Stanford dorm room to billion-dollar exit in 32 months. Not in tech. In CPG.

Grüns was founded in August 2023. Unilever just acquired it for $1.2B. Huel exited at 3.4x revenue. Liquid I.V. at 2.6x. Dr. Squatch at 3x. Grüns was tracking $300M in annualized revenue at the time of the deal.

The timeline:

Month 1: First sales through the website. Pre-seed from Stanford classmates.
Month 6: $6M seed round from Vanterra, SugarCap, and Selva.
Month 14: Profitable.
Month 21: $100M run rate, online only. $35M Series B led by Headline at a $500M valuation.
Month 24: Retail explosion. 6,300 doors; all 1,900 Targets, 3,500 Walmarts, every Sam's Club.
Month 32: Acquired by Unilever.

The product is 8 gummy bears. 60 whole-food-derived ingredients. $80 for a 28-day supply. 95% of customers use it 4–6 times per week. 80% use it daily.

But the product story is almost secondary to the founder story. Chad Janis was a VC before building Grüns, board observer at Chubbies, Brooklinen, and Dr. Squatch. He watched the Dr. Squatch exit from the inside. He knew exactly what Unilever buys, at what stage, and at what multiple. Unilever already owns Liquid I.V., Nutrafol, and SmartyPants. They aren't buying a gummy supplement. They're buying the leading greens brand in retail and on Amazon, built in two years, with 80% daily compliance and a DTC subscription engine most legacy brands could never replicate.

Chad recognized the acquisition case before he made his first sale. The category, the compliance mechanics, the retail sequencing, the DTC subscription layer, every decision mapped to what a strategic acquirer would pay up for.

The product Chad was really building was the investment thesis. The gummies were how he proved it.

Chewy has 20 million active customers. They already know what your pet eats, what medications it takes, and when it last ordered flea treatment. The missing piece was the clinical relationship, the vet.

Food is a commodity. Amazon, Walmart, and Chewy fight for the same margin on the same SKUs. But veterinary care is a $40B market growing at 5% annually, almost entirely cash-pay, with almost no brand loyalty at the platform level. Pet owners are loyal to their vet. Not to the company behind the vet.

Modern Animal is the clinical layer Chewy couldn't build fast enough internally. App-only booking. No reception desks. QR code check-in. Glass-walled treatment rooms. 24/7 virtual triage. A $199 annual membership that generates $1,660 in average annual spend.

That $199 to $1,660 gap is the whole thesis. The membership is the acquisition channel for everything that follows, visits, diagnostics, procedures, pharmacy. Once you own the clinical relationship, the commercial relationship compounds around it.

Chewy recognized that gap, recognized it couldn't close it organically fast enough, and paid $125M for a platform doing $100M run rate on 85% year-on-year growth, with mature locations already running at twice the industry average revenue per location and 20%+ EBITDA margins. The deal takes Chewy Vet Care from 18 to 47 locations overnight.

Founder Steven Eidelman sold his first pet company to Mars for $119M, raised $210M+ for Modern Animal, and raised a $46M Series D just six months before the acquisition. Six months later: acquired by the largest pure-play pet company in the US.

The model was proven. Chewy's job is to scale it. That's a very different, and much lower-risk, bet than building it from scratch.

Most people are writing the Blank Street story as a Gen Z coffee moment. Matcha. TikTok. Influencers. That's the surface.

The real story started in Asia a decade ago, and Blank Street's founders recognized it before almost anyone in the US or UK did.

Hey Tea launched in China in 2012. Premium drinks, small storefronts, accessible prices. No lounge. No atmosphere. Just a product and a queue. By 2024: $800M in revenue, 4,300 locations, 150 million members.

Mixue took the model to its extreme, ice cream and bubble tea priced between $0.60 and $1.40, franchise-driven, high volume. Listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in March 2025. Revenue: $2B in the first half of 2025 alone. Net profit: $381M. Market cap: ~$19B.

Luckin rebuilt its entire operation around the same insight after its accounting scandal: 31,000 stores, pickup only, app mandatory, no cash, no counter ordering. A coffee business that runs like software.

The pattern across all of them: remove the seat, remove the barista theatre, remove the lease premium that comes with a room people want to sit in. Replace it with speed, digital ordering, and a product good enough to create daily habit.

Blank Street imported that model to New York, then London, Boston, DC, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow. Under 350 square feet per location. Opening cost $60–75K versus $350–500K for a Starbucks. $149M in revenue in 2025. Group profitable. Now reportedly raising $100M at a ~$1B valuation.

The founders didn't invent this. They recognized it, believed it would translate to Western markets before the evidence existed, and moved fast enough to build a defensible position before anyone else arrived.

Starbucks invented the third place. A generation of Asian beverage brands quietly made it irrelevant. Blank Street was paying attention when most Western operators weren't.

Stantt launched with zero finished goods inventory. Made to order. Custom fit. No warehouse risk. The anti-DTC playbook before anyone called it that.

Then they tried to sell custom shirts online and discovered that guys don't do homework before buying clothes. A fit quiz, measurements, fabric choices, button decisions. Conversion was brutal. The DTC dream quietly died.

So Kirk Keel took the product to a flea market in Chelsea Market instead.

Within a week, something changed. Guys touched the fabric, tried on the fit, talked through the options with someone standing next to them. They bought. They came back. They told their friends. Kirk recognized what that meant, not a quirky origin story, but actual signal about how the product needed to be sold. That recognition turned into Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, and Dillard's, and a decade of wholesale-first growth that most DTC founders would never have chosen on purpose.

Now they've come full circle. Meta is working. DTC is working. AI-assisted campaigns, better product pages, photography that finally looks like the brand deserves to be there. Ten years of wholesale credibility, now being leveraged online.

Kirk joined me on In The Money this week. Three things worth taking with you:

Price for wholesale before you need it. Most founders discover too late that their margin structure can't survive a retail relationship. Build the wholesale economics in from day one, even if you're DTC-only right now.

Sell-through is the only metric that matters in retail. Not the PO. Not the door count. Whether the product moves off the shelf. Everything else is noise until that's proven.

DTC worked once the brand deserved to be there. It wasn't a growth hack that unlocked online. It was a decade of wholesale credibility, better creative, and a customer who'd already been sold by physical retail.

The flea market wasn't an accident. It was data. The founders who win are the ones who recognize it as such — and follow it wherever it leads.

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Deal Alert: Emerging clean skincare brand exploring strategic options.

Founder built a clean skincare brand the right way, got into national retail, hit $1.7M in year one, got selected for a major accelerator program, then chose to slow down and strengthen the foundation before scaling.

Highlights:
- $1.7M revenue generated in its first 12 months of national retail presence
- Modern “clean clinical” positioning targeting Gen Z / Millennial consumers
- 2,000+ five-star reviews and growing DTC audience with ~18K+ newsletter subscribers
- Existing national retail validation with a leading grocery retailer (100+ doors)
- The brand was selected for a major national retailer’s emerging brand accelerator and demonstrated strong early sell-through in a highly competitive category. Management later paused the retail rollout to focus on building brand awareness and DTC traction before re-entering retail from a position of strength.

Seller wants a soft landing with the right operator.

Email: fan [at] thehedgehogcompany.com

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.

fan [at] thehedgehogcompany.com