Ciao! Welcome to Line Sheet. I’m Italian now. Just kidding, but I am in Milan, wrapping up my first day of shows. What’s happening? A whole lot, per usual. Up top, I’ve got rapid-fire updates on everything you need to be briefed on: more on The Row’s deal (😍), Thom Bettridge’s appointment at i-D (😮), the sitch at GQ China (🙄), a new brand from a Line Sheet recurring character (🤩), and definitive proof of who really won the Olympics (🥇).

For the main event, Puck beauty correspondent Rachel Strugatz is back with some major Glossier news. And there’s other stuff, too. However, as you well know, you have to be a Puck subscriber to access it all. (Forwarding is very evil.)

Mentioned in this issue: Glossier, Emily Weiss, Kyle Leahy, the Olsens, The Row, Byron Trott, GQ China, Condé Nast, i-D, Karlie Kloss, Thom Bettridge, Yael Aflalo, Moncler, LVMH, Dior, Skims, Ilona Maher, Morgan Stanley, Selena Gomez, Rare Beauty, and many more…

• More on the prodigal Olsens: Intel on The Row’s deal keeps trickling in. The new investors purchased nearly 40 percent of the company for a $1 billion valuation, which suggests that $400 million in proceeds changed hands—presumably a decent amount to outgoing investor BDT & MSD Partners, plenty to the Olsens, themselves, and then the rest to The Row’s balance sheet. That’s a lot of money for a brand that’s been run quite frugally. But, as I mentioned on Fashion People earlier this week, The Row still needs a larger retail footprint, and stores cost a lot of money to open. Also, if they want to do beauty and fragrance on their own, without a licensing partner, that’ll cost them, too.

  On the personnel front, some people took issue with my classification of the relationship between The Row and Byron Trott’s BDT & MSD as “not a good match.” Obviously, no matter what happened over the years, it ended up working out for everyone. And there’s certainly tons of respect on both sides, in addition to the money that they have made one another. Finally, I posited in Monday’s piece that BDT & MSD helped with the deal. That may be true, but it did not bring Mousse, Tethys, et al. to the table. I’m sure they didn’t need shepherding, either.

• Condé in China: What in the world is happening at GQ China, which hasn’t published anything since parting ways with its state-approved local partner earlier this summer? (You can’t publish in China without a license.) There is speculation in China that Condé Nast will relaunch the product as Vogue Man—which could solve the license problem—but that’s just speculation. Also, just an F.Y.I.: I’m told that Condé Nast also lost the right to operate GQ Lab, the very successful social media account spearheaded by new Vogue China editorial director Rocco Liu. (The rights are still owned by the previous licensing partner. I asked the company what was up and they did not comment.)
• The i-D mystery solved: Until Thom Bettridge sent out a departure note on Friday, the Ssense editorial director was not top of mind for the long-empty chief content officer/editor-in-chief role at i-D magazine, which Karlie Kloss bought last year under the auspices of Bedford Media, her and husband Josh Kushner’s burgeoning content factory. The two names that were swirling most recently were Jaime Perlman—a longtime magazine editor and founder of the indie magazine More or Less, who currently works at Tory Burch—and the repeatedly mentioned Ferdinando Verderi, who came very close to accepting the gig, I’m told. But Bettridge, the editor-in-chief of Highsnobiety in a past life, might be the most practical choice. He’s not a stylist or creative director with a giant name, but he knows all the advertisers and seems to enjoy having a full-time job. (Verderi would have likely been a contract hire, working out of his own studio.)

  Bettridge is also used to dealing with Europeans (at 032c, Highsnobiety, etcetera) despite being a Dalton-educated New Yorker. While i-D hails from Britain, I don’t see how this specific position could live anywhere other than the city, where Bedford Media C.E.O. Nicole Muniz and her partner, creative director-type Patrick Ehrlund, run the holdco’s show. The March 2025 print relaunch gives Bettridge time to staff up and reengage advertisers. This was likely the most bang-for-your buck option. Now, let’s see if Bettridge can make things work with Muniz and, by extension, Kloss.

• An entrepreneur’s journey is never really over: Yael Aflalo, the founder of Reformation, who sold a majority stake in the business to Permira in 2019, is launching a new, higher-end brand in the upcoming days, I’m told. More on this from me tomorrow. (P.S.: Aflalo still owns a position in Reformation and is on the board.)
• Just an F.Y.I.: Grinta, the family holding company of former Stone Island owner Carlo Rivetti, has sold off more of its Moncler shares—2.29 million, in fact, equal to nearly 1 percent of the group, according to reporting by Italian news agency Ansa. Some background: Moncler acquired 70 percent of Stone Island from Rivetti in 2020, and then the other 30 percent from the Singapore government fund Temasek. (Which, in turn, had invested in Moncler years earlier; it’s all mixed up.) Anyway, this is not the first time Rivetti has offloaded Moncler shares. In March 2024, Rivetti sold a 1.18 percent stake.

  There are a few other moving parts here, involving Moncler C.E.O. Remo Ruffini’s own holdco, but it’s probably not worth getting into all this today. What matters is that Grinta is backing away, leaving room for Ruffini to gain more control—or for other investors to make their way in.

• Who really won the Olympics?: Like you don’t already know! LVMH may have been the title sponsor of this past summer’s Paris Olympics, but it was the group’s brands that got the most exposure online. Dior was the most talked-about brand of the games, according to tracking firm Launchmetrics, followed by Adidas, Nike, Ralph Lauren, and Louis Vuitton (also LVMH). Other LVMH brands in the mix included jeweler Chaumet (ranked No. 11), Berluti (No. 13), and Sephora (No. 17). Surprisingly, Skims, which was big in Japan during the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, ranked 20th. (That year, Ralph Lauren was No. 1, Nike was No. 2, and Skims was No. 3.) Ilona Maher, the pretty rugby player who went to the Emmys last Sunday, was the most popular athlete online, nearly doubling second-in-place Norwegian swimmer Henrik Christiansen in terms of chatter.

This was all just misdirection, of course. Glossier is not bringing Play back anytime soon, but instead releasing the long-awaited followup to Glossier You, the brand’s extremely successful fragrance that debuted seven years ago. You remains one of the line’s most popular products and was Sephora’s bestselling scent last year, despite competition from heavyweights like Sol de Janeiro, Dior, and Chanel. The brand has said it sells a bottle of You every 18 seconds, and C.E.O. Kyle Leahy talks about You becoming “the next Chanel No. 5.”

Could this new product become the catalyst for a conglomerate to finally make an offer for Glossier, which was last valued at nearly $2 billion? Earlier this year, I was told by someone close to founder Emily Weiss that she was finally ready to sell the company, and I reported that Glossier had tapped Morgan Stanley to explore a potential sale. In March, a person involved with the company told me that although no formal process had kicked off, the brand was in a place where it could “benefit from a transition in ownership.” Presumably Forerunner, Thrive, Index, Sequoia, and other investors would really like to see a return on their collective $266 million investment, too. Alas, despite the release of these new fragrances, or because of them, they may have to wait awhile longer.

The brand also has a strong executive team—Leahy, C.M.O. Kleo Mack, and creative director Marie Suter––but it’s Weiss who has always given Glossier its magic. No one can speak to the brand like her, particularly for fragrance, which requires more storytelling and universe-building than other beauty categories. Weiss convinced master perfumer Frank Voelkl of Le Labo’s Santal 33 fame to create You. Voelkl is the nose behind the new scents, too.

The macro environment has changed, beauty brands are no longer valued like tech companies, and strategics aren’t as willing to pay billions for Vaseline with cute branding or Selena Gomez’s blush. Glossier and Rare Beauty are both objectively attractive brands, but astronomical valuations––as well as questions around longevity, profitability, celebrity staying power, global resonance, etcetera––have made it harder to attract a buyer. And now, a potential buyer will want to discern whether or not the company was actually able to develop a fragrance portfolio, after all.

The two new scents will likely be well-received by Glossier’s “community,” but this latest launch seems out of step with the way the brand has traditionally handled new releases. Fragrance collections are definitely a thing––last month, Estée Lauder launched eight scents from Balmain Beauty––but it’s surprising that the debuts aren’t being spaced out to give each scent time to establish itself. The brand likely opted for a dual-fragrance strategy for a short-term boost in sales and profitability. Besides fragrance having one of the highest margins in all of beauty, perfume is Glossier’s most expensive item. A 50ml bottle of You costs $78––cheaper than competitors, but more than three times the price of Boy Brow or Cloud Paint.

Yes, it’s a great time to be launching fragrance, and yes, Glossier already has a hero product. But Weiss & Co. have set such a high-water mark for what success here looks like, anything short of a cult hit will look like a miss. These days, the company’s optics matter more than ever.

Until tomorrow,
Lauren