Vanity
Engagement
Vanity Shop of Grand Forks, Inc. (the “Company”) retained Hilco Streambank as its exclusive broker for its intellectual property assets. The assets for sale included the Vanity® brand and related private label brands, trademarks, Vanity.com and other domain names, e-commerce code and customer data.
Brand Background
From its roots as a Midwestern dress shop in the 1950s to its first juniors-focused specialty store in Fargo, North Dakota in 1969, Vanity® provided fashionable young women low-cost, high quality apparel and accessories for over 50 years. As of March 2017, Vanity® operated 137 stores across 27 states. In addition, Vanity® operated its e-commerce channel through the www.vanity.com, www.evanity.com and www.vanityshops.com websites.
For over half a century, the Vanity® brand resonated among young women looking for clothing and accessories that are both on-trend and affordable. Although originally juniors focused, the Vanity® customer trended toward fashion conscious women ranging from 20 to 35 years old. Vanity® differentiated itself from its competitors by providing customers a broader selection of sizes throughout various product categories utilizing Vanity’s proprietary assortment of fits and styles.
Marketing Process
Hilco Streambank developed a marketing program designed for the sale of the Company’s intellectual property assets. We identified and reached out to nearly 300 potential buyers, developed a teaser detailing the offering, and populated a data room containing confidential information regarding the assets available for sale.
We quickly identified that greater value could be realized by separating the vanity.com and vanity.net URLs along with the Vanity.com® trademark from the rest of the intellectual property assets, and successfully identified a stalking horse bidder and negotiated the terms of a stalking horse deal for those assets.
Hilco Streambank effectively conducted two sale processes – one for vanity.com and the assets associated with that domain name, and one for the Company’s customer database, the Vanity® brand, remaining trademarks and domain names.
Outcome
We conducted an auction at which more than 30 rounds of bidding took place, resulting in the sale of subsets of the Company’s intellectual property assets to two bidders, for a total of over $475,000.
