Originally posted by Forbes
By: Sharon Edelson, Senior Contributor
Tech-enabled consumer products firm Society Brands, which acquires e-commerce native brands that primarily sell on Amazon and their own DTC sites, announced it has completed its first institutional capital raise of $205 million, led by i80 Group, a leading provider of capital to breakthrough technology companies, and also said it has acquired a brand management company.
Society Brands acquires e-commerce consumer products companies and encourages the founders to stay on board to be part of the team in an effort to build a community and ecosystem of like-minded entrepreneurs that have the skill and energy to grow with their brand.
“We kind of look at ourselves as being very similar to a modern day e-commerce Procter & Gamble, where we’re really a house of brands that we’re building, and are generally agnostic at this point in terms of what categories we’re looking for,” said Michael Sirpilla, CEO of Society Brands.
On the heels of its first institutional capital raise, Society Brands also announced that it has acquired OmniiX, which has serviced hundreds of consumer brands selling products on Amazon and with a track record of growing brands at nearly 40% annually.
“The acquisition helps us a lot from the sourcing side, finding incredible companies to acquire, so their [OmniiX’s] technology certainly helps us out from that perspective,” Sirpilla added. “The biggest reason OmniiX is such a huge win for us is the human capital component. It’s not just John W. and Stormey Collins, who have come with this acquisition, it’s their entire team.
Society Brands wanted to see how the OmniiX managing brands at scale, given the fact that they’re a service-based provider and were managing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of revenue for their clients. Sirpilla said Society Brands should be able to get a similar result if it uses that same strategy and methodology on how they grew the brands that they were managing. “Essentially, that’s what we’re looking to build as an acquirer of brands,” said Sirpilla. “It all just comes down to team members and having an incredible team in place.”
The company will use the capital raised primarily for financing acquisitions, but it’s also developing proprietary technology “that’s a huge win for us as well. It really helps us source acquisitions and run our company at a more efficient level, but the primary focus is certainly helping us get to our longer term goals, which over the next few years will be a $1 billion business,” Sirpilla said.