03 September How Free Hoodies Made Gymshark A £646 Million Brand In 2012, a 19-year-old Aston University student was delivering pizzas at night and stitching gym vests in his parents' garage during the day. Ben Francis had no ad budget, no retail buyers, and no media plan. What he had was a posting address for a handful of YouTubers who talked about squat depth and protein timing to audiences of a few thousand people each. He sent them free clothes. Thirteen years later, Gymshark reported...
4 days ago • 3 min read
30th August Bird, Lime and the Depreciation Math of Scooters An analysis of Bird's scooters in Louisville tracked units by serial number and put the average working life at about 28.8 days. Run the full cost stack against that lifespan, and each scooter finished its short career roughly $293 in the hole. Bird went public via SPAC in 2021 at $2.3 billion. By December 2023, it had filed Chapter 11, having lost more than $430 million since the end of 2021, with the stock at eight cents. Lime,...
8 days ago • 4 min read
27th August Away Luggage:When Brand Culture Outruns Actual Culture Jen Rubio's luggage cracked open in a Swiss airport in 2015. Four years later, the company she built with Steph Korey was worth $1.4 billion, sold suitcases at $225 against a comparable Tumi bag at $525, and had a waitlist culture that most consumer founders would trade a kidney for. Then, on December 5, 2019, The Verge published screenshots of Slack messages from inside the company. Fourteen former employees described...
11 days ago • 4 min read
23th August Peloton and The Forecast That Ate The Company When Peloton filed to go public in 2019, it did something unusual for a hype-stage hardware company. It published a ceiling. The S-1 pegged its serviceable addressable market at 14 million connected fitness products, 12 million of them in the United States. With 577,000 units sold, Peloton had captured roughly 4% of a market it had sized itself. Eight months later, gyms closed worldwide and orders exploded. In May 2020, founder John...
15 days ago • 4 min read
20th August Juicero and the $400 Press Hands Could Beat On 19 April 2017, two Bloomberg reporters sat down with a Juicero produce pack and squeezed it. They got 7.5 ounces of juice in about 90 seconds. The $400 Wi-Fi-connected press produced roughly 8 ounces in two minutes. Founder Doug Evans had spent years talking about that press. He said it wielded four tons of force, enough to lift two Teslas. Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and Campbell Soup's venture arm had put around $120 million...
18 days ago • 4 min read
16th August Why Groupon’s Fast Growth was the Problem In October 2008, a Chicago startup sold two-for-one pizza vouchers at a bar downstairs from its office. Sixteen months later, Groupon was worth a billion dollars, and according to PitchBook, it is still the fastest any startup has ever reached that mark. Then something quieter turned up in the IPO paperwork. Revenue per sales rep fell from roughly $172,000 in Q1 2011 to $138,000 in Q2 2011. One quarter. Same playbook, same pitch, less...
22 days ago • 4 min read
13th August Casper and the DTC mattress CAC death spiral On page six of its IPO filing, Casper disclosed a number few of its competitors ever had to say out loud. Since launching in 2014 through September 2019, 16 percent of its direct-to-consumer customers had come back to buy anything else. Five years of brand building. More than $422 million spent on marketing between 2016 and September 2019. Eighty-four out of every hundred buyers are gone after one order. The mattress was excellent. The...
25 days ago • 4 min read
9th August How LEGO Almost Went Bankrupt In 2004, a 35-year-old strategist walked into LEGO's boardroom in Billund and delivered a number that left everyone stunned. Around 94% of the company's products were making no money. Yes, 94%. These were sets losing cash on every unit sold across almost the entire catalog, while the company shipped over a billion dollars' worth of product a year. The strangest part is that nobody inside LEGO had known. Debt had climbed past $800 million, sales had...
29 days ago • 4 min read
6th August The $20 Billion Deal That Died In December 2023, Adobe wired Figma $1 billion and got nothing for it. No product changed hands, no engineers moved desks, and no court ever ruled against the deal. The largest attempted acquisition of a private software company in history died on paper. Regulators never had to invent a theory of harm. Adobe had already written one, filed under its own product decisions. Here is how a browser tab beat a $200 billion incumbent and what it teaches you...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read