Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. Tonight, I’m heading to L’Avenue at Saks Fifth Avenue for a Puck private dinner with the one and only Marc Metrick, C.E.O. of Saks. I love co-hosting these things because they are off the record, and only fun-and-smart people show up. My afterparty is the Hate Reads party. See you at one or the other, I hope.

Today, we’ve got some LVMH real estate news, the requisite Condé union update, a report from the Ralph Lauren show (my podcast predictions were spot-on), and a glittering array of gems from beauty queen Rachel Strugatz—including a dispatch from the Estée Lauder situation room, and a much-needed analysis of the category’s slammin’ M&A market. (P.S., you can always email my favorite reporter at Rachel@puck.news with feedback and beauty industry tips.)

Alas, you’ll have to wait till tomorrow for me to get into Frasers repurchasing the intellectual property of Matches after declaring bankruptcy and liquidating. Yup, the stuff is still up on Walmart. (Except for… The Row! It’s gone! I hope I was helpful.) I will also address what I believe happened to stoke the rumor, published yesterday in Bloomberg, that LVMH might sell Marc Jacobs. (The company vehemently denied that it has even considered selling the brand, to which I say: good.)

Mentioned in this issue: Estée Lauder, LVMH, the Condé Union, Roger Lynch, Anna Wintour, Sephora, Stan Duncan, Ralph Lauren, Polo Bar, Vennette Ho, Colleen Hoover, Olive & June, Marc Metrick, Sarah Gibson Tuttle, Lina Khan, more Challengers fashion, and the Emily Weiss brownstone.

• More luxury real estate news you need to know: I hear that LVMH just won the bid for 673 Madison Avenue, a sweet little building on the corner of 61st Street, not far from the old Barneys New York. It’s part of a portfolio managed by Duell that also includes 5 East 57th Street (part of that stretch we’ve discussed before) as well as some residential properties downtown. How much LVMH paid, I don’t know, but the asking price for 673 Madison was $35 million, with the whole bundle of Manhattan joy estimated to be worth between $150 million and $200 million. A rep for LVMH declined to comment.
• When you intentionally cc: I don’t want to give management ammunition, but I think the Condé Nast union may be in crisis. After a union meeting yesterday, several members remarked on a “vibe shift.” Is the union losing? Well, it’s not winning, and the division between the people who choose to strike next week and those who don’t will likely widen the fissure. Meanwhile, union members working at Vanity Fair, Bon Appétit, and Epicurious continue to embarrass the Big Three—Roger Lynch, Anna Wintour, and Stan Duncan—by sending emails to the whole company, citing poor pay, poor working conditions, and general unfair treatment, and noting that they will indeed strike if management does not come back to the bargaining table. Perhaps it will be addressed at today’s board meeting. Your move, Rog!
• What do you want to know about the Ralph Lauren show?: I was there Monday evening, so allow me to fill you in. It took place in the brand’s corporate headquarters, cleared out and stripped back to a jute runway, not entirely dissimilar to his first-ever show in 1972, which was also staged at the office. Something of a full-circle moment for an 84-year-old designer, even if he will, undoubtedly, keep working until he can’t anymore. And, just like it was 52 years ago, there were not a lot of people—I heard about 90—but there were a lot of journalists, some flown in from Italy and the U.K., plus a tight little creator corner, featuring Morgan Stewart McGraw, Charlotte Groeneveld, and Tylynn Nguyen. Glenn Close was probably the biggest star, alongside Jessica Chastain and Kerry Washington—not bad for a Monday.

  The Lauren family was there, of course, and close friends. The collection itself, designed for holiday, hit all the Ralph Lauren notes—a velvet column dress, a shimmering polo shirt, a tux (for her), and lots of greige, as one friend remarked—and leaned heavily into the Western obsessions. (Note the steel-toe cowboy boots.) Lauren, per usual, looked better than anyone, in a teal and black accented-yoke shirt, vintage jeans, and a pair of gorpcore sneakers.

  Afterward, we all walked over to the Polo Bar, where perennial RL fixture (chief of staff and head of hospitality) Charles Fagan presided over the tables, organized by clique. All the Hearst editors were together, all the Condé editors, all the youngs. Ralph and Ricky and their crew in one corner, Sara Moonves and Derek Blasberg in another. Everyone was relaxed. So, I guess the night was about the pleasure of familiarity.

• Here’s Rachel on the latest Estée Lauder intrigue: Despite a 5 percent increase in net sales and C.E.O. Fabrizio Freda’s description of the second half of the fiscal year as an “inflection” point, the market wasn’t convinced. By 1 p.m. today, Estée Lauder had shares dipped by 15 percent.

  Outwardly, ELC keeps talking about a profit recovery plan that’s apparently underway, but it still sounds vague to me. A stronger, more detailed articulation of that plan—gesturing at layoffs or restructuring or a new licensing arrangement—might have boosted analyst confidence and gone a long way in the market. (By the way, when are those 5 percent layoffs happening?). It’s “the beginning of the recovery,” a very senior employee inside the company told me.

  Meanwhile, ELC is really betting on Amazon. Clinique was the first of the conglomerate’s brands to launch on the e-comm giant back in March, and Freda called early results “very promising” and “extraordinarily positive.” (It almost makes you wonder what took so long…) I’m told that nearly every Lauder brand will launch on Amazon by year’s end and that sales projections are “aggressive.” I also heard that L’Oréal is none too pleased about Lauder’s Amazon pivot. “L’Oreal thought they had this advantage,” a beauty executive said.

  One last thought: What the heck is happening with Aveda and Origins? If anyone knows, you know where to find me (Rachel@puck.news). —Rachel Strugatz

Olive & June, which sells cheap-ish polish and press-ons at Target and Walmart, has attracted less attention in the industry than Summer Fridays, a bestseller at Sephora. But Tuttle’s business, which generates similar revenue at a much lower price point (around $9 per bottle of polish), is arguably as impressive. At the outset, Tuttle wanted to create the next Essie—and, these days, Olive & June’s sales are bigger than Essie’s at Target, according to IRI data. Olive & June’s “It Ends With Us” polishes—a savvy collaboration with author Colleen Hoover, whose wildly popular yet trashy beach reads outsold the Bible in 2022—also led to record sales earlier this year.

Interestingly, Olive & June wasn’t always a product line. Tuttle launched the venture as a chi-chi Los Angeles nail salon back in 2013. The first Beverly Hills location was designed for people who get $100 mani-pedis, and for a few years, Olive & June definitely was the spot to get manicures in the city. Tuttle, however, quickly realized that product is a far more lucrative business than services. In 2019, she launched a cute little “mani system” that came with polish and the tools to do an at-home manicure. The brand debuted at Target shortly thereafter, just in time for a Covid-fueled at-home manicure boom. (Alas, the three salons closed in 2020).

Although Olive & June has not yet officially kicked off a sale process, I heard that there’s been inbound interest from some sizable companies. And with the beauty industry’s favorite banker fishing around for a buyer, S.G.T. might have her exit.

Ho is also currently liaising with Goldman Sachs on the potential sale of Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty, which is expected to sell for around $2 billion. Summer Fridays likewise tapped Ho to explore a sale process, which I reported in March. As one beauty executive put it, “Vennette understands the story almost as well as the founder does.” This person added: “She connects with businesses from the beginning, not when they’re already big. When you’re doing $2 million to $5 million in revenue, she wants to connect and see what’s going on.”

Why hasn’t Ho set up her own boutique or moved to a larger bank, like Goldman or Morgan? Ho had worked at the boutique Financo for more than a decade when Raymond James bought the firm in 2020. She’s likely on an earnout and has a preferred deal vig. (Ho didn’t respond to a request for comment.) Either way, she’s in the catbird seat for this era of dealflow.

Even though it feels like every beauty brand has signed a banker, there’s no way in hell each one will see an exit this year. A few will sell at most, and from the conversations I’ve had, Summer Fridays and Olive & June are among the more likely contenders. After all, nail is a hard category to crack. Most entrants are teeny, tiny brands that haven’t figured out how to scale beyond salons. The perennial leaders in the category—Sally Hansen, Essie, and OPI—are big businesses, and any upstart that approaches that level will inevitably get the attention of strategics.

I’m hearing that Augustinus Bader is having a harder time selling than anticipated (the brand, which declined to comment, turned down a few pretty substantial offers because it’s holding out for a deal in the multiple billions, I’m told), but there’s certainly ample M&A appetite for a blockbuster beauty deal. An acquisition is in the cards for Rare and Glossier; I just don’t think both will necessarily sell in the same year. I’ll leave you with this, though: Kosas may just be beauty’s next acquisition. The earlyish player in “clean” makeup, which has been in the market for several months, set their inbound deadline for today. I heard they secured a few bids.

I told ya: “Great pod about Challengers, btw. I’m in a lot of debates with friends regarding whether it’s actually a good movie. I know Luca Guadagnino can do better, but Jonathan Anderson nailed it. I imagine the hottest ticket around the Met Gala will be the Loewe afterparty, but I don’t think I’m cool enough.” —A J.A. fan and producer

On the Emily Weiss Brooklyn brownstone: “That’s honestly not that nice a block, way too close to Packer and all the Court Street drift.” —A journalist who knows these things

Until tomorrow,
Lauren