TRAUB Weekly News Update // Week of April 15, 2019

Here's our roundup of this week's top retail news. Soylent debuts its first food product, Neiman Marcus takes a stake in a resale site, Pinterest's IPO raises $1.4B and more! 

 M&A and INVESTMENTS

• Neiman Marcus takes minority stake in resale site Fashionphile Retail Dive
• Unilever acquired supplement brand Olly WWD
• Candid Raises $63 Million To Be The Warby Parker Of Braces Forbes
• Direct-to-consumer telehealth business Ro raises an $85 million Series B Tech Crunch
• Martha Stewart, Emeril Lagasse Sold to Marquee Brands WWD
• Kindbody raises $15M, will open a ‘Fertility Bus’ with mobile testing & assessments Tech Crunch
• AMI Offloads National Enquirer To Hudson Media WWD

INDUSTRY NEWS 

Here’s Soylent’s New Product. It’s Food. 
So Soylent — the contrarian food replacement company that made its name hawking beige, drinkable meals to time-crunched Silicon Valley workers — on Thursday unleashed the next-best-thing: Soylent Squared, a 100-calorie, very much chewable “mini-meal,” which is not a cube, but instead a perfect (perfect!) square. For fans, Squared represents an obvious, if modest, next step, from liquid to solid. To the rest of the world, Soylent Squared is a snack-size protein bar. NY Times

Walmart partners with Kidbox for subscription service
Walmart announced a partnership with children apparel curation retailer Kidbox featuring apparel from 120 kids' brands, including BCBG, Butter Super Soft, C&C California and Puma. The Walmart Kidbox stylebox includes four to five garments, including sweaters, denim, dresses and T-shirts, in sizes 0 to 14 for girls and 0 to 16 for boys, for $48, about 50% off the suggested retail price. Customers can order a box and schedule delivery on demand or sign-up for automatic shipments of up to six boxes a year. Retail Dive

French Titans’ Pledges to Notre-Dame Pass €850 Million

In the aftermath of the fire at Notre-Dame, one of the great symbols of France, the luxury industry — another symbol of the country, thanks to names such as Dior, Louis Vuitton and Saint Laurent — has pledged hundreds of millions of euros to the cathedral’s restoration. The donations were followed on Tuesday by other pledges that soon surpassed 850 million euros, or about $960 million, and included beauty, energy, technology and finance companies as well as private individuals. NY Times

Pinterest IPO Raises $1.4 Billion as It Shuns Social-Media Tag

Pinterest operates in a crowded digital marketing space, where Google and Facebook get the lion’s share of ad dollars, and a smattering of smaller platforms like Twitter and Snap get the rest. The San Francisco-based company, which serves as a sort of digital bulletin board for pictures and ideas for furniture, fashion, weddings, recipes and more, has a direct line to millions of people who are looking for specific things to buy. That may give it an edge in making money from its user base compared with some of its peers. BoF 

See Everlane’s first sneaker. It’s green, cheap, and so normcore-chic 

Sneakers are the shoe of our time, as comfortable as they are stylish, with countless variations possible. “Sneakers have become part of the American uniform,” says Allison Melville, Everlane’s general manager of footwear and accessories. “We think of them as a closet staple, along with jeans and T-shirts.” But sneakers also have a very large environmental footprint. Today, Everlane is unveiling an eco-friendly sneaker, dubbed the Trainer, that has been designed with as little virgin plastic as possible, and is also carbon neutral. In keeping with Everlane’s normcore aesthetic, the shoe is basic and monochromatic, with a classic running shoe silhouette. It costs $98, and comes in a range of colors from navy to pink to yellow.  Fast Company

COMINGS & GOINGS 

• J. Jill Names Mark Webb CFO WWD
• Schiaparelli Parts Ways With Design Director Bertrand Guyon WWD
  
  

GOOD READS

• Venture Capital is getting into...Astrology? Read more in Erin Griffith's profile for the NY Times