During the pandemic, Wall Street banks and private equity firms invested billions of dollars in startups rolling up popular brands sold on Amazon.com Inc. The bet was that these upstarts, fueled by an online sales boom, would become the next consumer product conglomerates — like Procter & Gamble or Unilever.
Then the pandemic ended, consumers returned to the stores, and Amazon’s sales growth cratered — erasing almost half of its market value. Now the reckoning has arrived for these so-called brand aggregators.
