📕 THE FULL RECEIPTS — 17 pages, $4.99: https://declassifiedhistory.gumroad.com/l/shelf-audit-18-the-mane-choiceThe deal broken down, the buyer's collapse, and who owns the brand today.In 2019, the nurse who built The Mane Choice from five hundred dollars sold it for a reported sixty-one and a half million dollars. Four years later, the company that bought it was bankrupt, and a private-equity firm owns The Mane Choice now. Here is exactly how that happened, and what it cost us, told through your own comments.This is a deep dive, not a lecture, and it stays on one axis the whole way: who owns the brand, and where your dollar goes. It is not a claim about whether any product is safe or whether it works.Courtney Adeleye built The Mane Choice at a kitchen counter in 2013 and grew it, by her own account, into a roughly hundred-million-dollar name in about six years. In 2019 she sold it to MAV Beauty Brands. The reported price was about sixty-one and a half million dollars, but only around thirty-eight million of that was guaranteed at closing. The rest, up to fifty-two and a half million more, was a performance-based earnout tied to the new owner.And the new owner was not really a beauty company. MAV Beauty Brands went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2018 at fourteen dollars a share, raised about a hundred and twenty-six million dollars, and used borrowed money to buy brand after brand. By 2023 it was carrying more than a hundred and twenty million dollars in debt it could not pay. It filed for creditor protection in Canada, its shares were delisted that December, and its brands, The Mane Choice among them, were sold out of the wreckage to Nexus Capital, a Los Angeles private-equity firm, for less than the company owed.The Mane Choice is still on the shelf today, rebranded, owned by a fund. Courtney Adeleye started over with a new line, Watch & Sea, that is hers. This video follows that whole arc and asks the harder question underneath it, the one you keep asking in the comments: how do our brands keep selling out, and what does it actually cost us when they do.Chapters:0:00 The Comment We Get Every Time1:00 A Nurse, Five Hundred Dollars, And Instagram3:00 The 2019 Sale4:30 What MAV Beauty Brands Really Was6:45 The Earnout Almost Nobody Reads8:15 Why Our Founders Sell At All10:45 What Happens After The Sale12:45 The Collapse, And Who Owns It Now14:45 Who Got Paid, And Who Didn't16:15 The Answer You Already Wrote▶️ The ownership list that started this — These 6 'Black-Owned' Beauty Brands Aren't Black-Owned Anymore: https://youtu.be/iayN_3CZmvk▶️ The same private-equity fund, a different aisle — the shea butter ownership breakdown: https://youtu.be/lQsl67GeCTIEverything here is ownership and money, drawn from public filings and the companies' own announcements. Nothing here is a claim about what any product does.⚠️ Some links here may be affiliate links. I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. It never changes a word of what I tell you. (FTC 16 CFR 255.)📚 SOURCES:MAV Beauty Brands Q3 2019 results and acquisition of The Mane Choice, Nov 2019: https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/mav-beauty-brands-reports-third-quarter-2019-financial-results-and-announces-acquisition-of-the-mane-choice-855396453.htmlMAV Beauty Brands completes IPO (14 dollars per share, TSX), July 2018: https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/07/10/1535395/0/en/MAV-Beauty-Brands-Completes-Initial-Public-Offering.htmlMAV Beauty Brands receives court approval of asset sale to Nexus Capital (CCAA), Nov 2023: https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/mav-beauty-brands-receives-court-approval-of-sale-of-substantially-all-of-its-assets-to-nexus-capital-management-803832862.htmlMAV Beauty Brands restructuring proceedings — Goodmans LLP: https://www.goodmans.ca/expertise/case/mav-beauty-brands-inc.'s-restructuring-proceedings