Retail Acquisitions: What We Can Learn from Jonathan Adler & Outdoor Voices

All right, Mike, another week, another big acquisition to talk about. This week, we want to talk about Consortium Brand Partners who acquired Jonathan Adler, actually required at the end of December. I thought it'd be interesting to kind of look at what Consortium Brands is doing with their acquisitions and compare it to the Outdoor Voices acquisition because that was another very like public one backed by an influencer.  And there's some interesting similarities and differences between these.OV being a little bit more of a turnaround. The founder had left. You know, they had cash issues, they missed earnings and yet Adler is a growth story. So they're managing the both a little bit different, but I would say in both cases, they're leaning into some of their strengths in distribution and focusing the product line.  So for Outdoor Voices, I know they streamline the product. They shuttered a bunch of underperforming stores. So it's just a lot of like the blocking and tackling of retail. I think they gave up on the whole like.

We're going to make this a community and lifestyle empire thing, which is what I think the founder was pushing. And on the other hand, Adler, who had great unit economics and was growing really well, introduced some new product categories. They want to bring them a little bit more into B2B, which is great for a furniture line. They want to double down on wholesale and push into corporate hospitality internationally. I think in Adler's case, they have a good thing going and it's just about like lending some good retail chops to that and putting gas on the fire.

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