TRACKED: 100 beauty and wellness deals reveal who gets acquired – and who gets left behind
this is the exit playbook the industry doesn’t want to publish
$4 billion for a fragrance portfolio. $1 billion for a brand with 10 products. $880 million for hand sanitizer. $1.2 billion for a gummy bear supplement that didn’t exist three years ago.
And in the same twelve months: a brand once valued at $1 billion filed for bankruptcy. Another worth $3 billion was recapitalized at a fraction of that. Dozens of brands shut down entirely.
We went deep on 100 beauty and wellness deals from the last 12 months – acquisitions, PE investments, IPOs, and brand deaths – and the picture they paint is the most clarifying thing we’ve published. Not because of any single deal. Because of what the full dataset reveals about what acquirers actually want, what kills brands that look healthy from the outside, and what the coming years of exits will reward.
This is a full industry report. It’s long. It’s data-heavy. And if you’re a founder, operator, or investor in beauty and wellness, it might change how you think about what you’re building.
Let’s get into it.
This report draws on data from Capstone Partners, Beauty Independent, S&P Global, Mergermarket, BeautyMatter, SEC filings, and company announcements. Full methodology and sources at the end of this piece.1
the beauty and wellness exit market is a barbell
The headline story of beauty and wellness M&A right now isn’t the volume. It’s the dispersion. The gap between what the best brands command and what everyone else gets has never been wider.
At the top: L’Oréal paid an estimated 20–25x EBITDA for Medik8 – a UK skincare brand with a 34% EBITDA margin and a founder who’s a formulation scientist, not a marketer. Church & Dwight paid up to $880 million for Touchland – a hand sanitizer brand – at 12.7x EBITDA, because it had a 42% EBITDA margin and a formulation competitors couldn’t replicate. e.l.f. paid up to $1 billion for Rhode: $212 million in revenue, three years old, 10 SKUs, estimated 40% EBITDA margins. Unilever paid a reported $1.2 billion for Grüns, a supplement brand that launched in August 2023 and reportedly hit $300 million in annualized revenue by the time the deal closed.
At the bottom: Olaplex sold for $1.4 billion – roughly 90% below its 2021 IPO valuation of over $13 billion. Pat McGrath Labs, valued at over $1 billion in 2018, later saw an investor mark down its stake by 88%; the brand filed for Chapter 11 in January 2026 and is undergoing restructuring. Anastasia Beverly Hills, valued at $3 billion when TPG invested in 2018, was recapitalized at a fraction of that when the founder had to put $225 million of her own money in to buy TPG out.
The question isn’t “will someone buy my brand?” anymore.
It’s: which side of this barbell are you on?
And the uncomfortable answer for most founders reading this: you’re probably in the middle. And the middle is where deals go to die.
If you’re sitting at $30–70 million in revenue with adequate-but-not-exceptional margins and no truly defensible positioning, you’re in the hardest part of the market to transact. The buyer pool is thin, the multiples are compressed, and many brands in this range simply didn’t find a deal at all. The 6–8x revenue your cap table is still modeling against? That market is gone.
The biggest constraint on deal volume this year wasn’t a lack of buyers. It was sellers refusing to accept that the market had repriced their brand.
who spent the money – and what they were actually buying
L’Oréal was the acquirer of the cycle. Six transactions in twelve months: the €4 billion Kering Beauté deal (House of Creed plus 50-year fragrance licenses for Bottega Veneta and Balenciaga), the roughly €1 billion Medik8 majority stake, Color Wow (estimated around $1 billion), a doubling of its Galderma stake to 20%, a minority stake in Amouage, and the Carol’s Daughter divestiture.
No filler deals. Every transaction filled a specific portfolio gap – luxury fragrance IP, science-backed skincare, premium professional haircare. L’Oréal didn’t buy brands this year. It bought a thesis six times.
Unilever was the most aggressive personal care and wellness buyer – and arguably the acquirer with the clearest pattern. Wild (the UK’s leading refillable deodorant brand). Dr. Squatch (estimated around $1.5 billion for the fastest-growing men’s personal care brand in the US). Minimalist (roughly $350 million for India’s leading science-backed skincare brand). And Grüns (a reported $1.2 billion for the supplement brand that compressed a decade of category-building into under three years).
All four fit the same profile: founder-led, strong DTC DNA that successfully expanded into mass retail, science-backed positioning, 20%+ annual growth rates. Unilever’s press release on Dr. Squatch listed three rationales: “exceptional community,” “strong cultural resonance,” and “proven omnichannel model.”
If you’re a founder wondering what a strategic acquirer is actually screening for – that sentence is the rubric. Print it out.
e.l.f. made the year’s most talked-about deal with Rhode. $600 million cash, $200 million stock, $200 million earnout. Among the youngest beauty or wellness brands to reach a billion-dollar exit. e.l.f. got its first prestige-channel foothold and Sephora access. Rhode got global infrastructure.
Church & Dwight paid up to $880 million for Touchland. Henkel made a twin haircare play – Olaplex ($1.4 billion) and Not Your Mother’s. Ulta bought Space NK at an estimated £300–400 million, its first acquisition-based international expansion. Blackstone, CVC, KKR, and Advent all made major PE bets across Asia and fragrance.
And then a new class of buyer appeared. Distressed acquirers – Windsong Global (KVD Beauty from LVMH’s Kendo), Rare Beauty Brands (Kate Somerville from Unilever), AXNY Group (Urban Skin Rx), Nameless CPG (Wander Beauty), Cost of Doing Business (Bread Beauty Supply) – quietly picked up brands with strong consumer awareness but broken economics at deep discounts.
A lot of names. One pattern underneath all of them.
Nobody was buying “nice brands with nice packaging.” Everyone was buying a thesis.
Strategic buyers filled portfolio gaps. PE firms bought either platform anchors for roll-ups or growth-equity positions in brands at $100–200 million that needed capital to hit $500 million. Distressed buyers bet on restructuring brands that consumers still remembered but economics had failed. And across all three buyer types, the same question surfaced: does this brand have a defensible reason to exist?
the graveyard is the most useful part of this dataset
While the headline deals grabbed attention, a parallel wave of distress reshaped the other end of the market. Brands shut down. Others filed for bankruptcy. Others recapitalized at painful valuations. The patterns across all of them are more instructive than the patterns in the deals – because the failure modes are the ones most founders are currently replicating without realizing it.
Pat McGrath Labs is the most dramatic cautionary tale in the industry this decade. A legendary founder. Instagram-era editorial prestige that was genuinely unmatched. Over $1 billion valuation in 2018. But editorial prestige didn’t translate to repeat consumer purchase. Revenue deteriorated. The brand filed Chapter 11.
Buzz is not a business model.
Anastasia Beverly Hills tells a parallel story. TPG invested at $3 billion in 2018. By late 2025, the founder had to put $225 million of her own money in to buy TPG out and recapitalize – a severe down-round relative to the 2018 entry. Sales slid. Debt mounted. The mass-to-prestige repositioning stalled.
Drunk Elephant, acquired by Shiseido for $845 million in 2019, reportedly saw sales decline sharply through 2025. Shiseido posted its first loss in decades, partly due to impairment charges. Too Faced and Dr. Jart – both acquired by Estée Lauder at premium valuations – are now rumored divestiture targets. Morphe filed Chapter 11 with $868 million in funded debt.
The common thread: brands acquired at peak hype before proving durability across economic cycles. This is worth sitting with. A brand that reaches $100 million over seven years of sustained growth in different macro environments is a fundamentally stronger acquisition candidate than one that gets there in three. The fast track is impressive on the way up. But acquirers in this market are buying durability, not velocity.
The nuance here matters: Rhode and Grüns both exited within three years of launch, which appears to contradict the durability thesis. It doesn’t. What made those two compelling wasn’t their revenue trajectory – it was the evidence of genuine consumer affinity underneath it. Grüns had 95,000 five-star reviews and 95% of customers using the product four to six times per week. Rhode had 40% EBITDA margins on a DTC-only business with 10 SKUs. That’s not a paid media story. That’s proof the product actually works. The brands in the graveyard had revenue without that proof.
Among the brands that shut down – Juice Beauty, Flower Beauty, Ami Colé, Youthforia, REN Clean Skincare, SKKN by Kim, Cosmoss (Kate Moss), Futurewise – the red flags were painfully consistent: over-reliance on a single retail partner, insufficient differentiation, unsustainable customer acquisition costs, and founder-investor tension.
Ami Colé raised over $3 million in VC, secured 600 Sephora doors, and still cited “financial challenges and founder-investor tensions” in its closure announcement. Sephora distribution didn’t save it. Capital didn’t save it. Press didn’t save it.
Which brings us to the Sephora problem nobody wants to say out loud.
Many of the brands that shut down counted Sephora as a retail partner. For many indie brands, Sephora has become an expensive proving ground rather than a guaranteed growth engine. The reason is structural: high marketing spend requirements, aggressive sell-through expectations, tight wholesale margins. The rules of that store are hard and expensive.
If you’re a founder using Sephora as the north star of your distribution strategy, read the closure list again.
To be clear – the problem isn’t Sephora. Rhode launched there and did $10 million in two days. Touchland and Salt & Stone both built category-leading positions on those shelves. The difference is that those brands arrived with demand already built. They used Sephora to capture existing momentum. Rhode had over 2 million unique searches on Sephora’s platform before it even launched there. The brands that failed used Sephora to try to create it – and the cost of playing in that store without pre-existing velocity is what killed them.
four archetypes exit. a fifth is forming.
Here’s what the data reveals when you strip away the noise. Four brand archetypes successfully exited at meaningful valuations in the last 12 months. Everything outside them in our dataset traded at a discount or didn’t trade at all. And a fifth is visibly taking shape.