Newell and VF: How to Kill a Consumer Goods Giant

I’ve taken a bit of time off from blogging recently to focus on other things, but recently came across this article from the WSJ about the fall of VF Corp ($VFC) and it reminded me of other legacy brand aggregators, such as Newell Brands ($NWL), that have also struggled as of late. There is a common strategy across both companies – they chose to concentrate key decisions around marketing, product development, and sales at the corporate versus brand level. And the results clearly show that was a mistake. 

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DTC Brands Need a Publishing Arm

Why is a publisher model appealing to brands? An emerging crop of companies with recurring revenue and large customer bases have discovered that “owning” audiences is better than “renting” them according to CBInsights and ultimately a way to reduce CAC and build more loyalty.  Over the last few years, a growing crop of financial service and SaaS based firms have been acquiring media companies – JPMorgan bought the Infatuation, HubSpot purchased the Hustle and Robinhood snatched up MarketSnacks. Make no mistake – this was a play to decrease CAC (customer acquisition cost) and drive up LTV (lifetime value).   A recent CEO said “Every company should go direct to its audience and become a media company.”  While the noise has mainly been centered on businesses with subscription economics, another cohort that would benefit from this trend are the emerging crop of DTC lifestyle brands that have been growing rapidly over the last 5-10 years.  This isn’t unchartered waters; brands have been acquiring media companies for years. Going back to the days following the Dot.com bubble, J&J purchased Baby Center in 2001 for ~$10m with the goal of providing more content to expecting moms. Flash forward to today and the pandemic has created another opportune environment for brands to snatch up media companies. Since the spring of 2020, we’ve seen ecommerce sales skyrocket, digital advertising costs increase precipitously and LTV become paramount leading to the newfound realization that paying to advertise won’t have the same ROI as owning an audience to market to.  One of the largest blights these newly public DTC companies have is that they aren’t profitable – the primary reason being the amount of money spent on marketing. 

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Rollups – How to Build a Modern Day CPG

When I was at Jarden (now Newell Brands), we always had clear acquisition criteria when it came to M&A. 

  • Strong cash flow characteristics
  • Category leading positions in niche markets
  • Products that generate recurring revenue
  • Attractive historical margins / or margin expansion opportunities
  • Accretive to earnings
  • Post earnout EBITDA multiple of 6-8x

This strategy allowed us to grow from one brand (The Ball Jar company in 2002) to over 50 brands and ~$8b in sales by 2015 when the company merged with Newell Rubbermaid. 

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Exits

If you have a startup and you’re venture backed, then you ultimately need an exit. Historically, this has been through M&A or by going public. However, with the exception of some SaaS deals, there’s not been a lot of M&A activity recently in the consumer space. Strategic buyers often feel many startups are overvalued and aren’t interested in paying the premiums. The alternative is an IPO and there’s a lot of new innovation to look forward to here. Earlier this year, there was growing support for direct listings among some high profile VC’s, namely Bill Gurley, who felt many startups were leaving “money on the table” by going through a traditional IPO. Slack and Spotify are two examples of companies that have done direct listings. His argument is that in a traditional IPO the bankers engineer the deal to get a pop for their institutional clients and ultimately the company doesn’t get to keep any of the upside. Case in point is Snowflake (SNOW) that went public yesterday via a traditional listing. The stock jumped 111% on the first day and as a result left $3.8b on the table. The downside with doing a direct listing has been the inability to raise capital as has been the case in a traditional IPO. That said, the NYSE has been working with the SEC on a way to do a primary raise concurrently with a direct listing that was recently approved but has since been rescinded as other parties pushed back. More to come here.

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