Vita Liberata, the premium tanning brand known for its organic formulas, has been acquired by its founder, the Irish businesswoman Alyson Hogg for less than $12 million. Vita Liberata makes both consumer and professional products. Hogg sold the business to Crown Laboratories in 2018. At the time of its original acquisition, Vita Liberata was generating $62 million a year in retail sales; current retail sales are $37 million.

Hogg declined to give specific numbers, but said the brand was sold to Crown Laboratories for more than $30 million.

In a statement, Hogg said she is bullish on the category despite its low market penetration which she estimates to be under 10 percent. “[Self-tanning] is growing thanks to science and innovation…a major reason penetration is so low is the ridicule the category is often subjected to,” said Hogg.

Self-tanning products have historically had pain points such as a bad odour, transferring onto bedding or clothes and a streaky or unnaturally dark finish. Hogg believes her more luxurious, sophisticated formulas can mitigate these risks and encourage consumers to try self-tanning, especially as concerns around sun safety grow.

Hogg will remain in her role as chief executive officer. “We did it once, we will do it again,” she said.

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Go-To Skin Care Bought Back by Founder

Beauty entrepreneur Zoë Foster Blake has regained control of Go-To, the skin care line she co-founded. A majority share of the company was sold to Melbourne-based beauty manufacturer BWX Limited in August 2021 for 89 million Australian dollars ($60 million).

The French publisher has appointed Tunis-based firm Nissa Editions Group as the local licensing partner and Cairo-based fashion media veteran Susan Sabet as both managing director and editor-in-chief of the new title.

An online edition of the magazine, with bilingual navigation in Arabic and English, went live yesterday. A print edition is set to launch in September.

“This new venture with Nissa Editions will enable the development of the Elle brand in this new territory for us that is Egypt. I am confident that Elle’s universal values, fashion, beauty, culture, society, and lifestyle unique point of view and high-quality journalism will inspire women in Egypt and resonate with them,” said François Coruzzi, Elle International Licenses CEO.

Sabet, a partner in the new venture, is a pioneering figure in the fashion media industry of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. In 2003, she founded Pashion, a pan-Arab fashion and beauty magazine distributed across the region, leading the title as both publisher and editor-in-chief until recently when it ceased operations. As co-founder of the Egyptian Fashion & Design Council, Sabet co-launched Egypt Fashion Week in 2023.

“After over 20 years in the fashion and lifestyle publishing business I am very proud and excited to take on this new venture in my career. Especially so, as finally a leading international publishing company has recognised and is honouring Egypt, its people and immense market potential to create an international platform to highlight and share our stories,” said Sabet.

Under Sabet’s direction, the title will publish a mixture of international, regional and local content. A snapshot of the latterhas already been released on the Elle.eg site including features on Egyptian actresses Mona Zaki, Injy El Mokadem and Tara Emad as well as the country’s iconic female cultural figures from the last century like the singer Umm Kulthum and actress Youssra.

Nissa Editions, a Tunisian company led by chief executive Mouna Khalfallah, has a presence in Cairo where Elle Egypt is headquartered. The firm is active in media and event organisation in the MENA region, specialising in the fashion, beauty, jewellery and watches, cars, yachts, art and real estate industries.

The launch marks the 46th international edition of Elle magazine. In the region, Lagardère Group has published an Elle Arabia edition since 2006, currently in partnership with Dubai-based Patrimony Media for the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) markets comprising the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain. Turkey has had its own edition since 1999. Previously, Lagardère also had a title called Elle Oriental based in Lebanon, but that edition has since been amalgamated into Elle Arabia.

The new Egyptian edition of Elle is the first of its kind, dedicated to a single Arabic-speaking country in the Middle East. “The largest country in the Arabic-speaking world and North Africa is blessed with a history, culture and people that offer endless fascinating storytelling and a huge market demand for international and high-quality brands aimed specifically at women,” said Khalfallah.

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A New Era of Arab-Led Fashion Media

Harper’s Bazaar and Esquire have launched Saudi Arabian editions, signalling a drive toward localisation in the Middle East that locals say is long overdue.

Fashion is embracing a new dimension.

Brands can now quickly and routinely create ultra-detailed 3D captures of their products to use for design tasks, in their marketing, on their e-commerce sites and in augmented-reality experiences such as virtual try-on, with more applications still emerging. Not so long ago, that required large photogrammetry rigs mounted with an array of cameras and lights that let you photograph an object from all angles. Today, they can produce these 3D twins with as little as an iPhone, a lighted box to serve as a mini studio, a laptop and software from providers like Adobe.

“What makes this exciting is that basically you can create the 3D asset once and derive any kind of content from it,” said Franz Tschimben, co-founder and chief executive of Covision Media, which builds more powerful 3D scanners used by brands such as Zara and Adidas.

The need for 3D imagery is growing as fashion expands into more virtual spaces. For brands to put versions of their products in video games or create immersive content for mixed-reality headsets like Apple VisionPro can require 3D models that developers can use. Last year, LVMH announced an expansion of its partnership with Epic Games, maker of the game Fortnite, as part of an effort to create virtual experiences for its brands and digital twins of its goods.

Shoppers may already see parts of these 3D models on a regular basis. While old-fashioned product photography still rules in fashion, some 2D shots consumers encounter online can be taken from 3D captures. Covision said its work appears on Adidas’ e-commerce site as product shots for shoes such as the brand’s Terrex Free Hiker 2.0.

“It is definitely the thing we see driving a lot of the 3D usage,” said Michael Tchao, who is on Apple’s ProWorkflow team, which tests and refines the company’s products according to the needs of customers and developers.

He called it “the secret big deal of 3D.”

Apple and Adobe highlighted that use and others at an event in New York last week to showcase their 3D technologies to the fashion industry. As part of the presentation, members of Coach’s 3D team demonstrated how they make 3D assets of products like the brand’s successful Tabby Bag by taking a number of smartphone pictures — ideally at least 70, but fewer can work — of the item inside a lighted box, dropping the shots on a laptop and using software that assembles them into a 3D image.

The brand uses them to create detailed mockups of its products — something it couldn’t do just from photos or videos. It can similarly snap a picture of a material swatch, import it into the software’s library, adjust characteristics like sizing to make sure details like leather grain are correctly proportioned and then drop it onto the 3D object. It has also turned them into marketing assets. In keeping with marketing’s trend towards surrealism, it has used 3D models in social media posts like one by a digital artist who depicted a the bag floating through a subway station.

Creating such a detailed 3D capture might have once taken hours or days, Coach said, but now it can do it in about 30 minutes, yielding a model that’s accurate down to the scratches on the hardware. That change is due to advances in technology.

A few years ago, for example, Apple — which Tchao acknowledged wasn’t always the first choice for designers working in 3D — saw broad applications for 3D captures and started building object-capture APIs into its operating systems and adding support for 3D files. It also optimised its systems to make the process of creating 3D models faster and simpler, according to Doug Brooks, a product manager on the Mac team.

While moves such as these helped eliminate the need for specialised equipment, software reduced the need for specialised skill sets. Fashion companies typically had separate roles for working with photogrammetry, using 3D tools and managing and digitising material samples, said Pierre Maheut, who heads up the partnerships team for Adobe’s immersive and 3D tools. Today, one person can handle all those tasks.

Of course, depending on the quality of the capture, it can still be evident you’re looking at a 3D model rather than a photo or video. The Tabby in Coach’s surreal Instagram post still has a digitised feel. But other companies are working to make their models look as real as a regular.

Covision Media’s scanners take some 15,000 pictures that they crunch into a 3D model in a few hours with little post-production finishing required. It’s more like classic photogrammetry, but Tschimben said the company has a unique method of measuring the reflection of light off an object and is faster than other techniques at producing detailed models. He compared it to mass production of 3D.

It now has two different scanners — a first-generation model suited to rigid items like shoes and a newer one for flexible objects such as clothes and bags — that it sells or rents to companies. Tschimben said businesses might keep one of the scanners, which stand about 6.5 feet wide and as tall as 8 feet or so, in their offices but could also put them at factories so they can see accurate models of samples without having to ship the physical product back and forth.

In addition to the current uses of 3D assets, Tschimben sees another big one on the horizon. The ongoing development of text-to-3D generative AI models, similar to those that exist for producing 2D imagery, means brands may one day soon be able to design products in 3D using AI. But for a brand to infuse its stylistic DNA into the output, it needs its own high-quality 3D datasets to train the model on. It’s another reason for companies to capture their products in 3D.

“To do this at scale for a company — let’s say for Adidas — in the future, we could go into this, since they are building up a huge data set,” Tschimben said. “[3D] datasets specifically tailored to their products and their company, they hold a lot of value.”

Adidas AG raised its profit target for the year amid strong demand for classic sneakers like the Samba and a boost from sales of its diminishing stockpile of Yeezy footwear.

The German sportswear company now expects to generate operating profit of around €700 million ($743 million), according to a statement. That’s an increase from the previous target of €500 million, but it still trails analysts’ average estimate of €871 million.

Now in his second year at the helm, Chief executive officer Bjorn Gulden is trying to orchestrate another era of fast growth at Adidas and close the gap with industry leader Nike, which has stumbled in recent quarters with a sales slowdown and inventory missteps. Adidas has also struggled, posting a decline in net sales in 2023. That followed years of crisis under Gulden’s predecessor, culminating in the cancelation of the company’s partnership with the rapper and designer Ye.

Adidas’ depository receipts gained 3 percent in US trading after the surprise announcement, which published after the close of normal trading in Frankfurt. Nike shares also rose, reversing an earlier decline.

Gulden has pledged to return Adidas to growth this year, with momentum expected to accelerate in the second half as the company trims inventories of apparel in the US and Yeezy footwear. The Norwegian CEO seeks steady expansion in both sales and profit in the next few years following the collapse that Adidas experienced during the pandemic era, when demand dried up in China. Adidas also became dangerously reliant on the partnership with Ye, which created a crisis after the celebrity made a series of offensive statements.

Since taking over in January 2023, Gulden has pushed to speed up decision-making at Adidas and embrace a wider array of sports, instead of focusing primarily on big-money athletic events. Gulden claims that investing more into lower-profile sports like weightlifting and wrestling helps build credibility and energy at the brand. He says it hearkens back to the ethos of Adi Dassler, who founded Adidas about 75 years ago.

Even so, the company’s momentum now is heavily tied to casual footwear, with the boom in classic models such as the Samba and Gazelle. There’s also continued demand for the controversial Yeezy footwear. The latest Yeezy drop generated revenues of around €150 million and an operating profit of around €50 million in the first quarter, Adidas said.

Gulden, who has a reputation for offering conservative guidances early in the year, is still assuming that the company will generate no additional profit from perhaps €200 million more in Yeezy sales this year. Adidas also expects unfavourable currency effects to weigh on profits. It intends to finish selling off its Yeezy inventory in 2024.

Adidas reported €5.5 billion in first-quarter revenue, higher than the €5.3 billion estimated by analysts.

The company is becoming an industry darling under Gulden, with shares up about 25 percent in the past year while Nike’s have fallen 26 percent. The American rival has been dogged by cooling demand for chunky basketball sneakers and criticism that it’s moving too slowly in churning out new products. In December, Nike CEO John Donahoe laid out a plan to cut as much as $2 billion in costs over the next three years, including layoffs that will slash 2 percent of the company’s workforce.

Meanwhile, Adidas is drawing praise for its hot-selling gum and rubber-soled terrace style sneakers, including the Samba, Morgan Stanley analysts said in a note yesterday. Morgan Stanley upgraded its recommendation on Adidas to overweight from underweight, and lifted its price target to €235 from €175.

By Tim Loh

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How Adidas Sambas Took Over the World

The humble trainer, once the reserve of football fans, Britpop kids and the odd skateboarder, has become as ubiquitous as battered Converse All Stars in the 00s indie sleaze years.

In its first-quarter results, LVMH’s Selective Retailing unit was the French conglomerate’s brightest spot. Sales rose 11 percent on an organic basis, with “remarkable growth” at Sephora cited. Overall sales for LVMH rose 3 percent, indicating that fears that luxury demand was cooling in step with economic growth were well-founded.

Sephora’s store network expanded in the last quarter, particularly in the US, though growth was also noted in Europe and the Middle East. Within the Selective Retailing division, the company’s duty free business is still trading below its pre-Covid level of activity, which LVMH chalked up to the slow resurgence of international travel to flagship locations in Hong Kong and Macau.

Perfumes and cosmetics also grew 7 percent, with fragrances a continued champion. LVMH noted the strong performance of Dior perfumes, many of which are hero products such as Sauvage, J’Adore and Miss Dior. The viral popularity of Maison Francis Kurkdjian’s Baccarat Rouge 540 was another boost. Skincare and cosmetics from Guerlain and Dior also contributed to growth.

The division’s resilience may be a balm for the beauty industry, which has been on unsteady ground since executives at Ulta Beauty signalled demand across prestige and mass was softening in March. The news that it expected its first-quarter results at the lower end of its guidance caused a rout on Ulta Beauty’s stocks, with a wider drop for other beauty firms including E.l.f. Beauty and Coty.

Disclosure: LVMH is part of a group of investors who, together, hold a minority interest in The Business of Fashion. All investors have signed shareholders’ documentation guaranteeing BoF’s complete editorial independence.

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Ulta Sparks Rout in Beauty Stocks on Warning of Slowing Demand

The company’s stock plunged as much as 15 percent, the most it has tumbled since March 2020.