The Lash Lounge, which has 130 salons, was sold to The Riverside Company.
Following The Riverside Company’s acquisition of The Lash Lounge, CEO Meg Roberts said she and the rest of the Lash Lounge executive team look forward to what the future holds.
“It really was the right time for everybody,” said Roberts about Franworth’s sale of to Riverside. The Lash Lounge is a central piece of the global investment firm’s new health and beauty platform, Head to Toe Brands, which Roberts now leads. Franworth had a controlling interest in 130-unit Lash Lounge since 2017 and helped the brand grow from six corporate stores. The brand did $65 million in systemwide sales in 2022 and ranked No. 384 on the Franchise Times Top 400.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Boxwood Partners acted as sell-side adviser for The Lash Lounge, which Anna Phillips founded in 2006.
Riverside’s growing platform of salon concepts also includes Littleton, Colorado-based Frenchies Modern Nail Care and Portland, Oregon-based hair salon Bishop’s Cuts/Color. Riverside also launched Threshold Brands, an umbrella for trade service brands MaidPro, FlyFoe, Men in Kits, Pestmaster and USA Insulation.
In February, Riverside acquired U.S. Lawns from BrightView Holdings for a reported $51.6 million in cash and added it to EverSmith Brands, another of its platforms.
Related: Riverside’s Threshold to Target Trade Services Franchises
Riverside has invested in more than 350 companies since its start in 1988. Its investment in The Lash Lounge signals a commitment to build out its beauty services platform.
Meg Roberts, the former CEO of The Lash Lounge, will now lead Head to Toe Brands for Riverside Company.
“We believe the acquisition of Lash Lounge will add value for the platform, most notably adding meaningful scale to the existing platform, strengthening the management team with the addition of Meg Roberts as the new platform CEO along with the rest of the impressive Lash Lounge team, and expanding the platforms geographic presence and addressable market opportunity, as well as opening up a number of growth levers for the platform that we look forward to executing on,” said Aakeem Andrada, assistant vice president at Riverside.
Roberts, who joined Franworth in 2018 as an operating partner and was named CEO of Lash Lounge the same year, said she’ll continue to help lead the brand under the new ownership group and take her executive team with her.
“It’s been a great six-plus year run with Franworth, but when the right partner came knocking to take over, it just made a lot of sense for us as we can see they are building a great platform,” Roberts said. “We love the idea of kind of being the crown jewel for their health and beauty platform, but we also want to have a crown of many stones with lots of success.”
Related: Meet the Lash Lounge CEO Who Is Stockpiling Chapstick and Dreaming of the ‘70s
Franworth President Dave Keil said he initiated the discussion about a potential sale.
Franworth President Dave Keil
“We felt really good about how we were able to grow the brand and make it as successful as it is, but at the same time we felt that Riverside was the right company with the right platform at this time to take over,” Keil said.
The average unit volume for Lash Lounge was $297,069 in 2022, a year-over-year increase of 26 percent, according to the franchise disclosure document.
“We’ve developed ourselves as a pretty premier brand here with an incredible team and with 20,000 members, so it’s a very attractive business,” Roberts said. “But the people I’m happiest for are our franchisees and, of course, Anna, who really deserves the credit for creating and seeing this brand through the difficult first years. It was important to me to want to protect and at the same time celebrate Anna’s and our team’s achievements.
“I have no doubt that we’re going to have great success with the next owner, our new partners in Riverside,” Roberts continued, “because we want to continue to be ambitious and aggressive but at the same remain responsible to our franchisees who we want to see have more success and more profitable.”