The Weekly Closeout: Authentic hires an Amazon vet, Dôen secures funding
This story was originally published on Retail Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Retail Dive newsletter.
It's been another week with far more retail news than there is time in the day. Below, we break down some things you may have missed during the week and what we're still thinking about.
From DutyFreeZone.com expanding beyond the airport to Shakira's hair care brand raising $12 million in capital, here's our closeout for the week.
Get duty free without the hassle of going to the airport
The duty-free airport experience is now online. DutyFreeZone.com launched its online marketplace this week to offer tax-free pricing on products from a number of categories including alcoholic beverages, fragrances, beauty, cosmetics and electronics.
The company, which was founded in 1998, operates from 'strategic duty-free zones' across North America and Latin America.
"We're transforming the way duty-free works," founder Reynald Vito Grattagliano said in a statement. "For decades, access to duty-free products was limited to airports and cruise terminals. Now, with our marketplace, anyone — from Dubai to Paris to Los Angeles — can shop duty-free, or become a global seller."
Authentic goes to the market
In other marketplace news, Authentic Brands Group recently appointed Tim Derner to the role of global head of marketplaces. Derner comes to Authentic from Amazon, where he most recently was the director of Amazon fashion and luxury stores.
In the position, Derner will oversee the expansion of Authentic's global distribution strategy with a focus on strengthening partnerships and accelerating brand reach, among other tasks.
'Marketplaces are a critical engine for long-term brand growth,' President Matt Maddox said in a statement. 'Tim's track record of building high-performing teams and scaling digital marketplaces worldwide makes him the ideal leader to deepen our capabilities in this space. His appointment marks a significant step in making this channel a cornerstone of our global distribution strategy.'
Dôen raises Series A funding round
California-based lifestyle brand Dôen this week closed on a Series A funding round led by growth equity firm Silas Capital, per a company press release. The almost 10-year-old brand did not disclose how much it raised, but said prior to this it had only brought in about $1 million in outside capital.
The funding is aimed at helping Dôen expand its physical footprint in key markets, build out its infrastructure and invest in marketing. The company, which launched as a digitally native fashion brand, has expanded its offerings over the years to include outerwear, denim, dresses, loungewear and a home assortment, among other products.
"This has been a long time in the making, as our top priority was finding a partner who aligns with our values and long-term vision for growing Dôen," Margaret Kleveland, co-founder and CEO of Dôen, said in a statement. "Silas Capital has a strong track record of supporting authentic, organic community building and helping their portfolio companies scale in thoughtful, sustainable ways."
Dôen operates seven of its own stores and sells through wholesale partners including Net-a-Porter, Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, Harrods and over 150 specialty stores globally. The retailer has built a $100 million revenue business and said retail sales at its stores have grown 80% year over year, in aggregate. E-commerce is up 40% year over year and wholesale bookings have grown 110% year to date, per the company.
Your popsicle mouth can now last longer
The Popsicle brand is entering lip care with a line of Popsicle Pouts lip oils. Available in orange, cherry and grape, the shades are inspired by Popsicle ice pops original flavors.
The lip oils are limited edition and sell for $5.64 at PopsiclePouts.com, about the same price as a box of Popsicle ice pops. A limited number of lip oils drop daily. Each purchase comes with a coupon for a free box of ice pops.
Squishmallows eyes the sleep category
Squishmallows is releasing its first SquishPillow exclusively at Target starting on Sunday.
The standard SquishPillow sells for $29.99 and the king size retails for $39.99. Products have two firmness levels, with firm available at launch and medium releasing in the fall.
'We're always listening to our fans, and when we learned so many were already using their Squishmallows as pillows, we knew we had to dream up and disrupt the home goods category by developing a branded pillow unlike any other,' Laura Zebersky, president and chief commercial officer at parent company Jazwares, said in a statement.
Squishmallows is also selling six themed pillowcases starting at $9.99. The brand will launch additional styles later in the year.
$12M
About a week after Shakira launched her hair care brand Isima, the company announced it secured over $12 million in capital investments from Stelac Capital Partners, Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio Capital, venture capital firm Northstar.vc and talent agency WME.
"We chose to support Isima because it brings together scientific innovation and a deep respect for individual identity," Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio, president of LMDV Capital, said in a statement. "In an industry long dominated by one-size-fits-all solutions, Isima offers something different — products designed to embrace diversity and meet the unique needs of each person."
The brand will launch exclusively at Ulta Beauty with a range of eight products, including shampoos, conditioners and a hair mask.
2.6%
That's how much Perfect Moment's fourth-quarter revenue is expected to grow by, reaching $5 million, according to preliminary financial results released Tuesday.
For the full year, revenue is expected to fall 12%, but excluding a Hugo Boss collaboration that ended in fiscal 2024, the company said full-year revenue increased 1%. The company attributed lower revenue to Matches Fashion, its largest wholesale partner, filing for bankruptcy. Perfect Moment expects to report a net loss of $16 million for the year.
Perfect Moment Chairman Max Gottschalk called the year 'one of consolidation and transformation,' noting that in addition to addressing inefficiencies in its operations, the company hired executives from Canada Goose, LVMH and Timberland.
Fluctuating U.S. immigration policy stokes uncertainty for garment workers, apparel factories
As U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents step up workplace raids and deportation efforts, the modest U.S. apparel manufacturing sector, always dependent on immigrants, is under pressure. Detentions of garment workers and others in Los Angeles, home to most of the country's textile factories, have sparked protests for weeks.
Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that, following lobbying by U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, President Trump decided to ease up on immigrants working in food production and hospitality. More recent reporting from the newspaper indicates that Trump has changed his mind again, alarming some businesses. Neither the White House nor ICE has responded to Retail Dive's request for comment on where the policies stand and how they might affect garment workers.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
11 minutes ago
- Yahoo
2 Top Stocks That Could Soar in 2025 and Beyond
Carnival continues to see record cruise demand, but investments in exclusive destinations could be another financial windfall. Record sales of Nintendo's Switch 2 console bolster this top video game company's growth prospects. 10 stocks we like better than Carnival Corp. › Wall Street can be very slow to give companies their due reward with a higher stock price, and that's to the advantage of an investor who keeps a long-term mindset. If you understand the opportunities ahead for a business, you're in a position to profit off the stock. Here are two solid companies experiencing growing demand for their services that could spell outstanding returns for patient investors. Demand trends and the long-term outlook for the leading cruise operator look solid. Carnival (NYSE: CCL) continues to report strong financial results in 2025, showing that it is benefiting from higher ticket prices and robust demand. Carnival reported another record quarter, with fiscal Q2 revenue reaching $6.3 billion. This brings its trailing-12-month revenue to $25.4 billion, which surpasses its pre-pandemic level of $20.8 billion in fiscal 2019. The stock price has more than doubled over the past three years, but Carnival could support more shareholder returns through improving margins. The shares currently trade at a forward price-to-earnings multiple of just 12.5, which is very cheap considering the strong growth it is reporting. Carnival's adjusted net income exceeded the company's guidance, reaching $470 million, or $0.35 per share. Strong pricing power and lower costs are expected to push adjusted net income to $2.7 billion for the full year, up from last year's $1.9 billion. Importantly, the upcoming launch of Celebration Key as a cruise destination point could drive profitable growth for the business that isn't reflected in the stock's modest earnings multiple. This exclusive destination in the Bahamas is strategically located close to the company's ports and is intended to lower fuel costs and generate healthy profits. Key attractions like water slides, entertainment, and restaurants should be a guest magnet, driving further upside to ticket prices and margins. Wall Street is significantly underestimating this opportunity. Carnival is not just a cruise company anymore. Investments in exclusive destinations like Celebration Key can distinguish the Carnival brand and drive attractive returns for shareholders. Nintendo's (OTC: NTDOY) (OTC: NTDO.F) stock has had its ups and downs in recent years, but if you had bought shares at the end of 2016, a few months before the Nintendo Switch launched, your investment would currently be up 338% -- outperforming the 172% return of the S&P 500. The video game industry is valued at $180 billion and has been growing for 50 years. Nintendo owns some of the most valuable intellectual property with exclusive franchises like Mario Bros and Zelda. Its Switch video game console has sold 152 million units, making it the most successful console in the company's history. Nintendo Switch 2 just launched and sold more than 3.5 million units in the first four days after the June 5 release, breaking previous records. Investors should note that consoles are low-margin sales. The real money is made on selling games, which carry higher profit margins. Nintendo forecasts 15 million unit sales for Switch 2 in the current fiscal year ending in March. But it expects to sell more games for Switch 2 than the original Switch sold in the first 10 months after launch. Investors should expect to see Nintendo's profits decline in the near term, given the higher percentage of sales coming from hardware sales. However, the strong sales of Switch 2 set up a great run of software sales over the next few years, which should fuel strong earnings growth over the next few years. The average price target among Wall Street analysts is currently $34.90, implying upside of 52% over the current $23 share price. These targets are usually estimates of where analysts believe the stock can trade in the next 12 months or so. With sales expected to double this year, this top gaming stock offers attractive upside potential over the next few years. Before you buy stock in Carnival Corp., consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Carnival Corp. wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $704,676!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $950,198!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 1,048% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 175% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 23, 2025 John Ballard has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Carnival Corp. and Nintendo. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. 2 Top Stocks That Could Soar in 2025 and Beyond was originally published by The Motley Fool
Yahoo
14 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Rampant cybercriminal group targets US airlines
A notorious cybercriminal group has shifted its attention to the aviation industry, successfully breaching the computer networks of multiple airlines in the United States and Canada this month, according to the FBI and private experts responding to the hacks. The hacking hasn't affected airline safety, but it has top cyber executives at major airlines across the United States on alert because of the hacking suspects: A network of young cybercriminals called 'Scattered Spider' who are known for their aggressive efforts to extort or embarrass their victims. It's a fresh headache for the travel industry as the busy summer travel season kicks into high gear. This is now the third major US business sector in the last two months, after insurance and retail, to face a flurry of cyberattacks tied to the criminal group. The hackers target big companies and their IT contractors, 'which means anyone in the airline ecosystem, including trusted vendors and contractors, could be at risk,' the FBI said Friday night in a statement that named Scattered Spider as the perpetrator of the airline hacks. 'Once inside (a victim's network), Scattered Spider actors steal sensitive data for extortion and often deploy ransomware,' the FBI said. The FBI, the statement continued, 'is actively working with aviation and industry partners to address this activity and assist victims.' Hawaiian Airlines and Canada's WestJet confirmed this week that they were still assessing the fallout from recent cyberattacks, though the airlines did not name the perpetrators. More victims in the aviation industry could come forward, sources briefed on the investigation said. WestJet's issues began two weeks ago, when the airline said it was responding to a 'cybersecurity incident' that was affecting access 'to some services and software systems,' including its app for customers. Both WestJet and Hawaiian Airlines said their operations were unaffected by the hacks. The lack of impact on operations at the airlines is 'likely a sign of good internal network separations or good business continuity and resiliency planning,' said Aakin Patel, the former chief information security officer of Las Vegas' main airport. It is not just the airlines themselves, but other 'segments of the aviation ecosystem' that are seeing increased cyberattacks, according to Jeffey Troy, the president of the Aviation ISAC, an industry group for sharing cyber threats. 'Our members are keenly alert to attacks from financially motivated attackers and collateral impacts emanating out of geo-political tensions around the world,' Troy said in a statement to CNN. The fine margins for error in the airline industry were on display Friday, when a separate IT outage, apparently unrelated to malicious cyber activity, caused delays for some American Airlines passengers. The Scattered Spider hacks have mobilized people across the industry to respond. In-house cybersecurity experts at major airlines have been closely monitoring the situation, sources familiar with the response told CNN, while cybersecurity firms such as Google-owned Mandiant are helping with the recovery and urging airlines to secure their customer service call centers. One of Scattered Spiders' preferred methods of infiltrating corporations is calling up help desks and pretending to be employees or customers. The technique has been highly effective for hackers to gain access to the networks of big companies. 'Airlines rely heavily on call centers for a lot of their support needs,' Patel told CNN, making them 'a likely target for groups like this.' Scattered Spider gained attention in September 2023 when they were linked to a pair of multimillion-dollar hacks on Las Vegas casinos and hotels MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment. The hackers tend to pick one sector to target for weeks on end. Earlier this month, they were the suspect in a hack of insurance giant Aflac that potentially stole Social Security numbers, insurance claims and health information. Before that, it was the retail sector: The hackers, according to an internal memo obtained by CNN, targeted Ahold Delhaize USA, which has the same parent company as the Giant and Food Lion grocery chains. 'The actor's core tactics, techniques, and procedures have remained consistent,' Mandiant chief technology officer Charles Carmakal said Friday in a statement, and that it 'is aware of multiple incidents in the airline and transportation sector' that resemble the operations of Scattered Spider.
Yahoo
15 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Could Solana Overtake Ethereum by 2026?
There are a few areas where Solana is outperforming Ethereum significantly. That's leading some investors to wonder if it could one day be the bigger chain. The next 18 months or so might be a critical period for this matchup to play out. 10 stocks we like better than Solana › Every bull market has its David-and-Goliath subplot. In crypto right now, Solana (CRYPTO: SOL) is the nimble rising star that's aiming to take the crown from the heavyweight champion, Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH). The prize is becoming the smart contract platform that mainstream capital chooses to use first. Both coins have surged in the past three years, though Solana's gain has been faster, sparking talk of a coming "flippening," where its market value might eclipse Ethereum's. Is the chatter just noise, or is there a signal here that investors should heed? Crypto users and investors tend to be an impatient bunch. Effectively, that means that when they're evaluating a new chain, its speed comes first. In that vein, independent benchmarks show that Solana consistently pushes thousands of real user transactions per second (TPS), and also that it can burst beyond 50,000 TPS when stressed with a high volume of load. In contrast, Ethereum's base layer still confirms a block every 12 to 13 seconds, limiting it to double‑digit values of TPS before needing to try to shunt users to costlier Layer 2 (L2) chains, which often require different tooling to interact with. Velocity attracts users. In September 2024, Solana logged 3.2 million daily active wallet addresses versus Ethereum's 410,000. The same pattern holds this year, with the numbers hardly changed. Per DeFiLlama, a crypto data aggregator, Solana handled $2.2 billion of decentralized crypto exchange (DEX) volume in the last 24 hours as measured in the afternoon of June 24. That's almost on par with Ethereum's $2.5 billion, despite Ethereum commanding nearly four times the total value locked (TVL) on its chain. The takeaway here is that new capital is likely to flow to where it can transact the fastest, and Solana is punching in the same weight class as Ethereum despite its significantly smaller size. Revenue data tell the same story. Between June 23 and June 24, Ethereum generated about $1.3 million in chain revenue and $2 million in decentralized application (dApp) revenue. Solana brought in $121,000 in chain revenue and and nearly $4 million in app revenue. In other words, Solana's apps are already earning roughly double what Ethereum's do, while its market cap is only about 25% as large. The metric of profitability per dollar of network value is thus working significantly in Solana's favor. The market cap gap also is narrowing. Ethereum's market capitalization hovers near $291 billion, while Solana's sits at about $77 billion. To outrank Ethereum today, Solana would need a roughly 280% price increase. That sounds steep, yet Solana has posted gains of that magnitude in shorter stretches before. Despite Solana's significant gains, Ethereum is hardly standing still. Its latest upgrade package, Pectra, went live on May 7, bundling 11 improvement proposals that expand block space, streamline wallet user experience, and raise the staking caps. Average gas (user) fees are now down since the update, though transaction speeds are roughly the same as before. The upgrade thus blunts Solana's cost advantage and potentially buys Ethereum time to work on its speed. Beyond the performance of its core tech, Ethereum's moat is its developer community. It still commands the largest pool of app developers and liquidity in crypto finance, though Solana added more new developers than Ethereum in 2024. Those network effects buy Ethereum even more breathing room to iterate and copy useful features that competitors debut. And the capital on its chain is likely to be at least a bit sticky. So could SOL really tack on 280% in six quarters to flip Ethereum? It might, if macro liquidity surges, and if it wins against its rival in key growth segments like artificial intelligence (AI), decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization. Barring that confluence of factors, a flippening is vastly more plausible in the 2029‑2030 window than it is within the next couple of years. For long‑term investors, the right approach is straightforward. Solana offers higher growth potential at the cost of higher execution risk. Ethereum offers a sturdier, slower‑growing base that is still innovating and could still offer substantial returns. Holding both coins would hedge the unknowns, but if you're forced to pick one horse for outperformance over the next five years, Solana looks like the better bet. Before you buy stock in Solana, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Solana wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $704,676!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $950,198!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 1,048% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 175% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 23, 2025 Alex Carchidi has positions in Ethereum and Solana. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Ethereum and Solana. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Could Solana Overtake Ethereum by 2026? was originally published by The Motley Fool Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
