Win family grows with $40M in funding from Orangewood Partners and acquisition of Love Your Melon

Win stands for ‘What Is Next’: we’re always thinking ahead to our next big milestone, the next cutting-edge technology, the next trend to tap into that will help us continue to build the omnichannel retail platform of the future. Today, I’m proud to share one of those big ‘What Is Next’ moments, as we close a $40M equity investment from our new partners at Orangewood, and welcome Love Your Melon, a mission-driven outdoor brand, to the Win portfolio.

Supported by the new financing from Orangewood, we’re thrilled to add Love Your Melon to the ranks of our category-defining brands Homesick, QALO, and Gravity, both complementing our sport and outdoor vertical and adding an important mission-driven element to our portfolio. Love Your Melon was born out of a goal to provide a warm beanie to every child fighting cancer, and in its success has become integral to the cause by donating 50% of net profits totaling $9.4M to date to research organizations and nonprofits, and over 235K hats to children and their families. 

Photo credit: Brenda Raftl

They’ve done that by building a passionate community of fans for their high-quality beanies and signature style, and launching some amazing licensed collections loved by kids and parents alike - including Disney, Marvel, and most recently Harry Potter. In addition to seeing tremendous promise in Love Your Melon from product expansion, to channel growth especially at retail, to the opportunity to tap into new markets, this acquisition carries extra meaning for us as we combine the power of our Shared Services team with that of Love Your Melon to allow us to fight pediatric cancer harder and faster than ever before. 

True to our name, this announcement also signifies a pivotal moment for our next phase of growth. Orangewood’s support has not only enabled us to grow our brand portfolio with the acquisition of Love Your Melon, but it will also allow us to grow our Shared Services team and thus our ability to support and scale a greater number of brilliant consumer brands. We’re grateful for the partnership with the team at Orangewood, their belief in the value of our platform, and their shared vision for supercharged growth in 2022 and the years to come. 

Welcome to the Win family, Love Your Melon and Orangewood, and stay tuned here for What Is Next. You can also read more about this announcement in this morning’s story in Retail Dive.

Eric Satler, President, Win Brands Group