Native's $100M Quiet Exit

A story about how Moiz Ali built Native deodorant quietly and efficiently before selling to P&G.

"We had done no PR for Native until after we sold the business. News publications were reaching out to us and I took one interview with Retail Dive because they were like 'Who are you guys? What are you doing?'

When we went to fundraise, we talked to Simon Equity Partners, which is basically the family office of Simon Property Group. We opened up our books to them and they were like 'Our job is to find businesses like you. You're down the street from us in San Francisco, your headquarters is 3 blocks away from ours, we've never heard of this business and we should have heard of it by now.'

We were doing probably close to a $50 million run rate when we sold the business and we had 8 people at the time. When I left, it was certainly doing north of $100 million a year and we probably had 30 or so people on the team. We raised $500,000 actually, that's all.

No one walked around with Native t-shirts until after we made an exit. I think it was fear of embarrassment if we failed, and things were working so well we didn't want to go around thumping our chest saying this is working really well. One, I believe it would jinx us, and two, other people would just start copying us. After we sold in November 2017, we had a competitor sell their business in December 2017, and in 2018-2019, 60 competitors in the natural deodorant space popped up."