Alo reportedly did ~$3B of revenue and ~$1B of EBITDA in 2025. Still overwhelmingly founder-owned.

Childhood friends Danny Harris and Marco DeGeorge built a screen-printing business in 1992 that became Bella+Canvas, a wholesale blank t-shirt supplier selling to printers, and scaled it to $1B+ in revenue. The least glamorous business in apparel. That commodity cash cow self-funded Alo through every stage a venture-backed brand would have raised for.

2007–2015: niche wholesale, selling to yoga studios, high-end gyms, and boutiques.
2016: first Beverly Hills store, the shift toward DTC, experiential retail, and lifestyle.
2019: ~$150M as the celebrity gifting engine kicks in.
2020: ~$200M on pandemic loungewear.
2022: past $1B.
2025: Puck reports $3B of revenue and $1B of EBITDA.

The strategic read: Alo didn't displace Lululemon by competing on technical workout gear. It went straight for high-end lifestyle and cultural clout, Hailey Bieber, the Hadids, the Jenners, an "Alosphere" of yacht trips, VIP-only gyms, and an Atelier luxury line. It turned activewear into a luxury flex. It's the Movement Class thesis I've written about with On and HYROX, executed earlier and more completely than anyone: wellness as status, sold at luxury margins.

Two things to watch. In 2023 they hired Moelis to sell a stake at $10B. It didn't trade. And UK challenger Adanola is now running the same playbook at half the price, growing 40% in the US. The question for the next five years: can Alo defend a brand moat built on cultural clout, or does "quiet luxury athleisure" become one more crowded category where the challengers at half price win?

A daily dose of SmartyPants Kids vitamins has 5g of sugar, about as much as two Hershey's Kisses.

Alice Li built First Day to fix that. Last week, after scaling the business past $100M in revenue on under $1M of outside funding, she completed a strategic deal with PE firm Paine Schwartz Partners.

2017–2019: Li and co-founder Andy Wang spend two years developing the hero SKU, a kids' multivitamin with ~2g of sugar, no dyes, color from fruit and vegetable juice, up to 75% less sugar than the incumbents, backed by clinical studies. They raise ~$1M from friends and angels. That's essentially all the outside capital for seven years.

2019–2021: the launch is brutal. Thousands a day on Facebook, poor early returns, Li putting her savings in, thinking about quitting, worrying about a $200K inventory PO. The DTC subscription eventually gets to 70,000 families and the cohort math kicks in. (Michael Robinov at Farm to People told the same story three weeks ago: the cohorts tell you whether to keep going. Li's did.)

2022–2025: expansion across the household, teens, women, men, plus magnesium, a 3-in-1 pre-, pro-, and postbiotic, brain support. Revenue hits nine figures. 1M+ families.

December 2025: after years of turning retailers down, First Day launches at Target with a dedicated endcap and exclusive flavors.

October 2026: Paine Schwartz.

No price disclosed, but the comp is Hiya: founded 2020, sugar-free chewable, one SKU for two and a half years, subscription-first, DTC until Target in 2026. At $103M in sales growing 50% with $22M EBITDA, USANA paid $205M for 78.8% in late 2024, a $260M valuation, ~2.5x sales, ~12x EBITDA, founders keep 21%. If First Day priced anywhere near that, it's an incredible outcome for a business built on less than $1M of outside capital.

This category, clean kids' supplements with a million-family subscription base, is exactly what Unilever bought with SmartyPants and what Big CPG claims it wants. That it went to PE instead is another data point for the unbundling story: Big CPG is buying at $500M+ scale, or selling, and the specialists are stepping in.

The chicken-in-a-chip brand just raised $40M from S2G Investments, the food and ag fund backed by Lukas Walton, with Machine Gun Kelly and Jack Harlow participating. The chip is chicken breast, egg whites, and bone broth, no potato, no grain, crisped through a proprietary process into something that eats like a Lay's with 10+ grams of protein a serving. Flavors run indulgent on purpose: Buffalo, Nashville Hot Chicken, Chicken & Waffles, Spicy Queso.

In Jason Wright's own words: "Building Wilde has never been easy."

2015: launches as a meat bar. It flops. Starts working on the potato-less chip.
2018: three years into developing a patent-pending machine, "the crisper."
2019: can't get the quality he wants from a co-manufacturer, so builds a $10M plant on equipment debt.
2022 onward: revenue doubles every year. Costco alone does $50M.

Now: $100M+ in sales. 35,000+ doors across Costco, Walmart, Target, Kroger, 7-Eleven. Just entered the cracker aisle with a 12g-protein cracker. And opened a 130,000 sq ft owned facility in Kentucky this year that increases capacity 6x.

Two things make this more than a protein-snack story. First, the plant. Owning manufacturing is usually a margin trap, Austin makes exactly that argument on The Deal Desk (below), but WILDE is the exception that proves the rule: when the product is a proprietary process, the plant is the moat, not a cost center. Nobody can co-man a chip that needs a machine only you've built.

Second, the macro. The proteinmaxxing wave has driven whey and beef prices to historic highs, I wrote about the whey supply shock. Chicken input costs have stayed far more stable.

New series. The Deal Desk is a recurring In The Money format, to break down the deals that mattered over the last few weeks. This week my co-host is Austin Gardner-Smith, CEO of Drivepoint, the AI finance platform for consumer brands.

Austin's opening argument is the one that reframes the WILDE story: owning your own factory sounds like an instant eight points of gross margin. He thinks it's usually a trap, strategic acquirers typically give you zero credit for owning a plant, and the capital and complexity rarely pay back.

What we cover:

Quick ask: did you enjoy Deal Desk?

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