Mana Products has been acquired.
The New York-based contract manufacturer, which reportedly furloughed its employees and went dark on customers in December, is back in action after being snapped up by Prime Matter Labs for an undisclosed sum.
“We will be continuing to operate and batching, we hope, as early as next week,” said Prime Matter Labs chief executive officer Aaron Paas. “There’s a few more boxes to check there, but we’ve got the core folks already hired, working on that, and we’re ramping up as many of the remaining former employees as the business dictates. We’re continuing to grow day over day on that front.”
As WWD reported, Mana had allegedly furloughed all of its staff and was in the process of mulling “strategic options” for the business, then-CEO Robert Jaegly said at the time. The deal gives Prime Matter, which operates predominantly in skin care, sun care, hair care and body care, entrée into makeup as well.
“It’s equipment-intensive, it’s sku-intensive, it’s people-intensive, but most importantly it’s knowledge-intensive,” Paas said of color cosmetics. “To not have any history and just say, ‘Oh, we’re doing color now,’ you’d get laughed out of the room.
“What we’re able to do here is take what makes Prime Matter Labs great, which is our technology, apply it to one of the most robust data sets when it comes to color knowledge in the world. Now, we own 50 years of color IP and color data and color iteration. Being able to feed that into [Prime Matter’s in-house AI platform], we can turn that into one of the most powerful color formulation engines in the world,” Paas said. “We’re taking something only humans can do, use it to train an engine that is going to power the future of skin, hair, body and color innovation.”
Geographically, it also expands Prime Matter’s footprint to New York. The lab currently has facilities in Miami and Los Angeles. “We are consolidating the operation out of two buildings into one,” Paas said of Mana’s facilities in New York. “Our intention is to maintain 100 percent of the capability set, but reduce the capacity to be in line with the existing business.”
