Brands
Hamilton Housewares appoints Somasree Bose Awasthi as business unit head
MUMBAI: Hamilton Housewares, the maker of Milton products, has appointed Somasree Bose Awasthi as business unit head. A former chief marketing officer at Marico and at Godrej Consumer Products (GCPL), she brings more than 22 years of FMCG experience spanning personal care, home care, hair care and edible oils.
Awasthi has overseen businesses worth more than Rs 7,500 crore and has led brands including Saffola, Parachute, Cinthol, HIT and Good Knight. She helped launch Godrej Aer and Godrej Magic, driving GCPL’s entry into air care and liquid handwash. At Marico, she steered portfolio diversification for Parachute Advansed, Livon and Saffola, and introduced processes for market-mix modelling, innovation pipelines and brand activation.
She began her career as a management trainee at the Godrej group, later becoming its first female area sales manager in east India. She rose to the post of CMO and sat on the firm’s management committee.
Awasthi has been recognised among The Economic Times Women Ahead 2017 list and has featured in Impact’s Top 50 most influential women in marketing for six consecutive years. A graduate in industrial engineering from Nagpur University, she holds an MBA from XIM Bhubaneswar.
Brands
UK’s OnlyFans seeks US investor at $3bn valuation after owner’s death
The adult video platform is seeking stability after the death of its billionaire owner
LONDON: OnlyFans is looking for a new partner. The London-based adult video platform is in advanced talks to sell a minority stake of less than 20 per cent to Architect Capital, a San Francisco-based investment firm, in a deal that would value the business at more than $3bn (£2.2bn).
The move is driven by an urgent need for stability. Leonid Radvinsky, the Ukrainian-American billionaire who owned OnlyFans, died of cancer last month at the age of 43, leaving the future of one of Britain’s most profitable privately held businesses suddenly uncertain.
The choice of Architect Capital is not arbitrary. The firm has deep expertise in financial services, which aligns neatly with OnlyFans’ ambitions to offer banking products to its creators, many of whom have long struggled to access basic financial services because of the nature of their work.
The numbers behind OnlyFans are, by any measure, staggering. The platform posted revenues of $1.4bn in the year to 30th November 2024, with a pre-tax profit of $684m, up four per cent on the prior year. Payments to creators totalled $7.2bn over the same period, a rise of nearly ten per cent. Radvinsky personally collected $701m in dividends from the business in 2024 alone, on top of more than $1bn in such payments he had already received. The platform, run through its parent company Felix International, hosts 4.6m creator accounts, with performers keeping 80 per cent of subscription proceeds and the platform pocketing the remaining 20 per cent. It has 377m fan accounts in total.
The current minority stake talks represent a notable scaling back of ambitions. In January, OnlyFans was reported to be in discussions with Architect about selling a majority stake of 60 per cent. Before that, the company had explored a sale to a consortium led by Forest Road Company, a Los Angeles-based investment firm. Neither deal materialised.
OnlyFans has built an enormously lucrative business on content that mainstream finance has long refused to touch. Now, with its owner gone and a $3bn valuation on the table, it is looking for the kind of respectable institutional backing that might finally persuade the banks to take its calls.
