Start with the number that matters most in this story, because it isn't the revenue.

General Catalyst's credit vehicle just committed $1B behind IM8's ad spend and retention cohorts. Credit funds don't underwrite hope. They underwrite math. For a lender to put ten figures behind a supplements brand's Meta and Google spend, the cohort data, payback periods, retention curves, contribution margin per customer, has to survive diligence that most DTC brands would fail. That commitment is the strongest third-party validation in consumer this quarter, and it barely made headlines.

The backstory makes it stranger. Danny Yeung's Prenetics rode COVID testing to $800M in revenue and a $1B Nasdaq listing in 2022. When testing died, the market cap collapsed to ~$50M, but the balance sheet still had cash. Most busted SPACs bleed out slowly. Yeung used the shell as a war chest, partnered with David Beckham, and launched IM8 Health in December 2024: one daily powder, positioned directly against AG1.

Nineteen months later: past a $200M run rate, tracking to $300M by year-end. The engine is performance marketing at a scale few operators can run, $150–200K per day across Meta and Google, roughly 1,500 live ads at any moment, every dollar of spend generating $1.44 in gross profit.

Two things I keep thinking about. First, the Grüns comp: IM8's revenue and growth curve tracks Grüns almost exactly, six months behind, and Grüns just exited to Unilever at $1.2B. If the pattern holds, IM8's current ~$350M market cap (up 158% in twelve months) is either a bargain or a bet on whether the cohorts hold at scale. Second, the model itself: this only works at full commitment. At half the spend with half the creative volume, the machine doesn't compound, it burns. The extreme is the strategy.

There's a detail buried in the Onitsuka Tiger spinout that tells you more than the growth numbers do: two years ago, the brand exited the US entirely. Closed every store. Shut the website. Demand wasn't the problem, Asics America was. The parent's US division saw Onitsuka Tiger as competition for its own sneakers, so one of the fastest-growing heritage brands in the world simply vanished from the largest consumer market on earth.

That's what being a line item in someone else's org chart costs you.

The history makes it poetic. In 1962, a Stanford MBA named Phil Knight flew to Kobe and convinced Onitsuka's executives to let him distribute Tigers in America. He sold them from the trunk of his Plymouth at track meets for nearly a decade. When the relationship collapsed in 1971, Knight took what he'd learned, and a silhouette that became the Cortez, and built Nike. Onitsuka Tiger has spent sixty-four years watching other people control its American story: first Knight's distribution, then Asics' internal politics.

Now it's spinning out as an independent company, and the numbers explain why the timing is now. 2025 sales of ~$850M, up more than 40%. 190 stores across 160 countries. Net margins around 40%, which is the stat worth pausing on. Nike's net margins run around 10–11%. Onitsuka Tiger is running at four times that, because it stopped competing as a sneaker company and started operating as a luxury house: Versace collaborations, a Champs-Élysées flagship, scarcity over volume.

The US relaunch is slated for 2027, the first time in the brand's history it will enter America on its own terms. Worth watching closely, both as a brand story and as a case study in what a subsidiary is worth once it's freed from a parent whose incentives don't match its own.

I spent a decade in tailored menswear, so forgive the indulgence but this is the deal I enjoyed digging into most all year.

Chanel just acquired Charvet, the world's oldest shirtmaker. Founded 1838, Place Vendôme, by the son of Napoleon's personal dresser. The client ledger reads like a history syllabus: Proust, Churchill, JFK, Saint Laurent, Lagerfeld.

Here's what makes Charvet nearly unique in modern luxury. For 187 years, the house said no to everything. No wholesale. No licensing. No second store. No line extensions. One boutique in Paris, 100 employees, 40 in the shop, 60 in a workshop in central France, shirts from €650 to over €4,000, and an obsessiveness that borders on the absurd: there is no "blue shirt" at Charvet. There are 500 blues.

The result of two centuries of refusing growth: an estimated €10–15M in annual revenue. On paper, a rounding error. In brand equity terms, arguably the most concentrated store of menswear credibility in existence.

Which is exactly what Chanel, nearly $20B in annual revenue, historically absent from serious menswear, is buying. And the terms of the deal are the most interesting part: Chanel has publicly committed to changing nothing. No expansion. No new doors. No growth plan. They also bought the Place Vendôme building itself, for a reported ~€100M, real estate as brand preservation.

Think about how rare that is. Nearly every acquisition thesis in luxury is "we'll take this jewel and scale it." Chanel's thesis is the opposite: the asset's value is its refusal to scale, and the buyer's job is to protect the refusal. It's the Jiro Dreams of Sushi model applied to M&A and it's only possible because the acquirer is private, patient, and doesn't answer to a quarterly earnings call.

My conversation with Tommy Flaim this week is really a story about two businesses and the distance between them is the whole lesson.

The first was an apparel brand. Objectively well executed: Lululemon designer, great quality, fair price. It went nowhere, and Tommy is unusually clear-eyed about why. It wasn't differentiated enough. The brand was too subtle. And it attacked athleisure. one of the most saturated categories in consumer, with no community, no cultural wave, and no answer to "why you over the dozen brands already here?" It was a good product stuck in the undefended middle.

Silly Pickles is the correction, applied ruthlessly. Tommy spotted the gap while bartending between startups: adult rec sports leagues run a broken format; round robins, fixed teams, nobody meets anyone new. He talked a Chicago bar owner into hosting a pickleball league, ran the whole thing on Excel, and watched the waitlist blow past a thousand players.

Two years later: 75 metro areas across the US, Canada, and Australia. $6M run rate on just $750K raised.

What stood out most from the conversation:

The unit of scale isn't the city, it's the local host. No national launch, no blitz. The right host turns a well-run event into a community people organize their week around. The wrong one turns it into a Tuesday activity people quietly stop attending. Quality control at Silly Pickles is fundamentally a people-selection problem, and Tommy has built the playbook around it.

Services businesses carry structural advantages CPG founders underestimate. No inventory risk. No cold chain. No retailer margin math. Revenue scales with community density, not working capital, which is why $750K of funding has gone so far.

The accidental asset: an IRL activation platform. Sixty-five thousand engaged members, happy, sweaty, and open to trying new things, has CPG brands coming inbound. Waterboy, an alcohol brand, an iced tea brand. For brands trying to escape the paid-media arms race, a trusted community at the moment of highest receptivity is a channel money struggles to buy.

The apparel brand taught him what the middle costs. Silly Pickles is what building at the edge looks like.

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If you've listened to more than a few episodes of In The Money, you've heard me return to the K-shaped economy; the top of the market accelerating, the bottom holding, the middle collapsing. McKinsey's new State of Grocery report is the clearest data yet that the same shape is now carving through CPG brands themselves. The squeeze is coming from three directions at once.

From below, private label has closed the credibility gap. 97% of grocers are increasing private label investment, and, the number that should genuinely worry mid-tier brands, 69% of shoppers now say private label is as innovative as branded goods. The historical mid-tier defense was "we're better than store brand." The shopper no longer agrees.

From above, the premium dollar is going function-first. 90% of grocers are expanding high-protein assortments, and the claims that win are getting surgically targeted: protein positioned for younger shoppers, low-sugar for older ones. Generic "better-for-you", the mid-tier brand's favorite premium costume, no longer clears the bar. The top shelf belongs to brands with a specific claim for a specific customer.

And the old escape hatch is bolted shut. High-low promo pricing, inflate the shelf price, discount hard, harvest the deal-seeker, was the mid-tier's traditional defense. 71% of shoppers now say clear, consistent pricing beats frequent discounts on inflated prices. The tactic designed to win the value shopper is being rejected by the value shopper.

Then the acceleration nobody expected this early: major grocers report that 20% of online orders already arrive as pre-assembled, algorithm-built baskets. Kroger and Sprouts have deployed Instacart's AI cart assistant, and grocery executives expect agent-assembled shopping to compound from here.

Sit with what that means for a mid-tier brand. Its entire model depends on being seen, eye-level placement, end caps, the impulse moment. An AI agent optimizing a basket for stated preferences and budget doesn't have an impulse moment. The brand that is neither the cheapest option nor the specifically requested one isn't rejected. It's never considered.

Quick ask this week:

I’m always trying to make this newsletter more useful. Too long? Too short? A category or story you want covered? Or something you’re building in consumer you want to talk about? Email me directly - I read and reply to everyone.

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