David Olsen, most recently CEO of private equity-backed Cos Bar, has joined Highlander Partners, L.P., a leading Dallas-based middle market private equity firm, as a Managing Director. In this role, David will lead Highlander’s investments in beauty and personal care and will play an integral strategic role in these businesses post-close. He will also work closely with Highlander’s existing CPG-oriented businesses in the areas of product development, branding and channel expansion with an emphasis on digital excellence.
On the move from retail to PE firm, David explained it was never part of his career plan, but it made a lot of sense.
“I have always been an operator and the interesting thing about this fund is that it is a family fund set up by one man, Lawrence Hersh, 15 years ago and created a family office that is professionalized and he really believed in hiring operators to run his business. They wanted to get in the beauty space. So that made a lot of sense for me,” said David.
He added it’s too early to identify what size brands and which distribution channel will be most attractive to the firm, but that “a strong business with a great management team that aren’t in it just to grow quickly and sell but rather build a strong business where we can come in and help them accelerate that growth” would be ideal.
David has more than 20 years’ experience in digital retail. At Cos Bar, he brought his digital and ecommerce expertise to transition and grow a traditional brick-and-mortar beauty retailer into an omnichannel business, while remaining true to its luxury DNA. Prior to Cos Bar, he launched the beauty and grooming businesses at Net-A-Porter and Mr. Porter as Global Vice President, growing those businesses by triple digits annually during his tenure. He originally founded and was the CEO of an e-commerce cosmeceutical business, DermTeam, which he later sold to DermStore, where he went on to lead business development, buying and operations before selling the business to Target in 2012.