Bollé Brands Group is selling Cébé to a coalition of companies: D.MO and Racer. D.MO is devoted to project management and the industrialization of products in the outdoor sector. Both of its chief executives, Sébastien Delsaux and Maxime Bos, are former Cébé employees. Racer, meanwhile, is a French manufacturer of gloves and protective equipment that dates back to 1927. The firms have come together for the acquisition, underwritten in part by two of Racer’s own backers, Upperside Capital Partners and 123 IM.
Cébé was founded in 1892 in the Jura region of France and produces sunglasses, ski goggles and helmets. In 2009 it was folded into Bollé Brands, which was itself – along with Cébé and Serengeti – acquired by A&M Capital Europe in 2018 from Vista Outdoor.
According to CEO Peter Smith – formerly of Nike, Reebok, Lacoste, Berghaus and Paul Smith – Bollé has been “managing Cébé’s transformation over recent years and ensuring that it has come out of COVID with a broad innovation pipeline and solid opportunities for growth.” Cébé’s sale, he continued, “is part of our strategy to focus Bollé Group on core brands for further global growth. Underpinned by our investment in product innovation and digitalization, our global brands of Bollé, Serengeti, and Spy+ are all growing at double-digit rates. The group has strong ambitions for each brand with strategic launches in the coming weeks.”
