Style News: Walmart sells Bonobos (at 75% off.) EXPRESS to take over operations.

Bloomberg: Walmart sells Bonobos for $235 less than it paid for it.

Turns out Walmart does not care how your butt looks in your pants.

Six years after paying $310 million for Bonobos, Walmart has agreed to sell the Bonobos brand for $75 million.

The current Bonobos campaign.
Indeed. “Fit” does happen.

The buyers are a partnership between a brand-management firm called WHP, and the clothing brand EXPRESS.

WHP will spend $50 million to acquire the brand, while EXPRESS will chip in $25 million. After that, Express gets to run Bonobos in exchange for royalty fees paid to WHP.

From the press release:

Concurrent with the closing of the transaction, WHP Global and EXPR will enter into an exclusive long-term license agreement with multiple renewal options granting EXPR the right to use the intellectual property acquired by WHP Global for the operation of the Bonobos business in the U.S. in exchange for EXPR’s payment of a royalty fee to WHP Global.

Also know that WHP took a 60% stake in Express in December. So there’s a lot of numbers flying around and some classic corporate “just who owns how much of what?” is going on.

Bottom line = once the deal is finalized, Walmart is done with Bonobos. Express, more or less, is in.

The deal is expected to close this summer.

Big thanks to Grant M. as well as our guy Ryan for the heads up on the Bloomberg article.

That’s all.

Carry on.

P.S. This is where the Schadenfreude-fueled armchair business experts on social media will start screaming “WHARRGARBL I TOLD YOU SO I COULD HAVE DONE BETTER BLAH BLAH.” But according to the CEO at Express, Bonobos is “delivering double-digit sales growth” and “is expected to be accretive to operating income and free cash flow positive in fiscal 2023, accelerating our sales growth and profitability.”

So….

¯\_(ツ)_/¯