Big M&A week, A lot of money moving, Plus Andrei from Finsi on why your ROAS is lying to you.
Hey DTC Friends,
Welcome to the first Field Notes (Thursday Sends) on Substack :)
If Tuesday’s Signals is where we track what is happening in the market, Field Notes is where we slow down and go deeper.
This week was heavy on M&A. Olaplex is headed to Henkel. Chewy is acquiring a vet clinic network. Vacation locked in a minority investment from VMG. A kids snack brand just closed a seed round. And the deals keep stacking.
But first, take a second to fill out the form. It helps connect the right people and surface opportunities for brands looking to grow.
Connect w/ the 1800DTC Community
If you’re a SaaS tool, agency, or vendor in the DTC space, this one’s for you.
We’re relaunching the 1-800-DTC directory at the end of May, and we’re building something that goes way beyond a simple listing. Think proprietary operator data, real stack intelligence, and a platform built to help brands actually find and choose the right tools fast.
Before we open it up, we’re giving our vendor community first access. If you want to be among the first to know what’s new, see features before anyone else, and lock in your spot early, get on the waitlist now.
This list is exclusive to our vendor and partner community. No fluff, just real updates as we build.
This edition is presented by DOSS
I have been following what the team at DOSS is building for a while now, and genuinely excited to have them presenting this week.
DOSS is building what they call an Operations Cloud. Think of it as a unified suite of apps that manages the flow of goods, dollars, and data across your entire business. Sounds like a lot of tools claim that, but the way they are executing it is different. Their team actually understands how businesses run in the real world, not just how software is supposed to work on paper.
They just announced a $55M Series B, which makes a lot of sense when you see what they are building toward. The capital is going toward getting companies live faster, building better systems, and developing agentic tools that remove the human bottleneck from operations.
What really resonates with me is their approach. After working with brands like Verve Coffee Roasters and Mezcla, they noticed a pattern: the businesses that win are the ones where software adapts to how they operate, not the other way around. That is the right way to build.
Worth checking out if you are thinking about how your operations stack scales with you.
Chomps just dropped something new: Chicken Chomps, the brand’s first move beyond beef and venison into poultry. Same clean ingredient standard, same high-protein format, just a leaner option for people who want something lighter in rotation.
What makes this interesting is not the product itself. It is the timing and what it signals. Chomps has been one of the most consistently well-executed better-for-you snack brands over the last several years, surpassing $100M in retail sales and building real loyalty in a category that is brutally competitive. Moving into chicken is not a random experiment. It is a deliberate bid to claim more of the meat snack aisle rather than staying locked in the premium beef stick corner.
Brands that have earned trust in one lane tend to move fast when they expand. Chomps has that trust. We will be watching to see how the chicken SKU performs at retail.
Andrei Rebrov and Misha Druzhinin didn’t set out to build another analytics dashboard. Andrei spent 11 years as CTO and Co-Founder of Scentbird, scaling the fragrance subscription to over a million subscribers and $300M+ in revenue. Along the way, he kept running into the same pattern across subscription brands: plenty of data, but nobody connecting the dots between ads, email, subscriptions, and support to answer the one question that actually matters: where is revenue leaking, and what do we do about it?
Misha brings 20 years of software experience from Amazon (retail and AWS) and Datadog, where he managed $40M in retained revenue through customer management. Together they built Finsi, an AI-powered growth team for e-commerce subscription brands.
Most brands say they have a growth problem. You say they actually have a data connection problem. Explain that.
Andrei: “Every founder I talk to wants to grow. They’re spending on Meta and Google, running Klaviyo campaigns, managing subscriptions on Recharge. But they’re doing it in silos. Their ads team doesn’t know which campaigns produce subscribers who stay past month three. Their email team doesn’t know which subscribers just had a failed payment. Their retention person — if they even have one — is manually pulling reports that take a full workday.
One brand we work with had a blended ROAS that looked great at 4-5x. When we split it by channel, one campaign was producing subscribers who churned three times faster than the rest. They’d been pouring money into it for months because the blended number hid the problem.”
There’s a lot of analytics software out there. What makes Finsi different?
Andrei: “Two things. First, we don’t just analyze — we execute. Finsi drafts email campaigns in your brand voice, manages ad budgets, creates customer segments, and deploys retention flows directly into Klaviyo. Most tools stop at the dashboard. We go through to the action.
Second, we built this for subscription brands specifically. Not generic e-commerce. Not SaaS. Subscription DTC — the brands on Shopify and Recharge and Klaviyo that live and die by whether subscribers stay past month three. That focus means every feature is designed around the metrics that matter for subscriptions: cohort LTV, acquisition channel quality, subscriber lifecycle, involuntary churn recovery.”
What is the shift in ecommerce that people are underestimating right now?
Andrei: “AI agents are going to audit your subscriptions for you. Right now, 41% of consumers say they have subscription fatigue. Within two years, AI assistants will proactively recommend which subscriptions to cancel based on usage patterns. When that happens, the brands with clean retention data — the ones who can prove they’re delivering value — survive. The ones still relying on dark patterns and hidden cancel buttons don’t.
The window to build retention infrastructure is now, before AI subscription management becomes mainstream.”
What is the hardest lesson from building Finsi?
Andrei: “Your real competitor isn’t another software tool — it’s the agency. Brands are paying $5,000 to $15,000 a month for agencies to do what Finsi does for $500 to $5,000 a month. But they’re comfortable with agencies because agencies come with a human who gets on calls and explains things. We had to learn that showing a dashboard isn’t enough. You have to tell people what to do in plain language, and then do it for them. That’s why we built the AI agents — they don’t just surface insights, they take action.”
If you could go back to day one, what would you do differently?
Andrei: “Talk to 50 brands before writing a single line of code. We talked to maybe 15. The product would have been sharper faster if we’d really understood the workflow — not just the problem, but how people actually work with their data day to day. The other thing: hire for the intersection of marketing and engineering. Finsi sits at that crossover, and finding people who think in both languages is the hardest part.”
Read the full founder interview:
Olaplex is going to Henkel for $1.4 billion.
Here is the full picture on this one, because the arc is worth understanding.
Olaplex went public in 2021 at a valuation that briefly cleared $15 billion. It was a genuine moment: a science-led, salon-native brand that had built real cult status and proven a premium price point that customers would pay without blinking. Then the category got crowded fast, competition from imitators intensified, leadership changed, and the stock spent the next few years getting repriced to reality. By early 2026 shares were trading below a dollar.
Henkel stepped in with a $2.06 per share offer, a 55% premium to where the stock sat the day before the deal landed. Total transaction value: $1.4 billion, pegging Olaplex at 3.3x its $423 million in 2025 revenue. The brand goes private. Advent International exits. The Olaplex name stays.
What Henkel is clearly building here is haircare coverage from top to bottom. The Not Your Mother’s acquisition at roughly $927 million covered the mass tier. Olaplex covers prestige. Together they are constructing a portfolio designed to challenge L’Oreal and P&G across every consumer price point in the category.
For the brands and operators in this community, the Olaplex story cuts both ways. It is a proof point that science-led positioning, genuine professional credibility, and loyal consumer adoption can create real brand equity worth acquiring. It is also a reminder that going public too high on momentum, in a category that can be imitated quickly, creates a pressure cooker that is very hard to manage from the inside. Henkel sees what is left and is betting it is worth $1.4 billion. That is a bet worth watching play out. → Full story
Chewy is acquiring Modern Animal.
On the surface this reads as a healthcare deal. Look a little closer and it is really a customer relationship play.
Modern Animal built something genuinely different in the veterinary space. It operates 29 owned clinics and pairs that physical footprint with 24/7 virtual care through a membership model currently serving over 100,000 families. Before the acquisition agreement the company had raised $46M in its most recent funding round, was running at $100M in annual revenue, and had grown that figure 85% year over year. Mature clinics in the network are running EBITDA margins above 20% and generating revenue per location at roughly twice the industry average. Those are not typical veterinary clinic numbers.
For Chewy, the deal expands its clinic footprint from 18 locations to 47 and is projected to add more than $125M in annualized run rate revenue. More importantly, Chewy sees a 15 to 20% lift in net sales per active customer across its healthcare ecosystem as the two networks integrate.
The bigger story here is what Chewy is building toward. It is one of the most successful DTC-to-omnichannel transitions we have seen, and this move is about deepening the relationship with the customer rather than just adding another product line. The brands paying attention to what Chewy is doing should ask themselves the same question: where else in your customer’s life could you show up in a way that actually matters to them?
Thanks for reading 1800DTC! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Money Moving
Vacation Inc. closed a minority investment from VMG Partners this week. No number disclosed publicly but VMG’s history in the space tells you what kind of bet this is. They backed Drunk Elephant before the Shiseido exit at $845M, K18 before Unilever came calling, and Kosas is still in portfolio. Vacation was pulling somewhere between $60M and $75M in 2025 net sales and generating around 5 million weekly organic social views through some of the sharpest nostalgic branding in the market right now. VMG just closed a $1 billion Fund VI so the capital is fresh. One of the more interesting beauty investments of the year.
Kids snack brand Cadootz closed a $3M seed round to fuel its move into nationwide retail. The better-for-you kids snack category continues to attract both consumer attention and early-stage capital, and Cadootz has been building real momentum heading into this raise. → More
New in the Market
Dollar Shave Club launched its first women’s grooming line this week, and the positioning is exactly what you would expect from a brand that built its entire identity around calling out industry nonsense. CEO Larry Bodner described it as “anti-Venus, anti-Billie, anti-Flamingo.” No pink packaging, no pink tax, no glitter. A six-blade razor, a set of shave aids, and prices that run from $5 to $10. Available now on their site and Amazon. The launch campaign pairs a traditional direct-to-camera ad with an AI-generated spot, and both are worth watching. The women’s grooming market is estimated at $1.8 billion and this brand knows how to take a swing at a category. → More
MUSH just landed at nearly every Starbucks location in the U.S. The ready-to-eat overnight oats brand will follow that with a 7-Eleven launch later this month, pushing its total store count past 36,000. Since launching in 2015 the brand has moved over 200 million cups and crossed $100M in retail sales last year. Distribution milestones like this are years in the making and this one is worth acknowledging.
Esspo officially launched this week: an espresso soda built to drink like a cold brew but feel like a soda, hitting Whole Foods with three flavors. Each can carries 120mg of caffeine and 240mg of L-Theanine. The brand is co-founded by Philippe von Borries and Justin Stefano, who previously built Refinery29 and sold it to Vice Media for $400M. Two years in development, strong founder pedigree, and landing at Whole Foods out of the gate. One to watch in functional beverage.
Create expanded into creatine and electrolytes this week with a new supplement launch, continuing its push into the broader performance nutrition space. Creatine is having a serious moment in wellness and Create is moving to own more of the conversation. → More
Kylie Jenner’s Sprinter brand stepped into hydration with K20, a new skin hydration mix launching online and in stores now. The brand continues to build out its functional beverage footprint. →More
Commerce Roundtable: April 20 and 21 | Austin, TX
This may be the best DTC event OF THE YEAR! 350+ founders, marketers, and operators building real brands, all in one room.
Brands like Cuts Clothing, Portland Leather Goods, Kosas, Instant Hydration, Battlbox, Humann, Heart & Soil, Frost Buddy, Mini Katana, and BREZ will be in the mix.
What you’re walking into:
• 18+ operators on stage sharing what’s actually working
• A venue built for connection, not just content
• Real networking, not badge scanning
• Premium Austin breakfast + lunch
• Sunset happy hour with open bar
• Sponsor experiences that are actually worth your time
And yeah… $220,000 in on-stage giveaways.
80% of tickets are already gone.
Code or Exclusive Offer for 1800DTC Audience: Use code 1800DTC for $100 off.
GROW LA: April 22 | West Hollywood
I will be at GROW LA on April 22 and would love to connect with anyone coming.
40 speakers from Amazon, Crocs, CUTS, Caraway, Fabletics, Wayfair, and e.l.f. Beauty. 30 tactical sessions. 800 attendees. One full day of ecomm leaders sharing what they are actually winning with right now, plus a solid showcase of AI tools worth knowing about.
If you are going, shoot me a note at zach@1800dtc.com. Let’s find time.
That is Field Notes for Issue 002.
What brand move or funding story from this week has your attention? And if you want to be featured in a future Unwrapped, hit reply and tell me what you are building.
See you Tuesday next week.
— Zach and the 1800 Hotline Team
Find a partner, tool, or agency: 1800DTC.com
Become a sponsor: Partner with us
Get connected with our partners: Brand Form
Thanks for reading 1800DTC! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Everything you need to build a better DTC brand, business and tech stack.
