Estée Lauder Backs Chinese Fragrance Brand, Mahomes Joins PRIME ⚡️

Welcome back to This Week in CPG, folks. Here’s what we’re covering this morning:

• Unilever divests non-core brands 💰

• Naomi Watts buys Stripes 🧴

• Gisou opens UK pop-up 🐝

• Sour Strips explodes 📈

• GHOST rolls out in Canada 👻

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Estée Lauder Backs Melt Season 💰

Per an Instagram post, New Incubation Ventures, the venture and incubation arm of The Estée Lauder Companies, has invested in Chinese luxury fragrance brand, Melt Season. This is Estée Lauder’s second investment in China after they backed beauty brand Code Mint in September. 

Melt Season, which sells ten fragrance products with prices ranging from around $130 to $190, was founded in 2021 by Lishi Ni, a former music industry executive and an alum of South Korean eyewear brand Gentle Monster. Prior to securing funding from New Incubation Ventures, Melt Season had raised seed funding from One Capital and Breeze Capital across two rounds. 

Melt Season is part of a new wave of homegrown challenger brands disrupting China’s high-end fragrance market. Another domestic fragrance upstart, Documents, launched in 2021 and secured funding from L'Oréal in late 2022. Yet another domestic contender, To Summer, was founded in 2018 and launched its first product in early 2019, has built a formidable business both online and in retail. Earlier this year, To Summer opened a stunning flagship store in Beijing that makes Aesop’s beautiful stores look like cave dwellings. 

With L'Oréal and The Estée Lauder Companies entering the Chinese fragrance category via their venture arms, one thing is clear — Western beauty giants don’t want to miss this wave. 

This is for a few different reasons. First, the Chinese fragrance category is expected to double in value to just over $5B by 2026. Second, per a report from McKinsey, 50% of younger Chinese consumers are opting for homegrown C-beauty brands over products sold by multinational firms.

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Deals 💰

Mergers & Acquisitions 

• CPG giant Unilever has sold a number of non-core personal care brands to private equity firm Yellow Wood Partners. Brands included in the transaction were Q-tips, Brut, Caress, VO5, and others. Terms of the arrangement weren’t disclosed, but these brands combined for $760M in sales in 2022. Earlier this year, Yellow Wood Partners acquired Suave North America from Unilever. Axios

• Now-bankrupt biotech firm Amyris has sold the remainder of its beauty brands. Naomi Watts purchased Stripes, the menopausal wellness brand she co-founded last year, for $500K, while Rose Inc, the makeup brand co-founded by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, was acquired for $2.5M. WWD

• Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart has acquired domestic bootmaker Rossi Boots. The seller is Propel Group, the same firm that sold outdoor apparel brand Driza-Bone to Rinehart two weeks ago. Business News Australia

• Private equity firm MacArthur Beauty has purchased the intellectual property of Uoma Beauty, a popular beauty brand that the British government threatened to shut down due to a failure to ship orders. It’s a bizarre story. The founder, Sharon Chuter, plans to protest the sale. Business of Fashion 

Fundraising

• Hey Freya, a women’s wellness brand that sells adaptogenic supplements and multi-vitamin products, closed a $500K round of funding. Goddess Fun+d and a number of angel investors participated. Business Wire

What’s New 🤩

Apparel, Cosmetics, and Wellness

• Honey-infused haircare brand Gisou opened a beautiful pop-up at Harrods in London which will be open until January 2nd. Business of Fashion

• Khloe Kardashian has partnered with Luxe Brands and will launch a new line of fragrances next year. Luxe Brands is the group behind Ariana Grande’s very successful fragrance collection. Cosmetics Business

• Korean skincare brand COSRX unveiled a new anti-aging cream called The Retinol 0.3 Cream which is available on Amazon. PR Newswire

Food, Beverage, and Alcohol

• Star quarterback Patrick Mahomes has joined PRIME as its newest spokesperson. Mahomes joins a number of other star athletes like Erling Haaland as PRIME spokespeople. Instagram

• LA-based pasta sauce brand Sauz launched two new products: Wild Rosemary Marinara and Creamy Calabrian Vodka. Love their packaging. Instagram

• Red Tree Beverages, the new alcohol subsidiary of Coca-Cola, will launch a new boozy juice brand called Minute Maid Spiked. Seems like a bizarre brand to extend into alcohol. BevNET

• Haus, the low-alcohol aperitif brand that closed due to a funding crisis, is apparently returning to the marketplace with an entirely different product — Caviar. Instagram

Data 🖥️

• The best selling sports drink brands in the U.S. over the past 52 weeks. Fascinating data. Gatorade remains the market leader by a massive margin, but PRIME will likely surpass both BodyArmor and Powerade in annual revenue by the end of 2024. Twitter

• Per founder Maxx Chewning, candy brand Sour Strips has sold over 180,000 units at Target over the past week. Wild. Twitter

• Skincare brand Beekman 1802 collaborated with Nestlé Toll House on a collection that sold $1M worth of product in an hour. The packaging is brilliant. Glossy

Distribution News 🚚

• Scandinavian skincare brand OLEHENRIKSEN will launch at Ulta Beauty in January.

• Sustainable medicine brand Cabinet is now available at select Target stores.

• GHOST Energy has begun rolling out across Canada.