Houlihan Lokey Advises Yellow Wood Partners

Houlihan Lokey is pleased to announce that Yellow Wood Partners LLC has acquired Suave in North America from Unilever. The transaction closed on May 1, 2023. 

Suave sells beauty and personal care products for women, men, and kids across mass retailers, grocery stores, drug retailers, and e-commerce platforms. The brand’s products include hair care and body care products, such as shampoos, conditioners, hair styling tools, body washes, antiperspirants and deodorants, and skin care. Suave was one of the first brands in the 1930s to bring salon-quality hair care to the general public at an accessible price.

Yellow Wood Partners is a Boston-based private investment firm that invests exclusively in the consumer industry in the middle market. The firm seeks to acquire branded consumer products that sell into a variety of consumer channels, including mass, drug, food, specialty, value, club, and e-commerce. Yellow Wood’s Consumer Operating DNA investment and operating strategy is based on utilizing the firm’s functional operating resources to help maximize brand performance by driving organic growth and increasing operating efficiencies while acquiring additional brands into a limited number of platform companies in its concentrated investment portfolio.

With the completion of the transaction, Yellow Wood Partners is creating the Suave Brands Company (SBC), a newly formed stand-alone business created to support the Suave brand. The company will be headquartered in New Jersey.

Houlihan Lokey served as the financial advisor to Yellow Wood Partners. This transaction underscores Houlihan Lokey’s deep expertise in the health and beauty sectors. Other recent transactions include the sales of LifeStyles Healthcare to Linden Capital Partners, Thinx to Kimberly-Clark, Arcadia Consumer Healthcare to Bansk Group, Duke Cannon to Main Post Partners, and SmartyPants Vitamins to Unilever.