Grit on top of good fundamentals is how you get a Farm to People, mid-eight figures today, growing nearly 100% year over year, a $5M round led by New Fare Partners, and a New York Times feature announcing it after thirteen years bootstrapped.

Grit on top of broken fundamentals is just banging your head against the wall. And when you bang your head against the wall long enough, you don't get a breakthrough. You get brain damage.

This is, incidentally, the first question I ask in every distressed situation: is the engine broken, or unfueled? A brand with real retention and a bad capital structure is fixable. A brand with great capital and no retention isn't. The cohorts tell you which one you have. Michael's told him to keep going.

🎧 Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify.

You almost never see this: a venture-backed consumer brand exiting to mid-market private equity.

Clio Snacks just sold to Stride Consumer Partners for $150M+ as a near-$100M revenue, ~$15M EBITDA business.

Why it's rare: early-stage consumer brands almost always have two exits, a strategic buys the brand, or the brand dies. Mid-market PE underwrites EBITDA, typically $10M+, and venture-backed brands are built to chase revenue, not profit. Even when a brand gets there, the preference stack from years of priced rounds often makes an EBITDA-multiple price feel like a loss to the cap table. Clio threaded all three needles: it got to real EBITDA, the number was underwritable, and the ~$40M raised from Alliance Consumer Growth and AF Ventures was modest enough that a $150M+ exit clears everyone.

The origin is the kind of story this category produces at its best. In 2015, Sergey Konchakovskiy leaves open Greek yogurt in the fridge overnight, sees it set to a cheesecake texture, and is reminded of sirok, the chocolate-covered cheese bars of his Ukrainian childhood. He dips it in dark chocolate. The refrigerated Greek yogurt bar is born.

The operating inflection came in 2021 with CEO John McGuckin. Revenue quadrupled over the following years, ~$36M by 2023, with one of the biggest drivers being something unglamorous and decisive: convincing retailers to carve out a new location in the refrigerated case.

The detail that makes the deal legible: the Stride partner leading it also led the 2017 buyout of Yasso, the frozen Greek yogurt bar, which sold to Unilever in 2023 for $700M+. Same category logic, same buyer, same playbook, second time through. Mid-market PE with a strategic exit already proven is the bridge venture-backed consumer brands have been missing. Watch for more of them.

Alongside the content, my firm runs restructuring and M&A mandates for consumer brands, and occasionally one is a fit for the operators and acquirers on this list. This mandate is live.

The business: Direct-to-consumer wellness hardware brand selling through its own online stores, with the US as the primary market (~70% of sales) and a presence in three other English-speaking markets. 4.5-star rating from 1,000+ verified reviews. Institutional credibility including equipment supply to a major international sporting event this year.

The numbers: First sales in 2023. ~US$16M revenue in 2025 with ~US$3.6M net profit, profitable every year since launch. 2026 forecast slightly below on revenue with a profit step-down reflecting investment in team, higher freight costs, and tariffs.

Why it's interesting:

Strong fits: home wellness and fitness equipment operators, DTC brands with Amazon and retail infrastructure looking for a profitable category entry, and consumer platforms building in longevity and recovery.

Serious buyers only. Email me at [email protected] with a line on who you are and what you're looking for, and I'll share the teaser.

Quick ask: Who should I have on the pod next? One name, hit reply; founder, operator, or investor. I book from this list.

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