Oddity is a direct-to-consumer purveyor of in-house beauty products. They are tech-enabled and a significant portion of their workforce is dedicated to tech. They recently went public and the IPO is performing very well. While not a SaaS business which is what we invest in, below is a short summary of the most interesting bits of the S1 to us.
40% of headcount is R&D. “our R&D center in Tel Aviv, where our tech leadership is based, recruits from the Israeli Defense Force’s best technology units.” There are 265 employees, with approximately 35% located in the United States.
They pitch as a consumer tech platform. “We bring visitors to our website, turn visitors into users by asking questions and learning about them, and then leverage the data we have across the platform to convert them into paying customers…..our data moat was generated by more than 40 million users and results in over 1 billion data points which we believe is more than all our giant traditional beauty competitors combined.”
Big numbers. “As of March 31, 2023, we had over 4 million active customers, or customers that made at least one purchase with us within the last 12 months.” $325mm of revenue growing 46% YOY. 67% gross margins. Positive EBITDA and net income. “For the three months ended March 31, 2023 and 2022, we generated net income of $19.6 million and $3.0 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $28.4 million and $6.7 million, respectively.” $600bln market. Profitability was achieved 18 months post launch. 26% of sales are outside the US.
Cohort performance is strong. “Our 12-month U.S. net revenue repeat purchase rate for our Q1 2022 customer cohort was approximately 80% as of the first quarter of 2023.” The cohort performance has improved every year.
Tech team organization. “The tech team is organized in squads devoted to key domains, each organized as small standalone startups with dedicated project managers, software developers, and quality assurance. This allows all teams to push domains in parallel and avoid bottlenecks. We work in weekly sprints that include planning, coding, deploying, testing, analyzing performance, and optimizing.”
While the company may use technology significantly in its business, the customer is buying beauty products. They’re not buying software or using a tech product. This IPO is still meaningful for software companies however. The IPO market has been frozen since December 2021, and the successful recent IPOs of Cava and now Oddity could open the door to additional IPOs including software and tech. Thank you for the readership.
Sammy is the Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Blossom Street Ventures. Visit us at blossomstreetventures.com and email directly at sammy@blossomstreetventures.com. We invest in companies with run rate revenue of $3mm to $30mm, with year over year growth of 30%+. We lead or follow in growth rounds and special situations like inside rounds, small rounds, rushed rounds, corralling investors with our term sheet, cap table clean up, and extensions. We can commit in 3 weeks and our check is $1mm to $4mm. Also visit https://blossomstreetventures.com/metrics/ for always up-to-date SaaS metrics.
