“With some probability over some period of time DTC inventory will set a price.”How did we find it
Having found success with 📝General Assembly, 📝Adam Pritzker founded 📝Assembled Brands in 2013. Adam was the first person that I know who saw the coming explosion of emerging consumer brands. Assembled Brands co-founded, provided the capital for, and operated a number of luxury consumer brands by the time I joined in 2015.
One of the brands, Khaite, was growing rapidly and consuming a lot of 📝Working Capital. We talked to a number of factoring companies (I practically had to buy a fax machine to communicate with these traditional merchant lenders). Factors have been involved in you receiving consumer goods since the dawn of the retail store. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that they haven’t adopted any technology since the dawn of the retail store either.
We had to buy a fax machine to communIcate with the factoring industry.
Using data from QuickBooks, Shopify, Google Analytics and Facebook, we built 150 📝Integrated Financial Models for emerging consumer brands. We benchmarked them against each other. We defined characteristics that made some brands successful and some brands infinite cash suckers. Chief among them were repeat purchasers and positive 📝unit economics.
We made a few loans and watched how they evolved. We built a pipeline of opportunity. The following year we formed Assembled Brands Capital, LLC and funded it with $100m from Oaktree Capital.
As of 2021, Assembled Brands Capital was a profitable and growing credit fund, and I remained on the board and 📝Credit Committee. I left my day-to-day responsibilities in early 2020 to found 📝BrightZen Systems, where we’ve productized this as our 📝Fund Incubation Services.
Related
- What is a 📝Financeable Equation?
- 📝Net Orderly Liquidation Value
- 📝How We Started Assembled Brands
- 📝Insights in identifying financeable equations