Fashion and apparel fundraises have been scarce for five years. Allbirds. Everlane. Outdoor Voices. A generation of DTC apparel brands burned through $1B+ of capital. So when a $50M apparel round gets announced, it's worth digging into why.

CHAMP, the $500M athlete co-owned fund launched by L Catterton and Patricof in April, just made its first investment. $50M minority stake in Rhoback, a golf and performance activewear brand.

In 2016, three UVA business school friends started selling performance polos from a wooden camper van. Ten years later: $150M in revenue, profitable, completely bootstrapped.

The fit for CHAMP is the real story. Rhoback has been leaning heavily on NIL endorsements since they became legal in 2021. The college athletes Rhoback treated right are now full-blown professional superstars, Joe Burrow, Dak Prescott, Tyrese Haliburton, and Ja'Marr Chase are now direct co-owners through CHAMP, not just paid spokespeople.

That distinction is everything. In a world of infinite content, attention is the scarcest resource. CHAMP isn't really investing in an activewear brand, it's aggregating 250 professional athletes into a single distribution engine, with ownership stakes that align incentives in a way a sponsorship check never could. The apparel is the vehicle. The athlete ownership network is the asset.

How Rhoback harnesses that network will be one of the more interesting brand stories of the next few years, and the model itself, athletes as co-owners rather than rented faces, is probably more important than any single brand it touches.

Three months ago I stood outside the Grand Palais in Paris and watched HYROX take over one of the most prestigious venues in the world. 18,000 athletes. Sled pushes under Europe's largest glass roof.

Now L Catterton is in exclusive talks to acquire a major stake at a valuation of ~€1B. €40M in revenue in 2023. €140M in 2025. €200M+ projected in 2026. €30M in EBITDA. 1.3M+ participants. 140 events. 30 countries.

But the event revenue is only the beginning. HYROX is building an ecosystem: 13,000 affiliated training clubs, dedicated Performance Centers, a PUMA apparel partnership, Centr digital coaching, an Amazfit wearable exclusive signed April 2026, merchandise, digital subscriptions.

Here's the part that explains why LVMH's investment arm is the one circling. Health is the new luxury, and the HYROX city badge is the ultimate status symbol, because money alone can't buy it. To finish HYROX you need months of disciplined training. You need a premium gym membership and a high-end nutrition protocol. You need the disposable income to travel to Berlin or London or Dubai or Paris for a race weekend. You need the physical capacity to run 8km and push a sled and do wall balls at race intensity without stopping.

A Birkin bag requires money and a waitlist. A HYROX finisher badge requires money and months of earned physical capacity. Every major luxury brand is currently trying to buy access to a consumer who has both. L Catterton understands that better than almost anyone in the room.

Steph Curry has signed a $400M deal with Li Ning Sports. Li-Ning merchandise is currently banned from sale in the United States. Let that sit for a moment.

The deal includes plans for Curry Brand retail stores in America. The brand manufacturing those products is legally prohibited from selling in America due to forced labor violations. Either Curry Brand operates as a legally separate entity with a different supply chain, or the deal includes a quiet bet that the regulatory environment shifts.

But for Curry Brand and Li Ning, the US market isn't the real prize anyway.

Li Ning is gaining ground in China on Nike. The NBA's popularity in China remains enormous. Steph Curry, two-time MVP, four-time champion, the man who changed how basketball is played, is one of the most recognizable American athletes among Chinese consumers.

The Way of Wade proved the model works. Dwyane Wade built the Way of Wade line with Li Ning into a genuine cult sneaker phenomenon in China. Jimmy Butler, Fred VanVleet, D'Angelo Russell, and CJ McCollum have all had Li Ning deals. Curry is the institutional scale-up of that thesis.

At $400M, Li Ning is betting it can build the Chinese equivalent of Jordan Brand. When the market size of a basketball-obsessed nation of 1.4 billion people is on the line, compliance headaches in Washington become a rounding error. Curry gets his lifetime deal. Li Ning gets its flagship icon. The US regulatory ban becomes a localized speed bump on the road to a market that was always the actual destination.

Morgan walked into Whole Foods with a silver can, no final formula, no co-manufacturer, and no branding. They said yes. Nationwide.

Morgan built Primal Kitchen alongside Mark Sisson. Mayonnaise, salad dressings, collagen bars, bottled avocado oil, most of it built alone in year one, into a paleo community that barely existed yet. Kraft Heinz acquired it in 2019 for a reported $200 million.

She could have stopped there. Instead she looked at the protein category, chalky, gritty, built for gym bros, nothing she actually wanted to drink, and decided to build the clear, fizzy, sparkling protein water she couldn't find on any shelf. For millennial moms. For active women. For herself.

This time: three kids under seven, a fractional CFO, a former nanny running marketing, no social media on her phone. She built the entire Way brand in three months. Shipped in August. The product hadn't even existed when Whole Foods said yes.

Three things from the conversation worth taking with you:

Raise capital on traction, not on hopes and dreams. The first time, Morgan was proving a category existed. This time, she could walk in with proof a buyer would say yes to a product that wasn't finished yet, because the track record did the convincing, not the pitch.

Whole Foods first instead of Target. A deliberate sequencing choice. The retailer whose customer trusts the brand most goes first, and that trust becomes the proof point for every retailer that follows.

What she'd do the same and differently the second time. Worth hearing in her own words, the specific lessons that carried over and the ones she deliberately discarded are more useful than any generic playbook.

The first exit taught her what works. This one is teaching her what's actually worth doing again, which, it turns out, is a much shorter list than what she did the first time.

🎧 Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify.

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12% of Americans are now on GLP-1 medications. They eat 700 fewer calories per day but need increased protein to avoid muscle mass decay. Nobody modeled what that would do to the whey protein market.

US whey protein isolate and concentrate are essentially unavailable for new buyers. WP Concentrate is up 108% over two years. WP Isolate is up 139%.

And there's another wave coming. Patents on semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic, are expiring in China, India, Brazil, and Turkey in 2026. Generic versions will flood those markets. Those four countries represent approximately 25% of the world's obese population. If just 25% of obese people in those countries start GLP-1 medications and follow recommended protein protocols, the world needs an additional 3 million tons of whey protein. Global annual production is approximately 1.5–2 million tons.

The retail price shock is coming. Q1–Q2 2027 is the most likely window. The brands that survive are the ones that locked in supply contracts, built relationships with alternative protein suppliers, and have the margin structure to absorb input cost increases without destroying consumer price points.

Ozempic changed how Americans eat. It's about to change how the world eats, and the supply chain underneath protein, the ingredient nobody was watching while everyone watched the weight loss headlines, is where the actual disruption is heading first.

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.

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