Shares of Montecito-based hair care company Olaplex began trading on the Nasdaq on September 30, opening at $ 21 and quickly climbing to around $ 25.
Shares rose 20% in the company’s first hours of trading under the symbol OLPX. At the opening price of $ 21 per share, Olaplex shareholders generated nearly $ 1.6 billion. The company’s market capitalization hit nearly $ 16 billion by noon, making it the fourth-largest publicly traded company in the tri-county area.
The only shares sold during the IPO were those held by existing Olaplex shareholders. Private equity firm Advent International is the current majority shareholder of Olaplex, with 79.6% of the company after the IPO, according to documents filed by Olaplex with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission .
Prior to the IPO, Advent owned 89.3% of Olaplex. Advent bought the company from its founders in Santa Barbara in 2019, for an undisclosed price.
Olaplex’s IPO raised hundreds of millions more for Advent and other sellers than the company initially expected. On September 28, Olaplex announced plans to price its IPO at $ 17 to $ 19, an increase from its previous estimate of $ 14 to $ 16. The company also announced on September 29 that it would sell 7.7 million more shares than its initial estimate of 67 million.
Between the higher opening price and the increase in shares, the expected value of the IPO rose by more than $ 500 million in the week leading up to the offering.
In addition to the 74.7 million shares offered to the public, the underwriters of the IPO have an option to purchase an additional 10 million shares.
Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Barclays are acting as co-book managers for the offering. B of A Securities, Evercore ISI, Jefferies and Raymond James also act as co-book managers. Cowen, Piper Sandler, Truist Securities, Telsey Advisory Group, Drexel Hamilton and Loop Capital Markets act as co-managers.
Olaplex staff work entirely remotely, and the company had remote operation before the COVID-19 pandemic, so it does not have a physical headquarters. His address on SEC documents is on Coast Village Road in Montecito.
Olaplex has 82 employees, as of an SEC filing date of June 30. Its 2020 revenue was $ 282.3 million, a 90% increase from the previous year.
The company is profitable, with net income of $ 39.3 million in 2020, up from $ 60.9 million in 2019. Its adjusted net income increased from $ 100.5 million in 2019 to $ 131.1 million. dollars in 2020, according to its documents with the SEC.
Olaplex sells its products to both professional hairdressers and consumers, primarily through retailers such as Amazon and Sephora. In 2020, a majority of its sales went through trade show distributors.
Olaplex was founded in 2014 by Dean and Darcy Christal from Santa Barbara. Craig Hawker, professor of chemistry at UC Santa Barbara, and his former graduate student, Eric Pressly, developed the technology for the company’s hair care products.
The founders of the company are Hawker and Pressly, according to Sherylle Mills Englander, director of the Office of Technology & Industry Alliances at UCSB.
“We are extremely proud of them and the success of Olaplex,†Mills Englander told The Business Times via email. It does not disclose whether the university has had a business relationship with Olaplex or charges licensing fees for the use of its technology, as the UCSB keeps the identity of its licensees confidential.
