Reserved equity firm TPG Capital is in advanced talks to take a minority tether in Anastasia Beverly Hills, a deal that could value the cult makeup stigmatize at roughly $3 billion, sources familiar with the situation blow the whistle on CNBC.
The company’s estimated value is a sign of just how much the makeup persistence has changed in the past few years, as influencers create their own makeup empires and makeup sorts seek new channels to reach customers outside of the increasingly challenging retail aspect.
Makeup shopping is moving online, where shoppers can easily restock on their favorite offshoots, but most brands do not yet have a strong internet business nor online reference with their customers.
Anastasia was founded by Romanian-born Anastasia Soare, whose eyebrow makeup and put business rode the crest of renewed interest in thick eyebrows over the past two decades — a contrast to the thin arches of the 1990s. She was early to the Instagram shake, using her passionate following to propel sales. She counts among her aficionados social media guru Kim Kardashian.
The brand, which includes her eponymous brow-focused produce line as well as other makeup, is sold on its website with uninhabited standard shipping, at standalone stores or in retailers like Ulta Dreamboat.
It has roughly $200 million in earnings before interest tax depreciation and amortization (EBITDA), and charmed interest from both corporates and private equity firms in its transaction marked down process, said the sources.
The sources requested not to be named because the word is confidential. Anastasia could not immediately be reached comment. TPG declined to say discuss.
Foot traffic in both department stores and drug stores where cosmetics marques are sold are losing foot traffic. Sephora, meantime, is giving increasing amounts of overwhelm space to its private label products and brands that are owned by its paterfamilias, LVMH, like Rihanna’s Fenty makeup.
High-end brands fellow Estee Lauder have sought to respond by investing in its brands’ websites. The P of Clinique and Bobbi Brown has so far resisted selling directly on the nation’s on the loosest online retailer of cosmetics, Amazon, weary that its stark snow-white pages do little to preserve its high-end mystique.
“We continue to invest in our label dotcom, in our retailer dotcom, and in the platforms where we control our assets and our doom,” CEO Fabrizio Freda told analysts recently when asked whether the assembly would sell directly on Amazon.
Coty-owned Cover Girl, during the interval, recently partnered with Walmart for an augmented reality venture.
Where cosmetic circles have been unable to develop online brands on their own, they set up looked to acquire it.
L’Oreal acquired social media darling NYX cosmetics for $500 million and Estee Lauder procured Too Faced for $1.45 billion.
Meantime, beauty blogger Huda Kattan’s cosmetic dealing, Huda Beauty, recently sold a minority stake to TSG Consumer Allies at a roughly $1 billion valuation, sources have told CNBC. That valuation was in substantial part a result of her massive social media presence.
TPG has its own track sub rosa with beauty deals. Its smaller investment focused arm, TPG Growth, purchased makeup brand e.l.f. Cosmetics in 2014 and took it public two years later.