Catch up on this week’s industry chatter with these click-worthy links:
- FORTUNE featured fashion brand CAbi, a $250-million direct selling business navigating the highly competitive apparel market. The piece highlights CAbi’s extensive representative training and slow-but-steady pace, which have produced an 85 percent salesforce retention rate and 5 percent annual revenue growth.
- GreenBiz took a look at the nascent Chemical Footprint Project, a benchmark that provides quantitative metrics on corporate chemical use. Nontoxic skincare and cosmetics brand Beautycounter is one of the companies that piloted the project, which aims to make sustainability data widely available to investors and consumers.
- Activist investors accelerated a recent board shakeup at Take Shape For Life parent Medifast. The company downsized its board from 12 members to nine, with five new directors whose expertise encompasses direct selling and international business. CEO Michael McDonald told the Baltimore Business Journal that, going forward, Medifast will focus on the strength of its direct selling division, which accounts for 71 percent of annual revenue.
- BelezaNaWeb (“Beauty on the web”), Brazil’s top beauty e-commerce company, is looking to take a bigger bite out of the country’s $43 billion beauty products market. Currently, direct selling brands Natura and Avon represent two of the top three names in beauty, while online sales account for, on estimate, less than 1 percent of total volume. Tech Crunch reports that BelezaNaWeb has raised a $30 million Series C round to ramp up its consumer experience and expand the digital market.
