BOSTON, June 1, 2017 – Yellow Wood Partners, a leading private equity firm focused on investing in consumer brands and companies, today announced the signing of a definitive agreement to sell PDC Brands, a rapidly growing provider of beauty, personal care and wellness brands, to CVC Capital Partners.
Founded in 1981, PDC is a rapidly growing beauty and personal care products company with a portfolio of category-leading brands across wellness, hair care, beauty & cosmetics, fragrance, and bath & body care. PDC’s portfolio of products can be found at major retailers throughout the US, UK and in 60 additional markets globally.
Dana Schmaltz, Founding Partner of Yellow Wood Partners, said, “During our partnership with PDC Brands the company grew dramatically with revenues growing over 4x and EBITDA growing over 5x over the last five years. The strong performance has been driven by strong organic sales growth combined with the addition of five acquisitions of nine brands that were added to the portfolio. With these efforts the Company has emerged as a global leader providing unique and innovative beauty and personal care products that connect with today’s consumers. Yellow Wood is extremely appreciative of the partnership built with CEO James Stammer and the senior management team at PDC, and particularly the collaboration, creativity and exceptional performance of the entire PDC team. The time is right time for PDC to become a key part of a larger partnership with access to all the global resources CVC brings to take PDC to the next level. We wish our good friends continued success.”
Mr. Stammer commented, “The Yellow Wood team completely understood our business and provided extremely helpful tools and functional skill sets each step of the way, enabling our brands to grow and thrive. This successful transaction clearly benefits our employees, customers, and the entire PDC Brands’ family. Our management and employees did an outstanding job and now, as part of CVC, we will have access to increased financial, marketing, and operational resources where we will continue to do very well.”
Closing of the transaction is subject to approval by the relevant competition authorities and is expected in June 2017. William Blair and Jefferies served as financial advisors to PDC and Fried Frank served as legal counsel. Nomura and Perella Weinberg acted as financial advisors and White & Case acted as legal advisor to CVC in the transaction.
About Yellow Wood Partners
Yellow Wood Partners is a Boston-based private investment firm that invests exclusively in the consumer industry in the lower middle market. The firm seeks to acquire branded consumer products across a variety of channels including mass, drug, food, specialty, club and e-commerce and utilizes the firm’s functional operating resources to help maximize brand performance. Yellow Wood combines investment expertise with complementary marketing, sales, finance, operations, and international skills to help form strong partnerships with its portfolio companies. For more information, please visit www.yellowwoodpartners.com.
About CVC Capital Partners
CVC Capital Partners is a leading private equity and investment advisory firm. Founded in 1981, CVC today has a network of 23 offices and approximately 400 employees throughout Europe, Asia and the U.S. To date, CVC has secured commitments of over US$107 billion from some of the world's leading institutional investors across its private equity and credit strategies. In total, CVC currently manages over US$65 billion of assets. Today, funds managed or advised by CVC are invested in 50 companies worldwide, employing c.310,000 people in numerous countries. Together, these companies have combined annual sales of over US$70 billion. For further information about CVC please visit: www.cvc.com
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