Good morning, Broadsheet readers! CEO Vidya Peters leads DataSnipper to unicorn status, Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock reinstates SAT/ACT requirements, and The Honey Pot founder Bea Dixon does an exit her way. Have a terrific Tuesday!
– Self care. Last month, personal care brand The Honey Pot announced it sold the majority of its business to investment firm Compass Diversified Holdings for $380 million. But founder Bea Dixon bristles when she hears the word “sale”—it sounds too final to her. “I don’t want us to be judged based on how much money we raise or how much money we make,” she says. “I want us to be judged on the character of our business, how we serve the humans we do.”
Dixon founded The Honey Pot a decade ago. A former pharmacy technician and buyer for Whole Foods, she developed its first feminine wash in her apartment. Today, the $121 million-in-revenue brand sells menstrual products, hygiene products, and other personal care washes, lubricants, and sprays with a focus on plant-based ingredients; its products are sold at Target, Whole Foods, Walmart, and more retailers.
Its new buyer Compass Diversified also owns the baby carrier brand Ergobaby; The Honey Pot deal closed on Jan. 31. Existing owners, including Dixon, retained a minority stake.
While Dixon prefers to focus on business-as-usual for The Honey Pot, the deal with Compass Diversified grabbed attention. It’s one of the largest exits for a Black female founder in recent years and arrives amid a difficult market for all founders. For those reasons, Dixon has worked to set aside her personal discomfort with the “sale” news and acknowledge the significance of the deal.
“It’s hard for anybody to raise this amount of money—anybody, period. And then when you throw into the pot the color of my skin, the body part that sits between my legs—then it gets even harder,” she says. “It’s important for everyone to see that things like this are possible, even though to me, we’re just doing what businesses do.”
Dixon says “it was time” for The Honey Pot to offer investors and its 73 employees liquidity. But, she told me, she turned down higher offers in favor of a partner that would allow The Honey Pot’s existing team to continue to run the business. Bloomberg reported in September that The Honey Pot could have been valued as high as $500 million as it explored a sale.
“Nobody knows our business better than us,” she says. No matter “if you’ve been in business for 20, 30, 40 years—you’ve been in business doing what you’ve been doing,” she says. “Nobody is going to know how to run Honey Pot better than this team that’s been doing it this whole time.”
Emma Hinchliffe
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@_emmahinchliffe
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ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Unicorn spotted. DataSnipper hit unicorn status last week under CEO Vidya Peters after the accounting and auditing automation platform notched $100 million in venture funding at a $1 billion valuation. DataSnipper’s automation capabilities position it to ease an industry-wide labor shortage by taking over the mundane and administrative aspects of the job. Coins2Day
- Test case. Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock announced that the university would require SAT or ACT scores from applicants again. Test scores were dropped from applications during COVID, but Beilock described how they “can be especially helpful in identifying students from less-resourced backgrounds who would succeed at Dartmouth but might otherwise be missed in a test-optional environment.” Washington Post
- Generating diversity. Some in the fashion industry are concerned that customizable fashion models generated by AI will hurt diversity efforts more than they promote them. Research shows that AI can emphasize a model’s racial stereotypes while others worry that AI models could reproduce the likeness of the real models they learn from. Coins2Day
- Stabilizing force. Prague-based telecommunications behemoth PPF is stable once more thanks to owner Renata Kellnerova, who inherited the $43 billion company when her husband died suddenly three years ago. After surviving the economic threat of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Kellner is reportedly “very actively involved” in eyeing investments in the west and preparing her three daughters for a potential hand-off. Bloomberg
- Quiet on care. A new investigation from the LAist found that almost half of California’s public universities failed to properly market the abortion pill services they’re required to offer students. The schools were ordered to provide abortion pills under a new law passed more than a year ago, but the LAist found that many failed to mention the service on their websites or provide instructions on how to access it. LAist
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Spanx appointed Cricket Whitton to CEO and named Nike alum Jeanne Jackson executive chair. American Express promoted Glenda McNeal to chief partner officer. Sweetgreen hired Rossann Williams as COO.
ON MY RADAR
How Caitlin Clark is changing basketball Wall Street Journal
What the trad wives taught me about my own marriage Bustle
How motherhood hurts careers The Economist
PARTING WORDS
"If I’ve kicked the door in, I’m just trying to stand here and leave it open for everybody else."
—Killers of the Flower Moon Actress Lily Gladstone on being the first Native American woman nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars
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