Anthony Mellor

Anthony MellorSep 9, 2026

Kendall Jenner just bought a stake in TRIP, the London drinks brand started by a married couple in 2019. Not an endorsement deal. Equity. She's the face of the global campaign and a shareholder in the business. Here's what she actually bought, from the filings: Net revenue up 132% to £50.9m in the year to February. US sales up 13x in a year. Run rate close to £90m. Forecasting over £150m in 2026. Valued at $300m in November. Publicly targeting $1bn by 2027. And the detail almost nobody clocked: TRIP launched as a CBD brand and became the UK's best-selling one. Today around 90% of its sales come from products with no CBD in them at all. They changed the product under the label and grew through it. It cost £13.9m in losses to get there. Celebrity equity, not celebrity endorsement. The same playbook Au Vodka ran to a £500m exit. Full breakdown of how they did it via the article on our website below: 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eEGvXZZs

Anthony MellorSep 11, 2026

Emma Grede is the woman behind SKIMS and Good American. She's now worth $405m. You've probably never heard of her. She was born in East London in 1982, a paper girl from Plaistow, raised by a single mother alongside three younger sisters. At 12 she had a paper round, and spent the money on copies of Vogue and Elle. Fashion was her escape. At 16 she enrolled at the London College of Fashion. She never finished. She couldn't afford the fees. It wasn't until her mid-twenties that anyone worked out why school had been so hard. She was, in her own words, super-dyslexic. None of it slowed her down. By 26 she had co-founded ITB Worldwide, a talent and marketing agency sitting exactly where brands meet celebrities. She spent 15 years building it. She sold it in 2018. Then she did the thing almost nobody in her position does. She stopped being the middleman. Her logic was simple: if you spend 15 years connecting brands and famous people, you cannot avoid doing business with the Kardashians. So she pitched Kris Jenner an idea. Denim that actually fit every body, in a market that preached inclusivity and made clothes for nobody. Good American launched in October 2016 with Khloé Kardashian. $1 million in sales on day one. The biggest denim launch in history. $200 million in sales by 2022. In 2019 she co-founded SKIMS with Kim Kardashian and her husband Jens. Valued at $4 billion by 2023, reported at up to $5 billion since, named one of TIME's most influential companies. Grede's stake is reported at around 8%. Then Safely, with Kris Jenner, into Walmart. Off Season, with the NFL. A founding investment in Kylie Jenner's Khy. A seat as a Shark on Shark Tank. Today Forbes puts her net worth at around $405 million. Her first book came out in April. Four children, a home in LA, and a portfolio built entirely on brands where someone else's face is on the billboard. Fame sells the first million. Operations sell the next billion. I broke down the SKIMS numbers on the site. Link in comments.

Anthony MellorSep 11, 2026

22% of the inventory the average DTC brand buys never sells. Not sells slowly. Sells zero units. A 2026 analysis of 1,200 Shopify brands found that 22.1% of inventory purchased over the previous 18 months had become dead stock. And this is usually how it happens. 20 SKUs becomes 40. One supplier becomes five. One market becomes three. Revenue grows, but the inventory planning underneath it doesn’t. So cash ends up sitting in the wrong colours, sizes and products while the things customers actually want go out of stock. Then comes the familiar cycle: Overstock → markdowns. Stockouts → missed revenue. Late buying → air freight. More “safety stock” → even more cash tied up. The answer isn’t simply buying less. It’s knowing what to buy, when to buy it and how much cover you actually need At SKU level. The spreadsheet that got you to $2M probably isn’t the system that gets you to $20M. -- P.S. I'm Anthony, the Founder of Onflair™ Group we help scaling DTC brands fix the operational problems that eat into margin, tie up cash and make growth harder than it needs to be. If you're a $5m + brand looking for help with ops or supply chain - reach out 👋