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.
The Honey Pot founder Bea Dixon. Courtesy of The Honey Pot “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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