The IPO Buzz: Olaplex Gives Wall Street A Good Hair Day

Hair products brand Olaplex Holdings, Inc. (OLPX proposed) priced its IPO at $21 – $2 above the top of its increased price range of $17 to $19 – and increased the deal’s size to 73.7 million shares – on Wednesday night (Sept. 29, 2021). The beauty brand raised about $1.55 billion. The upsized IPO gave Olaplex a market cap of $13.75 billion. (Editor’s Note: This column was updated Thursday, Sept. 30th, with the pricing and the NASDAQ debut of Olaplex.)

Wall Street had a good hair day, despite the Dow’s drop of more than 400 points. Olaplex started trading today at $25 – up $4 or  up 19 percent from its $21 IPO price – in its debut on the NASDAQ. The stock hit an intraday high of $26.50 – up 26.2 percent from its IPO price – and then retraced that gain a bit to trade at around $25.12 early this afternoon. Olaplex shares closed their first day of trading at $24.50 – up 16.67 percent from their IPO price.

Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, BofA Securities, Evercore ISI, Jefferies and Raymond James are the joint book-runners on the Olaplex IPO.

On Tuesday, Olaplex had raised its price range to  $17 to $19 – up from $14 to $16 – reflecting the strong demand that made it “the deal of the week.” In that S-1/A filing dated Sept. 28, 2021, Olaplex kept the number of shares at 67 million. At pricing on Wednesday night, bankers added 6.7 million shares.

Olaplex will not receive any proceeds from this IPO. Selling stockholders offered all 73.7 million shares sold in the IPO.

Mousse Partners, the family office of the Wertheimer family, which owns Chanel, sold $95.2 million of Olaplex shares after bankers increased the size of the IPO and priced it above its recently increased range, Bloomberg reported. Mousse Partners still owns Olaplex shares worth about $800 million, based on the IPO price, according to Bloomberg.

So far this week, two direct listings – Amplitude (AMPL) on NASDAQ and Warby Parker (WRBY) on the New York Stock Exchange – have made strong showings. (A direct listing is NOT an IPO.)

One IPO – Allvue Systems Holdings, Inc. (ALVU proposed) – was postponed on Tuesday, hours ahead of its expected pricing, “due to market conditions” – a day after the U.S. stock market slid. The deal has been put on hold indefinitely.

The stock market bounced back on Wednesday and the IPO deal machine cranked up again.

Seven Deals Coming Tonight

Four IPOs are on  tap for pricing tonight: Exscientia, an AI-driven pharmatech company based in the U.K.; First Watch Restaurant Group (FWRG proposed), a breakfast and lunch restaurant chain; Healthcare Triangle (HCTI proposed), a cloud-based healthtech platform for hospitals, doctors and drug companies, and TDCX, Inc. (TDCX proposed), a Singapore-based provider of digital customer experience solutions.

Three SPACs – special-purpose acquisition companies or blank-check companies – are also scheduled for pricing tonight.

Six SPACs have been priced so far this week plus a tiny NASDAQ uplift, which was a unit offering by Guardforce AI, Ltd. (GFAI)

If all the IPOs on the IPO Calendar get done, this week’s deal count will total 17.

(For more information, please check the IPO Calendar and click on a company’s name, which will take you to the IPO Profile and a link to the prospectus.)

(Never trade on proposed symbols. You might wind up owning something on the OTC Bulletin Board.)

Disclosure: Nobody on the IPOScoop.com staff has a position in any stocks mentioned above, nor do they trade or invest in IPOs. The IPOScoop.com staff does not issue advice, recommendations or opinions.

Disclaimer: A SCOOP Rating (Wall Street Consensus of Opening-day Premiums), is a general consensus taken, at press time, from Wall Street and investment professionals concerning how well an IPO might perform when it starts trading. The SCOOP Rating does not reflect the opinions of anyone associated with IPOScoop.com. The SCOOP ratings should not be taken as investment advice. The rating merely reflects the opinion of the professionals at the time of publication and is subject to last-minute changes due to market conditions, changes in a specific offering and other factors, such as changes in the proposed offering terms and the shifting of investor interest in the IPO. The information offered is taken from sources we believe to be reliable, but we cannot guarantee the accuracy.)