Shiseido announced Tuesday that it will spend $845 million to acquire Drunk Elephant, the female-founded clean beauty brand that has become one of the fastest-growing prestige skin-care companies in history.
Forbes estimates that 50-year-old founder Tiffany Masterson, who will stay on with the brand under Shiseido as chief creative officer and president, will pocket roughly $120 million when the sale closes at the end of the year.
Drunk Elephant had net sales of close to $100 million last year. It’s been backed by San Francisco based private equity firm VMG since 2017. The brand first signaled it was open to an acquisition earlier this year.
The $500 billion beauty industry has been going through a boom in recent years. It was first fueled by a growing market for makeup, and big beauty conglomerates were willing to pay high prices for these hot companies, like It Cosmetics, which sold to L’Óreal for $1.2 billion in 2016, a valuation of more than six times sales. But as the cosmetics industry has contracted more recently, investors and publicly traded beauty companies have turned to skin care. Unilever acquired luxury skin-care startup Tatcha for a reported $500 million in June, a deal valued at roughly five times sales.
Drunk Elephant was said to be hoping to fetch a valuation of more than $1 billion, but even at $845 million, the implied valuation is more than eight times sales, making the Drunk Elephant acquisition one of the biggest ever for a skin-care brand.
Masterson founded Drunk Elephant in Houston in 2012 while she was a stay-at-home mom of four. With the help of a contract chemist, Masterson developed serums and creams formulated without what she deemed as the “suspicious six” ingredients: essential oils, drying alcohols, silicones, chemical sunscreens, fragrances and sodium lauryl sulfate. Early on, Masterson’s brother-in-law invested $300,000 and her brother also invested an undisclosed amount and became president. Drunk Elephant is now one of the top-selling brands at Sephora, its exclusive brick-and-mortar retailer.
“I don’t look at other brands. I don’t go into Sephora anymore,” Masterson told Forbes in 2017. “I don’t follow trends. I stay close to home and stay in my lane. I do what I need. I’m a consumer first.”
[“source=forbes”]