StyleHaul sold to RTL for $107M — its books hid a $22M gambling hole

Stephanie Horbaczewski, a former Saks Fifth Avenue marketing executive, founded StyleHaul in Hollywood in 2011 — a network built around 'haul videos,' the fashion and beauty YouTubers who filmed themselves opening their shopping. By 2014 it had signed nearly 5,000 creators, from Zoella to iJustine, with a combined 199 million subscribers, and RTL Group paid $107M for a controlling stake, valuing the company at $151.4M and promising $20M more for expansion. Horbaczewski called RTL 'the right home for the company.'

The multi-channel network economy turned out to be thinner than its view counts. Ad money flowed to the platforms, creators were free agents, and the margins never matched the hype; Horbaczewski exited in the summer of 2018. Then, in March 2019, RTL shut StyleHaul's US operations outright — about 65 staff laid off across Los Angeles and New York, the business retreated to a skeleton UK operation run from Europe. RTL's 2018 accounts carried a goodwill write-down of around $119M on StyleHaul's value: the $151.4M acquisition, largely gone.

The post-mortem found something worse than a bad market. In November 2019 StyleHaul's former controller and VP of accounting, Dennis Blieden, pleaded guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft for stealing more than $22M from the company — fake accounting entries disguised unauthorized wires as client payments, and the money went to poker buy-ins of $52,000 and $103,000, cryptocurrency and a $230,000 condo rental under a forged executive's signature. The business that sold fashion's biggest creators couldn't see its own books.