Yellow Wood Partners has sold its portfolio company PDC Brands, a collection of beauty, personal care, and wellness brands, for just over $1.4 billion to CVC Capital Partners.
PDC Brands maintains a portfolio of many category-leading brands across the wellness, haircare, beauty & cosmetics, fragrance, bath & body, and salon professional markets. Company owned brand names include, among others, Dr. Teal’s (wellness and bath & body); Cantu (haircare); Eylure and Elegant Touch (beauty & cosmetics); Body Fantasies and Bod Man (fragrance); Bodycology, Calgon, and The Healing Garden (bath & body); and Salon System (salon professional). The company’s products are sold through major retailers in the US, UK and in 60 additional markets globally.
PDC Brands was formerly known as Parfums de Coeur, Ltd. – which was founded in 1981 – and changed its name to PDC Brands in March 2015. Today, PDC is headquartered in Stamford, CT with an additional office near London in Hayes, UK (www.pdcbeauty.com).
Yellow Wood acquired PDC Brands in September 2012. “Over the past five years of our partnership with PDC, the company has successfully grown into a multinational consumer products company providing unique and innovative beauty and personal care products marketed to the most attractive segments of the global consumer base,” said Dana Schmaltz, Founding Partner of Yellow Wood Partners. “It has been a privilege partnering with James Stammer and the senior management team, as our combined efforts led to PDC quadrupling revenues while increasing EBITDA by more than five times under our ownership.”
The growth at PDC was created through a combination of organic growth and five add-on acquisitions: ME! Bath (May 2017), a seller of bath bombs; Original Additions (April 2016), owner of the Eylure, Elegant Touch, and Salon System brands; Cantu and Bodycology brands (June 2015), acquired from Advanced Beauty; Dr. Teal’s Therapeutic Solutions brand (February 2014), acquired from Advanced Beauty; and Calgon and The Healing Garden (January 2013), acquired from Ilex Consumer Products Group.
Yellow Wood Partners invests in consumer brands and companies with revenues between $30 million and $200 million. Sectors of interest include branded consumer products across a variety of channels including mass, drug, food, specialty, club and e-commerce. The firm was founded in 2011 and is based in Boston (www.yellowwoodpartners.com).
CVC Capital Partners, the buyer of PDC, currently manages over $65 billion of capital, and funds managed or advised by CVC are invested in 50 companies worldwide. The firm, founded in 1981, is based in London and has a network of 20 offices and 420 employees throughout Europe, Asia and the United States (www.cvc.com).
© 2017 Private Equity Professional | July 6, 2017
