Branded, a consumer products platform and brand acquirer, has acquired the e-commerce roll-up platform Heyday to form a new company, Essor. The merger will create a consumer products group with about $400 million in revenue.WHO: Heyday (not to be confused with Heyday Skincare) was founded in August 2020 by Sebastian Rymarz and Adam Gerchen as a digital-first approach to creating the next-generation consumer products company. They acquire and incubate digitally native brands through innovative partnerships with e-commerce entrepreneurs. Once a part of the Heyday platform, brands tap into technology, data, supply chain, and growth capabilities designed to help them go omnichannel, expand their product offering, and build brand equity. Heyday has spent tens of millions of dollars developing its data platform, enabling efficiency at scale by applying data science and AI to digital merchandising and supply chain decision-making. The platform raised $800 million from visionary investors like The Raine Group, Premji Invest, General Catalyst, Victory Park Capital, and Khosla Ventures.Branded was originally founded in September 2020 by Pierre Poignant, Ben Kaminski, and Alexis Lanternier to partner with founders that have built brands with devoted followings on Amazon to help them scale. In 2012, Pierre co-founded Lazada, one of Asia's largest e-commerce marketplaces, building out the largest logistics network in South East Asia. Under his leadership, Lazada scaled to over 80 million customers and processed millions of daily transactions.