FUND NEWS
New York, NY - November 10, 2017 – Luxury skin-care brand RéVive has a new home — Tengram Capital Partners.
Tengram is buying the company from Shiseido Americas. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but industry sources estimated RéVive does about $15 million in sales. The transaction is expected to close by the end of November.
RéVive's founder, plastic surgeon Gregory Brown, is reinvesting in the business and will join the board.
Elana Drell-Szyfer, the former chief executive officer of Laura Geller (which Tengram sold to Glansaol in late 2016), will head RéVive as ceo. John Elmer is also joining as chief financial officer and chief operating officer — he held those same positions while working with Szyfer at Laura Geller. Mary Rodrigues will also join RéVive as senior vice president of marketing and e-commerce.
Brown developed RéVive and launched it in Neiman Marcus in 1997. He originally formulated the product to help heal burn patients, but later realized broader potential skin-care implications. "I had the idea if growth factors could stimulate cell renewal enough to make the skin heal faster, then maybe they could reverse aging skin," Brown said. RéVive uses something called Bio-Renewal Technology, which was inspired by patented and Nobel Prize-winning science that Brown used to help burn victims.
Today, RéVive is sold in Neiman's, Saks Fifth Avenue, Barneys New York, Nordstrom and other high-end stores. The brand has about 35 stockkeeping units — and Brown is not particularly interested in the traditional beauty industry launch cycle, he said, instead turning to outside areas for product inspiration. "I look in places not so classic to the cosmetics industry — medical schools, medical research," he said.
Under Tengram, the plan is to build RéVive its own team and eventually expand distribution. For the past several years, RéVive has been housed alongside Laura Mercier as part of Gurwitch Products, which Shiseido acquired in 2016.
"We're starting an independent organization where every employee is 100 percent dedicated to RéVive," Szyfer said. "In the past several years, they've been in an almost completely shared services model where people have worked on a combination of brands."
RéVive is distributed in the U.S. and U.K., but not broadly, she noted. "It still has great potential in all of its existing distribution," Szyfer said. Longer-term, Tengram is likely to expand the business' geographic reach. "There's a big international opportunity, as well as a big e-commerce opportunity," Szyfer said. "We think there's an innovation opportunity, especially [because] Dr. Brown is reengaging the brand from an ownership perspective."
"I have watched RéVive for a long time," said Richard Gersten, partner at Tengram.
"We will increase the innovation and the number of product launches [and] seek to grow the international business, which is less than 20 percent of the total today." Tengram also plans to grow the direct to consumer segment, he said.
"We believe it is a gem, thanks to founder Dr. Gregory Bays Brown, its exceptional products based on Nobel prize-winning technologies, a loyal consumer following and its impressive distribution. The RéVive brand has strong growth prospects, and we look forward to investing in key areas to enable the brand to thrive."
"When you look at where the market is now really starting to reengage, it's in luxury skin care," Szyfer said. "It's an area of growth."
The RéVive sale is the second divestiture from Shiseido recently. In October, Shiseido agreed to sell professional hair business Zotos to Henkel for $485 million in October. At that time Shiseido said it was working to hone in on specific areas of focus, and North America-dominant professional hair was not one of them.
"RéVive is a wonderful skin-care brand," said Marc Rey, president and ceo of Shiseido Americas. "We are confident it will be well supported by Tengram while Shiseido focuses on continuing growth across our strategic portfolio of brands and businesses."
The beauty M&A market continues to see deal flow. Recently, Castanea Partners invested in prestige skin-care business Tatcha, and Unilever acquired cosmetics company Hourglass.