Pura Vida: From 400 Bracelets Bought in Costa Rica to $68M in Revenue — and a 75% Stake Sold for $75M That the Buyer Later Offloaded for $1M

In 2010, Griffin Thall and Paul Goodman, fresh out of college, were on a graduation trip in Costa Rica. There they met two artisans, Jorge and Joaquin, who wove bracelets by hand, and commissioned 400 of them to take home. Selling those online out of San Diego was the beginning of Pura Vida.

Nine years later the business was doing $68M a year. In July 2019, bag brand Vera Bradley acquired a 75% stake for $75M in cash, plus an earnout of up to $22.5M tied to calendar-year 2019 performance targets. On the Built to Sell podcast, Thall said the price worked out to roughly nine times adjusted EBITDA for that year. The pair had never taken outside investment and held 100% of the equity right up to the exit.

Read this only as a “400 bracelets to $75M” success story, though, and you will misread the second half. The buyer subsequently let the business go at close to a total loss.

What was sold, and what it was sold for

One structural detail on the sell side repays a closer look: the 2019 agreement embedded a right, and in some circumstances an obligation, for Vera Bradley to acquire the remaining 25%, generally commencing five years after closing. For the founders, an exit for that last 25% was contractually mapped out before they ever cashed the first cheque. Vera Bradley did in fact buy that stake in 2023, for $10M. If $75M for 75% implies a $100M valuation for the whole, the remaining 25% four years later fetched $10M — implying a $40M valuation.

Why an order of 400 bracelets turned into a business

The core of this business was never the product. Hand-woven bracelets sell for a dollar or two. Anyone who goes to Costa Rica can buy them. What the two founders did was relocate the product into a story, wearing a memory of a trip, and then get a very large number of people to tell that story on their behalf.

Two mechanisms did the telling. One was Instagram, with over 1.9 million followers at the time of the sale. The other was the brand ambassador programme Thall describes as “more than 100,000 guerilla marketers,” spread across American college campuses. A product worn on the wrist is itself an advertising surface. When somebody else wearing it is the trigger for the next purchase, the number of ambassadors is literally the size of your ad inventory.

The other pillar was subscription. A monthly box accounted for more than 15% of revenue. Accessory e-commerce is normally a stack of one-off purchases where repeat rates are hard to forecast, putting 15%-plus of recurring revenue on top of that almost certainly fed into the acquisition price, because predictability of revenue maps directly onto multiple. In Japan too, categories like this swing with acquisition costs. See the handmade jewellery operator who scaled to ¥2M a month on paid ads. Recurring revenue is a damper on that swing.

And the founders never took outside capital. For nine years the equity stayed entirely with them. As Thall tells it, private equity proposals required the founders to put more of their own equity at risk, whereas Vera Bradley offered to pay roughly 75% of the money up front in cash. That is why they chose a strategic buyer. The decision was made on how much would definitely land in hand, not on headline multiple.

From the buyer’s side, this deal failed

This is the most important part of the case. The best deal a seller ever makes is not necessarily a good deal for the buyer.

Vera Bradley put $75M into the business in 2019 and $10M in 2023, $85M in total. Revenue then fell. Per Seaside Retailer, Q4 FY2024 revenue was $13.6M, down 43.8% from $24.2M in the prior-year quarter. In March 2025 Vera Bradley announced the divestiture of Pura Vida and closed the transaction on March 31. The price was $1M in cash plus contingent consideration over a two-year period. Retail Dive quotes Vera Bradley CEO Jackie Ardrey saying the sale of Pura Vida “represents a significant step in our strategic evolution.”

Buy for $85M, sell for $1M. No public material lets us state the cause with certainty, but the nature of the business suggests a few things. Its assets were not factories or patents. They were an Instagram account, a campus ambassador network, and the warmth of a brand named for a Costa Rican expression meaning “pure life.” All of those are tightly bound to the founders’ own personalities and the early community, and nothing guarantees they keep spinning at the same efficiency once ownership changes. As the e-commerce business acquired by OpenStore shows, small online stores often keep operating fine under new owners, but when brand value is itself fused to a trend cycle, what a buyer can actually inherit is smaller than it looks.

Cashing out 75% near the peak: the seller’s decision

$75M was backed by real 2019 facts: $68M in revenue and roughly nine times adjusted EBITDA. Six years later, the same business carried a price tag of $1M. The price at exit says nothing about how the business would hold up afterward.

As a seller’s decision, this case reduces almost entirely to one line: keep 100% of the equity by refusing outside capital, then convert 75% of it to cash near the peak. Surviving nine years without outside capital was possible because the unit cost of inventory was extremely low and working-capital pressure was light. As the D2C operator who rebuilt gross margin through a price increase illustrates, how you design margin becomes how much freedom you have on cash flow. There is also the path of just continuing to accumulate, as the handmade seller Tokuda has done, but what Pura Vida chose was to turn accumulated assets into cash at the moment they were valued most highly.