Kendall Jenner Bought a Stake in TRIP

On 8 September 2026, Kendall Jenner announced she had taken a stake in TRIP, the London drinks brand founded by a married couple in 2019, and would front its global campaign. The wording from co-founder Olivia Ferdi was deliberate: Jenner is both the face of the campaign and a shareholder, "a much deeper alignment than a traditional ambassador relationship."

The celebrity is the headline. The business underneath is the story, and for the first time it can be read properly, because TRIP filed its first full set of accounts at Companies House this summer. They show a brand that became the UK's best-selling CBD drink, then replaced almost its entire product range, lost £13.9m building a distribution machine, and came out the other side growing 132%. Every figure here is sourced.

From a knee surgery

In 2018, seven weeks before his wedding, Daniel Khoury needed knee surgery. He and his fiancée Olivia Ferdi experimented with natural ingredients targeting inflammation, pain and sleep, aiming only to get him down the aisle. He danced at the reception. Three months later they left careers in law and finance to build a business around what had worked, and launched TRIP in London in 2019 as a CBD drinks brand, at a point when CBD products were barely available in the UK.

The early model was direct-to-consumer and cult-ish: a third of customers were returning monthly by 2021, Soho House took it as an exclusive partner, and a $5m raise that year funded a US launch. By the twelve months to February 2023 TRIP was the fastest-growing soft drinks brand in the UK by NielsenIQ's measure, up 522%, with 88% of the CBD drinks category and 15,000 stores.

The staircase in the filings

Two notes on reading that table honestly. The company's headline figures, $100m in 2025 and $200m forecast for 2026, are its own statements and sit on a different basis from the filed net revenue of £50.9m, which is the audited, post-discount number for a February year-end. And until this year TRIP was not required to file a full P&L at all, so the £50.9m is the first revenue figure the public has ever been able to verify. Seven years of growth, one filed number.

The reformulation

TRIP's defining operational decision is the one the celebrity coverage skips entirely. In 2024 it launched Mindful Blend, a range built on magnesium, lion's mane, L-theanine and ashwagandha, with no CBD in it. By this summer, around 90% of sales came from that non-CBD range. The company that owned 88% of the UK CBD drinks category had, within two years, moved almost all of its revenue out of the category it dominated.

The context was pressure on both sides. UK CBD faced a hardening regulatory environment, and a 2024 Advertising Standards Authority ruling pushed TRIP to refine its messaging toward verifiable claims, such as magnesium's role in psychological function. But the execution is what matters for operators. Reformulating a hero product means new ingredient supply chains, new manufacturing specs, a controlled transition of stock so the old range clears without markdown while the new one lands, and a customer base that has to come with you. TRIP grew 132% through that transition. The brand had never really sold a compound. It sold a promise, calm, and the founders proved the promise was portable.

The distribution

Functional drinks are shelf businesses, whatever their DTC origins, and the margin story in TRIP's accounts is a distribution story. Thirty thousand UK doors by 2024. In the US, Target and Whole Foods by 2024, an exclusive Whole Foods flavour launch, more than 10,000 doors, and a senior sales hire in Abby Redick, who helped build OLIPOP, RISE Brewing and Health-Ade in the American better-for-you category. US turnover rose thirteenfold in a year, from £550k to £7.2m, with a run rate above $30m and a company expectation of passing $75m in 2026.

The sequence is the lesson. TRIP built the shelf presence before the celebrity campaign, not after. Jenner is arriving on top of 10,000 American doors, not being asked to create demand for a brand with nowhere to buy it.

The capital, and what Kendall is a piece of

TRIP has raised in three visible steps: $5m in 2021 with Depop's Maria Raga and Christian Angermayer among the backers, $12m in 2022, and $40m in November 2025 led by Coefficient Capital at a valuation above $300m, with Joe Jonas, Paul Wesley, Ashley Graham and Alessandra Ambrosio among the individual investors. Jenner joins that cap table this week.

Two things about that structure are worth noticing. First, the £13.9m of losses were not an accident; they were funded, deliberately, by that capital, to buy the reformulation and the distribution described above. Second, Jenner is not a generic celebrity. She founded 818 Tequila and has spent years inside American beverage distribution, which makes her one of the few famous shareholders who understands the shelf. The playbook is the one Au Vodka ran to a reported £500m exit: celebrity equity rather than celebrity endorsement, with the famous partner aligned to the outcome instead of the fee.

The detail almost nobody clocked

The brand the celebrities are buying into is not the brand that got famous.

The TRIP that topped the UK CBD category no longer generates most of TRIP's revenue. The TRIP that Jenner bought into is a magnesium-and-botanicals company with a CBD heritage, a US distribution engine, and its first audited revenue figure on public record. Between those two versions sit £13.9m of filed losses. That is the price of the pivot, and the accounts show it was paid in full before the valuation was set.

The valuation, and the test

At $300m, roughly £222m, against the £50.9m of filed net revenue, the November round priced TRIP at around 4.4 times audited sales; against the £90m exit run rate the company reports, closer to 2.5 times. The public target of $1bn by the first half of 2027 is more than three times the November price in around eighteen months, and it needs the US run rate to more than double, the £150m-plus forecast to land, and a category, calm, to establish itself the way gut health did. That is the test, and it is entirely live.

The operator's lesson

Three things generalise from the filings.

Own the promise, not the ingredient. TRIP's customers bought calm. When the ingredient came under pressure, the brand survived because the promise was portable. Ask what your customers actually buy, and whether it survives your hero SKU changing.

Distribution before hype. The celebrity landed on top of 10,000 US doors and 30,000 UK ones. Reverse that order and the campaign creates demand with nowhere to fulfil it, which is the most expensive kind of marketing there is.

Know which losses are investment. £13.9m of red ink bought a reformulated product and a two-continent distribution machine, then turned to profit. Losses that buy a machine are strategy. Losses that leak from an operation are the other thing, and the accounts alone will not tell you which you have.

A knee surgery, a wedding, two careers abandoned, a product replaced under its own label, and a Kardashian-Jenner on the cap table seven years later. The story is good. The filings are better.