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How much is private equity to blame? At first I was tired of the bogeyman, but it's starting to show patterns. Working in tech, I've seen from colleagues the shannanigans played - they come in the form of taking out debt of one company, dooming it, to fund something else, they also come in the form of weird chargeback commitments with big vendors we all know - IBM, Google, especially Microsoft, Oracle, etc. Here's a weird and mild anecdote. I have enjoyed using a combo duvet cover and covertlet, it works all year around, you can put the winter comforter in it, or it's heavy enough to use by itself. Used these for years, ordered from Amazon and BB&B. I spent a lot of time recently looking at the same thing. It was called Vue by Ellery Lifestyles. Eventually Google explained what happened - private equity gutted it in a classic tale of how private equity squeezes and destroys companies. Will spare you the boring but the gist: (company is from 2010 or so) "In 2017, Ellery Homestyles (the actual manufacturer of Vue) began aggressively restructuring and acquiring other bedding assets (like Extreme Linen) to scale up for massive digital and omnichannel retail.During this corporate scale-up, older multi-piece specialty sets like the 2-in-1 Barcelona coverlet were phased out to make room for high-volume, mass-market designs.Eventually, Ellery Homestyles' brands were absorbed into even larger manufacturing parents, like home textiles giant Keeco" <.. headwinds > "The final blow to the brand's original identity came when Keeco’s private equity strategies ran into severe financial headwinds. Keeco aggressively loaded up on debt to merge with a bankrupt competitor, Hollander Sleep Products, in 2022. When major customer Bed Bath & Beyond went under, Keeco was left holding massive debt.To handle this, their private equity backer, Centre Lane Partners, executed a classic PE maneuver in early 2025: a corporate carve-out.They split the company in two. They rebranded the core utility bedding business as Live Comfortably and threw the struggling fashion bedding/window division into a separate sister company called Simply Interior Homes. By June 2026, the newly formed fashion division filed for bankruptcy, with court filings explicitly stating that the private equity carve-out left the fashion business severely underfunded and hollowed out. Private equity essentially treated the brand exactly how the playbook dictates: it funded its initial growth, rolled it into a massive $1 billion corporate conglomerate to eliminate manufacturing complexity, and finally carved the company apart when debt mounted. The high-end, 100% cotton Vue Barcelona set was a casualty of a system designed to favor mass-production efficiency over specialty textile design." |