Glossier: direct-to-consumer beauty brand. Reminds me of Julep back in Seattle (Julep raised from Maveron, Andressen Horowitz, Jay-Z, Will Smith and of course, Madrona Ventures aka legendary investors as they are the biggest holder of Amazon stocks since early 1990’s until mid-2005, in which their $5M seed round is worth at least $5-20B, dependent on their liquidation schedule).
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- Beauty brands is one of those things that’s will take time and fundamental change in customer shopping habit to change given its real hands-up product interaction. I think I mentioned this before, but it’s always why I am optimistic about ULTA Beauty from the the long equity trading perspective.
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- Companies can use AR to at least visual the makeup on the face but the feel is different. I got a few friends working at Nordstrom Labs (kind of Google X, the “secret” lab of Nordstrom) and there are interesting stuff brewing out there.
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- And let’s ignore the fact they have been trying to go private for 3 quarters now, but banks are charging Nordstrom, one of the few publicly-traded retail companies, that are still delivering positive ‘same-store’ revenue growth, the core metric for retail, and they also got pretty healthy/non-too leveraged balance sheet, 18% interest rate of the debt portion of the deal. And in fact, JPM and other shareholders just stopped their 2nd attempt to go private earlier this week.
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- Madrona Ventures is one of those small handful US VCs that has an “innovation lab” vertical within the already-complex VC corporate structure (mainly for risk mitigation purposes). One company I would watch in their investment portfolio right now would be Amperity.
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Intersection notepad 