Great Bowery Acquires Coveteur

The network of organizations established through Matthew Moneypenny, who exited two years ago, is acquiring the trend and way of life digital media corporation to better compete in the evolving Genius illustration business.
NEW YORK, United States — Digital media employer Coveteur has discovered a buyer in Great Bowery, the guardian company of numerous brain and image licensing organizations that represent makeup artist Pat McGrath, photographers Tim Walker, Juergen Teller and many more.
The groups declined to share the phrases of the deal, but market sources estimate the price at around $15 million.
Coveteur used to be centered in Toronto with the aid of Jake Rosenberg, Stephanie Mark and Erin Kleinberg in 2011. The web page rapidly developed a special photographic approach thru its closet series, featuring the residences of fashion creatives such as stylists, editors and designers who usually labored behind-the-scenes. The website has for the reason that extended to cover beauty, wellness, tour and other fashion lifestyle-adjacent subjects through images, written content and video, with a staff of 21 full-time personnel primarily based broadly speaking in New York and CAD $585,000 (around $435,860) in funding from backers such as rapper Drake. The organization has additionally experimented with product collaborations inside these categories, inclusive of sun shades produced by Karen Walker.
Today, Coveteur makes the bulk of its income through branded content material (which can include images, videos and events) and traditional advertising, followed through white-label campaigns, picture licensing and commissions from on-line sales.
Since Kleinberg exited the commercial enterprise in 2013, Coveteur is presently run together by means of Rosenberg and Mark, who will stay underneath its new proprietor and move the company to Great Bowery’s namesake building in Soho. The aim now is to hire extra people, create greater product collaborations and produce more video content material and events.
For Great Bowery, the acquisition is supposed to expand the kind of offerings it can provide its fashion clients: groups which want to create greater content material throughout special kinds of media than they did in the past.
The brain illustration commercial enterprise is less beneficial than it used to be when clients only wished photographers and make-up artists for two huge campaigns per year, and print magazines had larger budgets. Today, greater media corporations offer their very own in-house innovative agencies, greater manufacturers are expanding their in-house creative content material groups and top abilities are putting out on their own.
An appreciation of these altering forces was once founder Matthew Moneypenny’s reason to located Great Bowery in the first area back in 2014, when he united 12 corporations at the back of fashion’s image-makers with funding through Waddell & Reed, an asset management company based totally in Overland Park, Kansas, with the intention of developing a super-agency that would find new business possibilities for creatives leaders in fashion.
But Moneypenny exited in May 2017 due to disagreements with Waddell & Reed, and the company has had a few tumultuous years since. A deal to sell to large rival IMG fell thru at the stop of 2017, as did plans to merge with MAO Management Artists in 2018. Moneypenny’s successor Richard Companik left less than a 12 months after assuming the chief government position. Several of the founding partners, leads of their agencies, have additionally given that left in current years: Howard Bernstein of Bernstein & Andriulli and Beverley Streeter, Liz McKiver and Robin Jaffee of Streeters. (Bernstein still has equity in the business.) Great Bowery has additionally lost some of its biggest talents, including photographers Inez and Vinoodh, stylist Karl Templer and journalist Katie Grand, who have each considering the fact that employed their very own full-time agents.
“Our clients, like all of us in the business, are below pressure financially; they are being pushed to do greater with the same or more with less,” stated Great Bowery Chief Executive Liz Sands. She assumed the position in April 2018 and used to be in the past the chairman of the board following Moneypenny’s exit. She got here to Great Bowery thru Waddell & Reed, which she advised, and has a historical past in operational restructuring and personal equity. Since turning into CEO, she has centered on streamlining operations.
Sands said the acquisition of Coveteur made feel after staring at modifications in the market.
“What we see from our client’s point of view is they are looking for a extra integrated approach from the organizations that they work with that grant innovative services,” she said, adding that her strategy for Great Bowery is to take a seat between large enterprise gamers that go too slowly because of their size, and smaller, underfunded innovative carrier businesses that can’t execute on complicated projects.
Sands delivered that the goal is to now come to be “greater than the sum of [their] parts,” and permit each sub-agency in the Great Bowery umbrella to grow without losing their boutique, entrepreneurial culture and without scaling costs.
Both Great Bowery and Coveteur format to work collectively to create extra product lines, both underneath the names of Great Bowery’s brain roster (for example, a hair products line fronted via a hairstylist) and underneath Coveteur’s manufacturer name. As phase of this strategy, Great Bowery lately employed Brigid Walsh as head of method and development; she was beforehand the head of international commercial enterprise development for Mario Testino’s agency (which has considering that imploded after #MeToo allegations) and the head of partnerships and communications at Vogue.
“I suppose for us it’s being capable to team of workers up and have the proper resources to execute all the ideas and initiatives that we choose to do,” said Mark. “We wanted to make positive we located a associate that shared these values,” brought Rosenberg.
Coveteur counts an common month-to-month on-line target market of 880,000, in accordance to Similar Web.