Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. It’s so beautiful here in Los Angeles. I love talking about the weather.

Today, I’m reading the Net-a-Porter tea leaves (maybe it’s gonna be okay?), sharing some insights about GLP-1 drugs and shopping (no, Phil, I am still not on Mounjaro, but thank you?), and offering you everything I know about what’s happening at Outdoor Voices (will the saga ever end?).

It’s crazy, but today marks a year since the announcement dropped that I was joining Puck. (Line Sheet officially launched a few weeks later.) I know many of you will soon be re-upping your annual membership, and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading these notes as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them. Special thanks to Gary Wassner, the first person to sign on after the WWD piece came out. No surprise, since he is one of the few people who still reads WWD. (JK, I very much appreciated that nice story. Really.) Anyway, this is a great time to send feedback: Give it to me. I heart you.

Mentioned in this issue: Outdoor Voices, Ashley Merrill, Tyler Haney, Net-a-Porter, Richemont, Gabrielle Conforti, Lululemon, Alo, Adanola, L Catterton, Bain, Glossier, Emily Weiss, Marisa Meltzer, Ozempic, Mounjaro, Ssense, Joey Zwillinger, Allbirds, and many more...

• The net-net on Net: The chatter this week was that Net-a-Porter—or YNAP, or whatever is left of it in the end—is close to a sale. First, I heard that both L Catterton and Bain Capital were still in the running to take the online luxury leader off the hands of Richemont, which should have never bought it in the first place. The L Catterton thing appears to be total B.S. The LVMH-linked private equity firm may have considered it early on in the process, but most of their fashion investments are stable businesses looking for the capital to scale, like Birkenstock, rather than distressed investments praying for vulture turnaround artistry. Bain, on the other hand, recently began raising a $4 billion “special situations fund,” created expressly to acquire distressed assets and the like, according to a report in Reuters. In the end, though, I’m hearing that the buyer might end up being a London-based investor—probably makes the most sense, given the specificity of the U.K. market (Net-a-Porter is also based there) and the unique circumstances (i.e., great brand, big customer base, messed-up business model, and tech issues that are going to take a long time to fix).

  Meanwhile, among the retailers still standing, both Moda Operandi and Saks.com are out raising money right now. A reader also asked earlier this week if I thought Montreal-based Ssense, once rumored to be prepping for an I.P.O., could swoop in and steal some of the market share from Farfetch, Net-a-Porter, and Matches: They support young designers more than any other global multibrand retailer, but they also sell big luxury brands and buy deep. My guess is that Ssense won’t be going public anytime soon—even in Canada!—but I do know that the company is run pretty leanly and was profitable for many years. (In 2021, it raised money from Sequoia Capital at a $4.1 billion valuation.) For all of these businesses, a big challenge is keeping inventory levels in check.

• Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels… at least when you’re on Ozempic: For months, I’ve been asking all you scientists about the societal consequences of GLP-1 drugs—will they kill the desire to do anything fun, including shop? For now, the threat to our G.D.P. appears to be minimal, at least according to a survey of more than 3,000 U.S. consumers, conducted by Toluna in partnership with The New Consumer (my husband Dan Frommer’s thing) and Coefficient Capital. Users of Ozempic, Mounjaro, and other semaglutide drugs with less pronounceable names didn’t necessarily say they were buying more or less fashion and beauty. But they did say that they were “trading up”—spending more on nicer brands—while consumers who aren’t on one of these drugs said they were trading down. This is true across all categories: GLP-1 users are buying nicer things, while drug-free impulsive types are buying cheap stuff.

  Makes sense. If GLP-1s are blocking your dopamine hit, then maybe you’ll finally be inclined to buy fewer, better things, like that one extremely terrible D.T.C. brand asked you to do all those years ago.

  One other little bit of info Dan pointed out: The study found that 31 percent of Gen Z and 32 percent of Millennials claimed that “just knowing about Ozempic” made them feel more pressure to lose weight. (Gen X and Boomers DGAF.) Helps to explain the “I only eat one meal a day but I’m not on the shot” trend.

As I reported last year, Merrill, who first invested in Outdoor Voices in 2020, bailed the company out in December and then fired president Gabrielle Conforti (whom she had personally installed years earlier) in an effort to reorganize the business. After talking to multiple people (and seeing some documentation), my understanding is that Outdoor Voices was generating more than $60 million in net sales in 2021 and 2022 under Conforti. The first half of 2023 was okay, too. But like most smallish apparel companies, especially ones that have raised several rounds of funding, OV had mounting debts. And things really started to dip during the second half of the year, which is when investor Oakwell sent out that fundraising deck valuing the company at $32 million pre-money.

Merrill was the one who ended up putting more money in, and got heavily involved again in December. She brought in executives from her sleepwear startup, Lunya, to consult, and canceled several planned production orders for Spring 2024. Like a traditional private equity investor, she wanted to strip everything back and get the company in selling shape. Merrill, who lives in Los Angeles, visited the Outdoor Voices offices a total of two times during this period, I’m told: once when she started and once for a product review.

That’s not all that surprising, of course. Investors are supposed to match capital to a strategy and then oversee the executives and operators to manage it day-to-day. The real problem, it seems, came down to execution. By the fall of 2023, Outdoor Voices owed many vendors money. Merrill paid some of the debts in December, but not all, and as I said, she also canceled many of the product orders for early spring in order to put the product she wanted in stores.

While the previous team had spent the last year attempting to regain some of that early Outdoor Voices magic, Merrill’s reference boards were much more generic: She was looking to Lululemon, Alo, and Adanola, all pretty standard hot-girl brands, while OV founder Tyler Haney’s singular aesthetic was more hot-girl-who-has-heard-of-The Memphis Group. To be fair, Haney also understood that the Southern sorority sister offered a path to scaling and widened the breadth of product before she was ousted in late 2019/early 2020. But you have to at least make the consumer think you’re different, even if you’re not, and Merrill’s approach was uninspiring, according to several employees.

Honestly, though, she still probably could have made it work on paper with the most basic of basic-bitch gear. Merrill’s actual problem was that she couldn’t get her product made fast enough, and while the company technically hit its sales goals for January and February, those targets had been drastically reduced from projections made just a few months earlier. Productivity in the stores was also an issue, especially a costly new location in New York.

My hunch is that Merrill will file for Chapter 11, like she did with Lunya when it was in trouble last summer. Maybe someone passionate about Outdoor Voices will buy it for cheap amid the restructuring, although I know at least one previously interested party who couldn’t be bothered at this point.

It’s funny—ironic?—that this all happened the same week my partner Rachel Strugatz wrote about the turnaround at Glossier, which has engaged a banker for a possible sale this year. As Rachel reported, Glossier will probably sell at a pretty high valuation, and its investors, who’ve kicked in $266 million over the years (including that insane Series E), will see a meaningful return—particularly Forerunner.

I stopped counting how much money Outdoor Voices raised a few years ago—definitely not that much—but I can’t underscore how important these two brands were when they launched in the early 2010s. It’s no surprise that Glossier’s Emily Weiss and Haney became friends: They are both captivating characters with a sixth sense for what people want to buy. Both of their brands were grippy, and inspired dozens of others, not only in terms of aesthetics—pale pink for Glossier, terrazzo tile for OV—but also in their approach to marketing and merchandising. They also shared investors.

Like almost all startup founders, both Weiss and Haney weren’t finance people, and they made mistakes managing their respective businesses. The biggest difference, perhaps, is that Weiss got out of her own way at the right time, and Haney did not. But I also think that Haney didn’t get that chance. Weiss became, in the end, a stronger executive, but beauty brands are also easier to scale, and easier to make profitable. Achieving a good margin on a pair of leggings is just a million times harder than a lip balm.

Celine is launching color cosmetics. [BoF]

A look back at Gianni Versace’s final collection. [Cabmate]

Chioma Nnadi’s first cover is out. [British Vogue]

The Independents Group, a private equity-backed network of fashion-adjacent events, communications, and marketing companies, has now acquired the London-based creative agency Kennedy. [Inbox]

Should your brand be on Reddit? [Link in Bio]

Two of my faves, Andrew Taylor and Robert Burke, have opened a strategic comms firm. [WWD]

How your vicuña sweater gets made. [Bloomberg]

Apparently, they talk about me in this episode. [How Long Gone]

The MediaLink guy is in trouble! (Brunello, Bottega, and Gearys are involved.) [In the Room]

File this under, I Know You Tried Hard But This Should Have Happened Years Ago, Bud. Joey Zwillinger is out as C.E.O. of Allbirds. Also, do we really need to have the Allbirds convo? The problem with Allbirds is that they are not good enough, and they never were. No turnaround plan will fix that. [The Information]

My friend (and great newsletter writer) Ali Pew has joined Cultured as fashion editor at large. [Inbox]

If you, like me, abandoned Dan Rydell and Casey McCall for Ben Convington and Noel Crane in the fall of 1998 (don’t be so judgy, I was 16!), then you might like this new podcast from Jam Session co-host Juliet Litman. [Dear Felicity]

Until Monday,
Lauren