Why Spruce chose to partner with Breakout instead of getting acquired by rollups

D2C brand Spruce Shave Club is a men’s grooming & wellness care brand. They have raised an undisclosed round of funding from Breakout in the last quarter of FY22.

Spruce Shave Club was started in 2016 by an entrepreneurial father-son team from New Delhi. In the same year, US-based Dollar Shave Club was acquired by Unilever for $1Bn, manifesting that there is a huge potential in the men's grooming segment.

The duo started with the goal of helping men across the country reinvent the way in which they groom themselves. Spruce makes cruelty free natural products without any silicones, sulphates and parabens - unlike many consumer products in this category.

Since then, Spruce has expanded into categories beyond shaving & grooming with 100+ SKUs. They have served more than 2.5L customers across the country. Spruce has been growing consistently over the past 6 years and has always maintained a strong bottom line profitability.

Because of their impeccable metrics, in 2021 Spruce received offers from multiple e-commerce rollups for a potential acquisition. They deliberated over the offer and soon realised that there is a fast growth in this segment boosted by pandemic. Online personal care market is projected to cross $25Bn by 2025 and many D2C brands will get an opportunity to capture this value.

Spruce reached out to the Breakout team in mid-quarter to explore non-dilutive capital options. Uncollateralized debt options were limited in the market with banks and large financial institutions asking for collateral and personal guarantees. A few platforms that offered unsecured financing were quite expensive and came with predatory terms. Spruce eventually chose Breakout to be their partner. They received the entire funding amount in less than 7 days.

Lalit Advani, founder & CEO of Spruce said

“Breakout has been amazing for us. We were able to grow with substantially higher capital efficiency than other options laid in front of us.”

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Spruce has a long and exciting journey ahead of them and we at Breakout are excited to play a role in that. 🙌

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