Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. How is your mercury-retrograde, solar-eclipse-in-Aries week going? (There’s a reason I’m not traveling right now, and it’s not only because the air in Los Angeles smells like jasmine.) While I opted out of Monday’s ceremonial Burning of the Retinas, I’m excited to catch the next eclipse in 2044, when I’m 62 and have the time to order the special glasses on Temu.com.

What I did not miss was the Fashion Trust U.S. Awards, hosted Tuesday night at a big ol’, 26,800-square-foot mansion in Beverly Hills. More precisely, it was the all-lit-up-in-red home of Jordana Reuben, friend of Tania Fares, the nonprofit’s ever-determined mastermind. More on her below.

I have gathered a few cute things for you up top, but today is really about Rachel “[email protected]” Strugatz, with news of yet another beauty brand on the market and how it’s becoming the Bobbi Brown of this generation. Hint: Merit’s former C.E.O., Katherine Power—Who What Wear co-founder, maker of wine with Cameron Diaz, and another collector of notable Los Angeles real estate—plays an outsize role.

Also, it’s been a few emails since I made you feel bad for not subscribing, but acting like you do, over-forwarding, being a brat and the like… don’t do that. Use the discount code LINESHEET and get it from the source.

Mentioned in this issue: Merit, Katherine Power, Condé Nast, Roger Lynch, Andy Lew, Vogue, Zendaya, Dave Kimbell, Bobbi Brown, Law Roach, Annie Leibovitz, Carlijn Jacobs, Outdoor Voices, Tania Fares, Fashion Trust U.S., Philippe Pinatel, Hailey Beiber, Emily Weiss, Nicole Richie, Jamie Mizrahi, Westman Atelier, and many more.

• Puck’s artsy ambitions: I can’t wait for Wall Power, Puck’s new private email from veteran journalist Marion Maneker, which is launching soon. (Sign up!) Marion will cover the “mega-auctions and galleries, elite buyers and sellers, and the power players who run this opaque world.” What more could you want? You’re all rich (right?) and you all collect (true). Of all the markets I wanted Puck to expand into, it was art… and my opinion is what matters. I’m sure we’ll even get some crossover in the bold-faced name department.
• Happy five-year anniversary, Rog: There was a “global company meeting” yesterday at Condé Nast, where April 22 marks five years since Roger Lynch was named C.E.O. The reports from the inside were that there wasn’t much to report: “The most uninspiring town hall to date,” said one sad employee. “No plan. No strategy. No life lol.” A longer-term employee told me they were disappointed that big questions were not answered, but suspect Lynch felt that he answered them. People on the layoff list remain sequestered in the centralized content pit, and everyone wants something to happen.

  Well, there is something happening, at least: Check out the May covers of British and American Vogue, both featuring Zendaya, both styled by her very own Law Roach. This isn’t the first time the transatlantic Vogues have taken advantage of time with a superstar by eking out as much content as physically possible. (See the matching Adele covers in 2021 and the Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington curtain-raiser last September.) The May covers, both of which are fine, look and feel different—Annie Leibovitz shot the American one, Carlijn Jacobs shot the British one—but feature the same profile by Marley Marius inside. (Fair.)

  Obviously, magazines aren’t what they used to be, and Zendaya using Roach indicates to me that she had the upper hand. Lesser magazines allow stars to hire their own stylists for cover shoots, but as I’ve mentioned before, I find this approach hackneyed. Celebs feel way more comfortable with their personal stylist, but comfort doesn’t always generate a memorable cover. Zendaya and Roach do have a unique relationship, having worked together for a dozen years, so perhaps it was worth it for Vogue to capture that on the page. I’m feeling neutral.

• A small-but-significant O.V. update: I heard from a bud in the vicinity of Oakwell Capital, once a major investor in Outdoor Voices, that the firm no longer has a financial interest in the diminished business. Outdoor Voices, from what this person knows, is currently controlled by Ashley Merrill. (Seems Oakwell was happily booted at the end of last year, when Merrill threw in more cash.) Everything else I reported on Monday? That still stands.

  People are sending me crazy ideas about who should acquire Outdoor Voices, and why. A lot of people want me to know that bringing Ty Haney back is a bad idea; I never said it was good! I said it was fun. If you buy Outdoor Voices, will you give me a heads-up? My number is +1 646-241-3902.

• More on Tania Fares and that Fashion Trust U.S. party: We love a good cause, so congrats to the recipients of last night’s awards (and a total of nearly $500,000 in funding for emerging U.S. brands) including Charles Harbison, Batsheva Hay, Esha Soni, and Don’t Let Disco. It never ceases to amaze me how many celebs come out for these events, especially because pretty much none of them are getting paid. (Kudos to Zooey Deschanel, the emcee, for working Worldnet into her script, and to Da’Vine Joy Randolph for looking great when presenting Harbison with his award, and to Glen Powell for showing up. Nobody complained when Macy Gray sang, “Thank You for Being a Friend.”)

  We should talk about Fares at length in a future issue, and her unwillingness to take no for an answer. She has been backing young brands for ages, since she was living full-time in London, and launched Fashion Trust Arabia with the Qataris in 2018. She knows how to convince people like Stephanie Horton, the head of global consumer marketing at Google, and Andy Lew, C.E.O. of Lanvin Group-owned St. John Knits, to underwrite specific awards. Then there’s her savvy recruitment of larger-than-life nice person Laura Brown to the board. Who else, other than Brown, could get Maria Cornejo to come to L.A. for one night? Isabel Marant even gave out an award.

  P.S., I had the best seat in the house, at the St. John table, between Lew and Lanvin Group’s new C.E.O., Eric Chan. Sex and the City’s Kristin Davis was in the vicinity, but more importantly I got to see my new favorite person, Morgan Stewart McGraw, who has 1.6 million Instagram followers and a fashion line run in cahoots with none other than The Loyalist, the platform co-founded by my two other new favorite people, Max and Xander Ritz. I’ll be writing about all of them again soon. (By the way, I just bought two dresses from St. John, unprompted. There is a nice-looking dress shortage in this country.)

Merit is younger than other rumored M&A targets, like Summer Fridays, Glossier, etcetera, but I’ve been told that retail sales (meaning in-store and online sales) were over $100 million in 2023, implying actual revenue of at least $50 million—a sweet spot right now for strategics eyeing their next acquisition. The brand also just brought on a real C.E.O., Philippe Pinatel, who left his post as global brand president at Lauder-owned MAC Cosmetics in January.

Merit’s rise has been quieter than other brands in the space, which are often helmed by celebrities like Bieber or Selena Gomez. (The Mario in Makeup by Mario happens to be Kim Kardashian’s makeup artist.) A lot of the success should be credited to Power, a savvy founder who’s less founder-y than many of her peers; she’s not at every event, or on every panel, or posting videos of herself crying in front of her brand’s Sephora display. Power has also become an investor in her own right: In 2020 she was named an operating partner at Sonoma Brands, a private equity firm that invested in Versed, Merit, Supergoop, and Vacation, and last year she joined venture capital firm Greycroft as a partner to lead early-stage C.P.G. investments.

Power, who is BFFs with other celebrities (Nicole Richie) and celebrity adjacents, such as stylist Jamie Mizrahi, also looks and plays the part. Her skin is lifted, taut, and glowy, and her lips are plump, even when she wears matte lipstick—in other words, she looks rich. She also makes wine with Cameron Diaz, because somebody has to. (The two launched Avaline, which sells affordable, organically farmed wines that aren’t very good for between $24 to $30.) MyDomaine once did a piece about Power putting her Beverly Hills home on the market for $2.4 million, not to be confused with the 4,000-square-foot Little Holmby home she listed for $8 million in 2018 or the $27 million Bel-Air estate that she became the owner of two months ago.

Power presciently understood this all along, and baked retail distribution into business models practically from inception. Versed launched at Target in 2019, and Merit entered Sephora about a month after its own website went live. This strategy has served Power’s beauty lines well, especially Merit. “She did not have to rely on direct-to-consumer and could really think about scaling something quickly,” someone familiar with the business told me. “She had that in the partnership with Sephora. They saw what she had done with Versed and Target, so there was a lot of credibility to draft off of there.”

Earlier this month Ulta C.E.O. Dave Kimbell hinted at a potential beauty slowdown, but the insiders I’ve talked to remain cautiously optimistic. There’s “great demand and great retail strength with key retailers” and those margins, one source said, even if “there has been a little bit of roadkill,” referring to BH Cosmetics, Becca, and Too Faced, which “turned out to be overpriced.” There are other concerns, too, the source added: “How sustainable is a particular brand? Is it too trendy?”

But the kind of beauty Merit sells never really goes out of style. There’s always a woman who wants brownish pink lipstick, a little blush, and a swipe of mascara. No matter what the trends are­­—no-makeup makeup or tons of makeup makeup—there will be a beauty customer who wants what Merit, Bobbi Brown, Westman Atelier, and Jones Road (Brown’s newish makeup brand) are selling.

Until tomorrow,
Lauren