Wall Street Welcomes New Players and Acquisitions

Evan Clark
·2 min read

The party on Wall Street is hopping — despite the pandemic — and some fresh faces and new couples are about to hit the scene.

Already there’s been a rush of IPOs this year, including offerings from Poshmark Inc. and ThredUp in resale, Dr. Martens and Mytheresa out of Europe and Jessica Alba’s The Honest Co.

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Next up are a host of buzzy names. These include Authentic Brands Group (which is expected to go public shortly); Warby Parker and Rent the Runway (which have confidentially filed their registrations statements); Allbirds (which is rumored to have filed), and Kate Hudson’s Fabletics (which is said to have hired banks to guide it through an offering). Ermenegildo Zegna Group is also planning to make its public debut this year via a SPAC deal.

As companies make their final pitches to investors, the attendant paperwork and financial statements will answer many questions about just how next-gen players like Rent the Runway tick and what their growth trajectories truly are.

While many of these companies have been on the sidelines for years, holding off on initial public offerings and content to raise money from private backers, the getting is just too good on Wall Street to pass up.

That’s because COVID-19 has had a perhaps counterintuitive impact on stocks.

Markets did fall in the early days of the pandemic, but a combination of government stimulus, low interest rates, corporate retoolings and the promise of post-pandemic growth have Wall Street going from strength to strength.

So investors who put money into hot new concepts are choosing now to cash out.

And when markets are hot, the bar for business valuations is set higher, helping nudge buyers and sellers together and leading to more deals.

This month alone the soon-to-be-public ABG agreed to buy Reebok from Adidas in a deal that could be valued at up to 2.1 billion euros, Levi Strauss & Co. made its first deal for an outside brand in decades by agreeing to buy Beyond Yoga and Foot Locker Inc. said it would plop down a total of $1.1 billion to acquire Japanese sneakerhead chain Atmos as well as WSS, which courts the U.S. Latine market.

If that’s any kind of prelude, it will be a blowout second half.

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