Fan Bi (buy/ advise $5-50M brands in special sits)

If you're interested in: 🎧 Listening to some the most interesting $5m-$50m founders, operators, investors, acquirers, and lenders in the DTC and CPG space. 🔖 Reading about interesting M&A deals in the consumer products category. 👀 Seeing a proprietary deal a week from brands who want reach a broader audience of buyers. Sign up for the link in bio.

In a sea of red consumer tickers this week, $CROX is up ~30%. Crocs bought HEYDUDE for $2.5B in 2022, near the top of the consumer M&A cycle. Take a casual canvas shoe and build the next Crocs. Instead: wholesale overshipping + discounting = sales disappointment + brand damage. The stock fell from $150+ into the $80ies. The market effectively wrote HEYDUDE to zero, then punished Crocs for owning it. Now: stock +25.5% on earnings day with HEYDUDE stabilizing. Crocs guidance raised for the 3rd straight time this year and promoting ~$1B of annual cash generation. Turns out $50 foam clog and $60 canvas slip-on at 20%+ net margins is pretty resilient for Main Street consumer.

VC + fashion has produced some poor outcomes: Allbirds, Everlane, Outdoor Voices, Rent the Runway. Then there’s ME+EM. A British womenswear brand growing ~29%, at ~20% EBITDA margins, whose VC just doubled down. Founded in 2009, ME+EM spent a decade quietly compounding as a DTC brand for professional women. Then Highland Europe invested £55M in 2022 to accelerate US expansion. Since then: 2023: £82M revenue / £16M EBITDA 2024: £120M revenue 2025: £148M revenue 2026E: ~£190M revenue / ~£37M EBITDA Four years after Highland’s investment, revenue >2x, EBITDA >2x. US revenue has gone from emerging to ~£65M, around 1/3 of the business. The brand counts Kate Middleton as an organic customer. Highland just increased its stake, saying ME+EM has some of the strongest brand loyalty it has seen in consumer.

A Dallas retailer selling $1 makeup sponges just got valued at ~$750M via an investment from VMG. Miss A started in 2013 as an eCom store where basically everything cost $1. Today it's ~$150M in revenue, ~100 stores, wholesale into 20,000+ Dollar General locations. Its $1 makeup sponge is the #1 beauty sponge on Amazon. The unlock came in 2016. Miss A stopped being just a retailer and launched its own private label, AOA Studio. That let it copy trends faster, expand margin, keep pricing $1–2. AOA now drives ~90% of sales. And the demand engine is pure internet-era value shopping: Originally, YouTube “$1 makeup” hauls. Now, TikTok “Miss A dupes.” $2 versions of $30 Sephora products. This is the K-shaped beauty market. Luxury keeps winning. Deep value keeps winning. The middle gets squeezed.

$SHOP, just as it suggests to its merchants, really leans into the pre-BFCM sale.

Nerds going from ~$40M to nearly $900M since launching Gummy Clusters might be one of the most underreported CPG stories of the decade. And it almost didn’t work. The idea actually started in 2001 with Nerds Rope. But no breakout. Then Gummy Clusters launched in 2020 with just ~$700K of marketing. Early tests flopped. In 2021, Kylie Jenner posted them organically to ~200M followers: “Next level.” TikTok took it from there. The crunch became ASMR content. Sales: 2020: ~$8M 2024: $500M+ Today: approaching $900M Repeat is insane too: More than 1 in 5 buyers purchase 6+ times a year. Nerds has now passed Skittles as America’s #1 sugar candy. And Mars is responding with gummy versions of Skittles + Starburst. Big M&A win. Ferrero bought Nestlé’s entire US candy portfolio in 2018 for $2.8B: Butterfinger. Crunch. SweeTARTS. Laffy Taffy. Nerds. Nerds was basically an afterthought. Today, the value created by Nerds alone may have effectively paid for the whole acquisition.

Alo reportedly did ~$3B of revenue and ~$1B of EBITDA in 2025. Still overwhelmingly founder-owned. Danny Harris and Marco DeGeorge built Bella+Canvas, a $1B+ wholesale blank-T-shirt business, and used that cash machine to self-fund Alo without outside capital. Then: 2007–15: niche yoga wholesale 2016: first Beverly Hills store 2019: ~$150M revenue 2020: ~$200M 2022: $1B+ 2025: ~$3B revenue / ~$1B EBITDA Alo didn’t beat Lululemon by obsessing over technical performance. It went after status. Hailey Bieber, the Hadids, the Jenners + VIP gyms, yacht trips, an Atelier luxury line. It turned activewear into a luxury flex. In 2023, Alo hired Moelis to explore a stake sale at ~$10B. It didn’t trade. Now Adanola is running a similar playbook at roughly half the price and growing fast in the US. Cultural moats are tricky. Can “quiet luxury athleisure” stay a moat?

Had no idea. I've only more recently experienced @rfvivas's attention to detail and methodic execution. Would've expected that from someone with still lots to prove, not one of the earliest employees at ~$100B co who could've bought his own island. Respect.

$SHOP having a BFCM pre-sale today.

Nasal strips used to be a cold remedy. Now they’re performance gear. You’ve seen them on NFL players, Carlos Alcaraz, in every mouth-taping TikTok, in Huberman sleep protocols. This week, Intake Breathing raised $62M from Camino Partners, founded by KIND’s Daniel Lubetzky. Two adhesive tabs on the nose + a reusable magnetic band that physically opens the nasal valve. The band is the razor. The tabs are the blades. Since launching the system in 2023, triple-digit growth 3 years running, approaching $100M revenue, and it's DTC + Amazon only. The capital funds mass retail. The incumbent, Breathe Right is 30 years old, historically positioned around colds and congestion. Since 2022, it’s grown ~60% YoY riding the same sleep + performance wave. This summer it sold for ~$1.0B on ~$200M of revenue. The opportunity: 74% of Intake customers had never bought a nasal strip before.

The leading kids’ vitamins often carry 3-8g of sugar per serving. A SmartyPants dose has roughly as much sugar as 2 Hershey’s Kisses. Alice Li built First Day to attack that. Last week, after scaling past $100M in revenue with under $1M of outside capital, First Day completed a strategic deal with Paine Schwartz Partners. 2017–19: 2 years developing the hero kids’ multivitamin. 2g sugar, no synthetic dyes. 2019–21: DTC subscription to 70,000 families 2022–25: Expands into teens, women, men + magnesium, probiotics, brain support. Revenue passes 9 figures, 1M+ families Dec. 2025: Finally enters Target after years of saying no to retail Oct. 2026: Paine Schwartz deal For context, Hiya sold 78.8% to USANA at a ~$260M valuation on ~$103M revenue and ~$22M EBITDA. I’m surprised First Day didn’t end up with Unilever or another Big CPG strategic. But for a largely bootstrapped consumer brand, this is about as impressive an outcome as you’ll see.

Have you seen WILDE in the wild? You’re about to see a lot more of it. The chicken-chip brand just raised $40M from S2G, with Machine Gun Kelly + Jack Harlow also participating. The product is genuinely innovative: chicken breast + egg whites + bone broth, crisped into something that eats like a Lay’s. No potato. No grain. 10g+ protein. The path has not been easy: 2015: launches as a meat bar. Flops. 2018: finishes developing its proprietary “crisper.” 2019: can’t get the quality it wants from co-mans, so builds a ~$10M plant. 2022+: revenue starts doubling annually. Today: $100M+ sales, 35,000+ retail doors, Costco alone does ~$50M. New 130,000 sq ft Kentucky facility, capacity up ~6x. Moving into protein crackers Have you tried WILDE?

Last week Braze announced its sale to Salesforce for $5.66B, ~7.5x revenue, growing ~20%, loss generating. Meanwhile, Klaviyo trades at ~$5B EV, ~3.5x revenue, growing 26%, and profitable. Klaviyo has grown consistently since it's 2023 IPO, more than doubled in revenue, and yet the stock sits 35% below listing price. 👀

Shopify’s strategic investments: 2020: Affirm, checkout financing 2020: Global-e, cross-border 2022: Klaviyo, CRM 2022: Faire, wholesale 2023: Flexport, logistics Now: Whop. Shopify joined Whop’s $205M round at a $5.1B valuation. Whop started in 2021 helping founders sell sneaker bots. It evolved into infrastructure for selling things that aren’t physical products: communities, courses, software, memberships, services. $400M+ annualized revenue, up from ~$60M at the start of 2025. ~6% take rate. Implies ~$6-7B of GMV. Why does Shopify care? Because “sell anything” increasingly means selling something that doesn’t ship in a box. The fastest-growing merchant may not be a store. It may be an individual monetizing knowledge, access, community or attention. And, Whop is now adding physical goods. So the next Shopify was starting to get built outside Shopify. And its Content Rewards marketplace may be even more important: - Brands set a budget + price per 1,000 verified views. - 100,000+ creators compete to make clips. ~$1.25 CPM vs multiples of that on Meta. Tobi has spent years talking about entrepreneurship becoming the default career. Whop’s stated mission is to deliver everyone an income.

Mikayla Nogueira worked the makeup counter at Ulta before she had 21M followers. Last week, her beauty brand raised $15M, one year after launch. The fame came from years of doing the work on camera: Tutorials. Reviews. Applying makeup. Showing people how products actually perform on a real face. Then she built a brand around exactly that expertise. Point of View launched in March 2025 with Ani Hadjinian, ex-Augustinus Bader + Bobbi Brown, as CEO. → ~$1M DTC launch in minutes → $20M+ first-year revenue → Sephora nationwide → first-week Sephora sales 80% above forecast The positioning is POV is not skincare, and not makeup.. It's “Skin prep”. Products designed to make makeup grip and perform better. The setup is incredibly strong: Creator with native product authority + Prestige-beauty operator + Real category white space + Investor that’s seen this movie before.