Strategic acquirers remain active at the start of Q2’18 as highlighted with last week’s acquisitions of Nanda Co. Ltd. (Stylenanda) by L’Oréal and Eyeko by The Hut Group, as both strategic buyers are looking to expand their international brand portfolios.
Founded in 2004 by So-Hee Kim, Stylenanda is a South Korean beauty and fashion company led by popular Millennials color cosmetics brand 3CE. Stylenanda plans to leverage the partnership to further its international expansion and grow its global brand recognition. Stylenanda marks L’Oréal’s first investment in the K-beauty category and allows L’Oréal to further penetrate Asian markets, which are driving extraordinary levels of recent growth across the global skin care and color cosmetics categories. Stylenanda generated sales of $152 million in 2017 and a rumored purchase price of approximately $372 million, representing a 2.4x multiple of revenue.
U.K.-based indie cosmetics brand Eyeko is a leader in the eye makeup category, selling mascaras, liquid liners, and other color cosmetics products. The company was founded in 1999 and has built a distribution network across Europe, the United States, and Australia through select retailers, including Sephora and Ulta as well as its company Website. Eyeko joins a long list of fast-growing, premium beauty care brands including Illamasqua, Glossybox, RY, and Espa that recently joined The Hut Group portfolio, leveraging its retail system and marketing infrastructure and furthering the strategic acquirer’s goal to become the leading online beauty retailer.
These acquisitions follow in the footsteps of some recent cross-border transactions, namely Unilever’s $2.7 billion acquisition of Carver Korea and the acquisition of New Zealand-based Snowberry by Procter & Gamble.