Fan Bi

Why would a $200M+ American apparel brand open its first international store in a French town of 25,000 people?

Not London. Not Milan. Not Shanghai.

Biarritz.

The answer tells you everything about how Faherty Brand thinks about brand building.

80 stores. $200M+ in revenue. The Faherty brothers built one of the most interesting American lifestyle brands of the last decade without traditional VC.

Most American lifestyle brands expand internationally by following tourist foot traffic in global capitals. Faherty went to the spiritual home of European surf culture and claimed it.

Biarritz is the Hamptons of the Basque Country. The crowd that spends July there spends the rest of the year in London, New York, and Paris. Win the summer in Biarritz and you've seeded the brand in every market that matters, without paying Regent Street rent.

It's the same logic that put their US stores in Montecito, Malibu, Sag Harbor, and Newport Beach before anywhere else. Coastal resort communities equals cultural credibility.

Biarritz isn't a retreat. It's a beachhead. 😉

Thrasio raised $3B.

Touched a $10B valuation. Filed for bankruptcy in February 2024. The Amazon aggregator model, buy hundreds of brands, scale centrally, go public, collapsed under its own weight.

Inside that bankruptcy was a stain remover brand called Miss Mouth's Messy Eater.

Thrasio had acquired it in 2020 for ~$10M. A small Amazon brand originally called Frosty Dream Inc., selling stain products under names like Road Spill and Emergency Stain Rescue.

It survived the bankruptcy. Kept growing. Expanded to Target. Hit #1 on Amazon with 90,000+ reviews, fuelled by parent creators on TikTok filming themselves removing impossible stains from kids' clothes.

Church & Dwight just paid $325M for it.

$80M in revenue. $28M in EBITDA. 35% EBITDA margins. 4.1x sales. 11.6x EBITDA.

A 30x+ return on the original acquisition price.

Church & Dwight has been quietly building a playbook around exactly this type of brand, and they've now done it twice.

2022: Hero Cosmetics. Amazon-native pimple patch brand. Founded 2017 with one product. $115M revenue. 40% EBITDA margins. $630M acquisition. 5.5x revenue, 14x EBITDA.

2026: Miss Mouth's. Amazon-native stain remover. $80M revenue. 35% EBITDA margins. $325M acquisition. 4.1x revenue, 11.6x EBITDA.

Church & Dwight's stated formula: #1 brand in a proven category. Asset-light. Strong margins. Gross margin accretive. Can leverage C&D's global sales, distribution, and operations platforms.

An investing lesson as old as time; there's more alpha in growth than value.

North America's thermal wellness (sauna, steam) industry is worth $1.6B. Europe's is $32B. Asia's is $40B.

Roman baths. Japanese onsen. Korean jjimjilbang. Finnish saunas. Communal bathing is one of the oldest social institutions in human history.

The US was missing it until Andrew Huberman explained it.

Over the last four years, Huberman has dedicated multiple podcast episodes to the clinical science of deliberate heat and cold exposure. Specific protocols. Exact temperatures. Peer-reviewed Finnish longitudinal studies showing 4-7 sauna sessions per week linked to a 40% reduction in cardiovascular mortality. Cold exposure increasing dopamine by 250% for hours afterward. The kind of precise, science-first education that turns a wellness practice into a daily routine.

5.4 million TikTok posts tagged with the Huberman sauna protocol. 5 million on his cold plunge protocol. Joe Rogan amplifying the same message to tens of millions more.

This week, that gap attracted $41M in funding for BATHHOUSE, led by Imaginary Ventures, their first ever bet on a physical space.

Bathhouse's two NYC locations each span 35,000 sq ft. Thermal pools. Saunas at 195°F. Cold plunges at 45°F. Day passes from $39. Memberships $145-225/month. Designed to be the new happy hour.

They're not alone.

Othership: ~$20M raised. SoulCycle co-founder and Shawn Mendes backing. Six locations. Performance and community positioning.
Remedy Place: $60M valuation. ~$5M raised. Ultra-premium social wellness club.
Plus Lore Bathing Club, AIRE Ancient Baths, and a dozen new entrants opening across NYC in 2026 alone.

Equinox started as one premium gym in NYC in 1991. Charge more. Build a brand people want to be seen in. Wait for the culture to shift. Today: $5B+ business. Bathhouse is making the identical bet in thermal wellness, selling a social identity, not a sauna session.

North America represents roughly 2% of a $72 billion global category. Is this the beginning of a multi-decade adoption curve; the yoga moment, the specialty coffee moment, the premium fitness moment, playing out in real time?

Or is a dozen bathhouses opening in NYC in a few years the first sign of a category overheating 😅 ?