The metacrew group GmbH, which owns the platforms Foodist and beautylove, is looking to expand on an international level. To realize its growth and acquisition plans, the company got Giuseppe Iozzolino, an investment banker and M&A expert, on board as its new Head of Corporate Development.
While metacrew already is the leader in subscription commerce for the food and beauty markets in the german-speaking area consisting of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the global food and beauty industries are massive, and there are a lot of untapped opportunities. The beauty industry was worth over $530 billion in 2019. Further, just the global food and grocery retail market size alone was valued at $11.7 trillion in 2019, and it is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 5 percent from 2020 to 2027.
With a massively successful 2020, and such steeply growing food and beauty markets, the company now wants to build on that success. Iozzolino will drive the company’s ambitious growth plans, which include the acquisition of further companies and the development of a new service for the financing of startups.
“Giuseppe Iozzolino’s expertise is breathtaking. He worked at the investment bank Houlihan Lokey for eleven years and built its consumer, food, and retail business in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. He organized many high-profile acquisitions, which caused a stir in the industry and made him the number one contact,” Tobias Eismann, CEO of metacrew, said about M&A specialist Iozzolino.
“This, and his specialty, the direct-to-consumer business in the food and beauty markets, are an ideal fit for our expansion ideas, which Giuseppe will plan and implement. For future tasks like launching and realizing acquisitions and cooperations with industry partners, we can’t imagine a better choice,” Eismann continued.
In 2020, metacrew grew by 40 percent to more than €40 million in sales and became profitable after the integration of Foodist. Now, after the successful integration of Foodist, metacrew wants to realize further acquisitions, nationally and internationally, to expand even faster. An M&A expert such as Iozzolino seems like a perfect fit to accomplish this goal.
With a food division that increased by 90 percent to nearly €20 million in sales and a beauty division that grew by 20 percent, metacrew is already expecting €60 million in sales in 2021. However, with the addition of Iozzolino, metacrew is aiming to realize more than €100 million in sales through organic growth and acquisitions in the next two to three years.
In addition to M&A, Iozzolino will take care of establishing metacrew as a service provider for exit strategies and the financing of industry enterprises. “metacrew is a leading B2B provider of emotional product tests within a target group that is clearly defined in advance. We use our customer understanding and far-reaching customer access that we got through our various (subscription) commerce concepts, online shops, our own word of mouth platform, and product sampling capabilities,” saidGiuseppe Iozzolino.
“On this basis, we can demonstrably help startups with innovative products but limited distribution gain more visibility, valuable and marketable user feedback, reviews, and ratings – which can be a deciding factor in the search for investors. Further, we can support established companies outside of Germany with pending exit processes to validate internationalization potential, which regularly forms the core of the equity story, through real transactional data points to upgrade the pitch deck for investors,” he went on.
