“We are excited to announce the rebranding to Vivify, reflecting our accelerated growth and showcasing our leadership in the specialty colorants and ingredients industry across multiple end markets,” said Devlin Riley, CEO of Vivify. “The powerful Vivify logo and the tag line ‘Color, Ingredients, Innovation’ effectively captures our value-added capabilities, representing an exciting next step in our journey as a company.”
CenterOaks acquired cross-industry color capabilities
CenterOak Partners is a Dallas, Texas – based private equity firm. At the start of 2017, the firm acquired Aakash Chemicals and Dye-Stuffs Inc. That company, founded in 1978 and located in Glendale Heights, Illinois, makes colorants, adhesives, and specialty chemicals for primarily the graphic arts, coatings, and plastics industries.
At the time of the deal, Randall Fojtasek, Managing Partner at CenterOak, remarked, “Aakash Chemicals represents a compelling opportunity to partner with a strong management team in the large and highly fragmented specialty chemical distribution industry….Aakash Chemicals’ attractive characteristics coupled with CenterOak’s experience create an ideal platform for continued success.”
In 2017, the company (then owned by CenterOak) acquired Calico Food Ingredients (specializing in food colorants and additives) and Heritage Color (a liquid pigments company serving the graphic arts and seed coatings industries). Then in 2018, Askash acquired Sandream Impact, a well-known cosmetic pigments company based in Fairfield, New Jersey.
Vivify is a new beauty ingredients supplier with decades of experience
Jason Sutherland, a Managing Partner at CenterOak, describes the pigment company’s growth in in this week’s press release about the rebrand this way: “Following CenterOak’s partnership with [Aakash, now known as] Vivify, the Company scaled through organic growth and strategic acquisitions, creating a more diverse product portfolio across a wider variety of industry sectors.”
And he adds that, “the Vivify name better reflects the current vision as we continue to grow the Company’s portfolio of products under this new name while laying the foundation for the next phase of growth.”
Now, the company which began as Aakash and grew by acquiring Calico, Heritage, and Sandream has formerly rebranded as Vivify. CenterOak hopes the rebrand will “[streamline] the customer experience and [allow] for expansion of the Company’s private label offerings.”
