Space NK Said to Hire Goldman to Explore Sale

Goldman Sachs has been tapped to explore sale options for Space NK, the high-end beauty retailer, sources have said.Manzanita, the family office that owns Space NK, is also said to be exploring sale options for Lipstick Queen, Eve Lom and Kevyn Aucoin.Combined, the businesses are said to have around $200 million in sales, with Space NK the retail operation doing about $150 million and the brands bringing in about $50 million, sources said. Goldman Sachs declined to comment for this story. Manzanita did not return a request for comment.Space NK was founded by Nicky Kinnaird, who opened the company’s first store in London in 1993. Since then, Space NK has expanded — the business has more than 60 locations in the U.K., as well as more than 25 in the U.S. market, which it entered in 2007. Space NK has been backed by Manzanita Capital, the family office started by Gap Inc. veteran William Fisher, since 2003. In the U.S., Space NK has retailer partnerships with Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s.In addition to selling products from Lipstick Queen, Eve Lom and Kevyn Aucoin, the retailer sells luxury and niche brands. Other lines include By Terry, Christophe Robin, Goldfaden MD, Lancer, Malin + Goetz, Oribe, Tula, 111 Skin and 37 Actives.Kinnaird is no longer involved with the Space NK business, and is working with private-equity-backed Ancora, which she started with beauty veteran Laurie Perella Krebs, to buy and develop brands. Their first deal was for Indie Lee, a clean skin-care line.Broadly, beauty mergers and acquisitions have been on fire in recent years. Deals have spanned the spectrum of the market, from cosmetics, hair, skin and fragrance to retail — Macy’s Inc. paid $210 million for Bluemercury, another beauty specialty retailer, in 2016. At that point, Bluemercury had 60 stores.Much of the beauty M&A action has been on the brand side. Recent transactions include TPG Capital’s minority investment in Anastasia Beverly Hills, said to value the business at about $3 billion, Tengram Capital’s investment in Lime Crime and Gryphon’s majority investment in mass-market makeup brand Milani.On the strategic buyer side of the equation, Procter & Gamble has gotten back into the beauty acquisition game with deals for Native, a natural deodorant brand, and Snowberry, a prestige skin-care business. Unilever, which was extremely active through 2017, recently bought a majority stake in Equilibra, a personal-care and nutritional supplements business, and acquired natural deodorant business Schmidt’s. L’Oréal recently made a tech play with a deal for ModiFace.

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