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By Elizabeth Kaske and Shelley Gupta
What do you get when you pair American blue jeans with Norwegian sailing wear and skiwear? A company with complementary strengths, value-adding synergies, and growing market reach.
It’s the outcome the leaders of Greensboro, N.C.–based Kontoor had in mind when they set out to grow the company from its foundation as the parent of Wrangler and Lee jeans into a portfolio of three iconic lifestyle, outdoor, and workwear brands. Kontoor’s leadership was looking for brands that could extend its platform into adjacent high-growth categories while preserving the company’s operational discipline and strong foothold in heritage apparel and workwear.
Oslo-based Helly Hansen combines all those attributes as a nearly 150-year-old technical brand with credibility in both outdoor and professional workwear, meaningful international scale, and a growing U.S. market footprint. In addition, the leadership teams at both companies were a strong cultural fit, which helped establish trust and alignment from the outset. Kontoor closed its $900 million acquisition on May 31, 2025. For Kontoor, the main integration consideration was to unlock value while preserving the brand, culture, products, and technical knowledge that had made Helly Hansen successful.
Retail M&A often underperforms because buyers overestimate synergies, growth, or the capacity to integrate. In apparel, excessive standardization can dilute the capabilities that made the target attractive in the first place. But Kontoor and Helly Hansen approached the integration differently, building on a strong strategic and cultural fit that helped both organizations contribute while preserving the qualities that made each business successful.
Helly Hansen became the largest driver of Kontoor’s 2025 growth, helping lift its revenue 21% to a record $3.2 billion. The deal also improved gross margins and generated $100 million in cash within the first seven months of ownership. Investors noticed: Kontoor’s stock has risen 35% since its May 2025 closing, outperforming the S&P 500 by up to 10 percentage points. The deal offers practical lessons for acquirers seeking to drive growth without sacrificing the strengths of the assets they are acquiring.
Making a Strong Fit Stronger
Kontoor leaders set the stage by choosing an acquisition target that matched their needs on multiple levels.
“We were clear on where we wanted to take the portfolio,” said Joe Alkire, Kontoor’s president. “Outdoor, workwear, and lifestyle were attractive spaces for us, and Helly Hansen was one of the few assets that brought together these areas of strategic interest. We also saw clear opportunities to add value through operational discipline, supply chain capabilities, and financial rigor while providing the brand with the investment, resources, and long-term support needed to unlock its next phase of growth.”
After the announcement, leaders clearly communicated the strategy and deal value to both teams. Kontoor brought its scale, sourcing capabilities, operating discipline, and financial rigor to support Helly Hansen’s next phase of growth.
The integration also benefited from a shared willingness to engage deeply to make the deal successful. “When we met with the leadership team at Kontoor, it quickly became clear they were the partner we needed to support our continued growth,” said Børre Hegbom, SVP global head of Helly Hansen. “They understood the business, listened carefully to our ambitions, and recognized that continued investment would be essential to unlocking long-term value. We were strongly aligned on the path forward from the beginning.”
This alignment became a defining characteristic of the integration, as leaders from both organizations invested the time and energy required to preserve Helly Hansen’s strengths while accelerating growth under new ownership.
Discipline, Governance, and Detail
To achieve the expected deal value, the companies needed disciplined execution. Kontoor and Helly Hansen established a structured integration program that combined rigorous planning, governance, and synergy management to keep leaders focused on performance and value creation.
Kontoor and Helly Hansen leaders consistently demonstrated a solutions-oriented mindset, viewing challenges as opportunities to strengthen execution and collaboration. Their ability to make timely adjustments while maintaining transparency and accountability and staying focused on the deal thesis helped sustain momentum and deliver strong results.
Kontoor’s steering committee helped resolve integration challenges as they arose. Kontoor and Helly Hansen had different systems, operating philosophies, and expectations for progress. As friction increased, leaders used the governance process to identify risks and escalate decisions. Integration leaders anticipated risks before they slowed momentum through bridging differences in communication styles and expectations.
A Longer Journey
As the integration foundation stabilized, Kontoor leadership focused more fully on growth initiatives, reinforcing Helly Hansen’s role as a strategic priority and key growth driver. The deal preserved Helly Hansen’s strengths while giving it more room to grow.
In Kontoor, Helly Hansen gained a strategic parent with a long-term interest in building its brand and investing in its growth. The balanced and disciplined approach to the integration helped generate more than $25 million in recurring synergies, putting the company on a path toward its targeted $40 million run-rate synergy goal by the end of 2027.
The deal demonstrates multiple ingredients for integration success:
Kontoor viewed the deal closing not as a finish line but as the beginning of a longer journey. One Kontoor executive who helped build the deal model relocated to Norway, taking ownership of day-to-day execution. That presence helped sustain momentum after closing, supported by a lean steering committee empowered to make decisions quickly.
“Being present in Norway mattered,” said Kontoor’s Alkire. “It sent a clear message to the Helly Hansen team that this business was strategically important, that we were there to listen, and that we were committed to building the future together.”
Kontoor further reinforced that commitment with the appointment of Børre Hegbom, a Helly Hansen veteran of more than two decades, as brand president, reflecting the parent’s confidence in the new team and its commitment to preserving the company’s culture.
In early June 2026, Kontoor leaders went to Norway to celebrate the first anniversary of the deal with Helly Hansen employees at the company’s summer picnic, emphasizing that Kontoor viewed the acquisition as an ongoing investment in the combined company’s future.
Elizabeth Kaske is the EY-Parthenon Global and Americas Mergers and Acquisitions Leader, Ernst & Young LLP.
Shelley Gupta is an Executive Director in the EY-Parthenon Transaction Strategy & Execution team, Ernst & Young LLP.
Learn how EY-Parthenon M&A advisory services can help organizations refine their growth strategies, perform deal sourcing, conduct diligence and valuation, and achieve greater synergies during M&A integration.
The views reflected in this article are the views of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Ernst & Young LLP or other members of the global EY organization.
Developing new medicines and materials requires making new molecules but planning how to make them is still largely manual, time-consuming, and costly. RetroChimera automatically proposes high-quality synthesis routes. The model combines two strong models with complementary strengths, learning how to rank their proposals to produce better predictions than either alone. In blind tests, PhD-level chemists prefer RetroChimera’s individual reaction predictions over preceding models and recorded literature reactions.
Custom-made molecules are unlocking advances in modern medicine, smart materials, and sustainable agriculture. Yet, progress is slowed by chemical synthesis—the time-consuming process of making new molecules from simpler building blocks in the lab. In addition, synthesis is a significant driver of drug development costs. So even as computational methods make it possible to explore large numbers of novel molecules, finding practical ways to synthesize them remains a critical challenge.
Retrosynthesis approaches this problem by working backwards from a target molecule, breaking it down step by step into simpler precursors (Figure 1). This process is comparable to playing strategic board games like chess and Go. It involves contemplating a wide range of possible immediate moves, or individual disconnections, while also requiring high-level strategic thinking to reach the end-to-end synthesis plan. However, the number of possible moves in retrosynthesis is much larger than in board games, and it is not obvious which moves would be available for a given molecule. Existing systems face major challenges, including recalling rare but strategically important reactions, robustness beyond the training distribution, and aligning with chemists’ expectations. As a result, retrosynthesis often requires highly specialized expertise, which hinders scaling and automation of scientific discovery.
In a paper recently published in the journal Nature (opens in new tab), we present RetroChimera (opens in new tab), a new framework for retrosynthesis prediction. It is built around two models (Figure 2). R-SMILES 2, a Transformer-based de-novo model, predicts precursor molecules directly from the input molecule. This gives it the flexibility to learn reaction patterns directly from data. However, its unconstrained generation can also make it prone to hallucination.
NeuralLoc, in contrast, is a graph neural network- (GNN) based model that encodes both the target molecule and reaction templates as graphs. It selects reaction templates and predicts where they should be applied to the target molecule. Its predictions are grounded in reaction patterns extracted from the training data, so it tends to produce more accurate and reliable outputs. But it’s more constrained when encountering reactions not covered by the template library.
These differences actually turn out to be a strength. Rather than making the same kinds of predictions, the two models capture complementary patterns in chemistry and specialize in different reaction types. R-SMILES 2 performs particularly well on reactions that involve large changes over the course of the reaction, while NeuralLoc excels in reactions of low precedence and those involving more localized changes.
RetroChimera combines the ranked predictions of both sub-models using a learned ensembling strategy. Each model assigns a learned, rank-dependent vote to each predicted reactant set, and votes are added when both models propose the same reaction. By learning how much to trust each model at different ranks, RetroChimera can leverage their complementary strengths, approximately matching the better-performing sub-model across reaction classes.
As a result, RetroChimera performs strongly across both common and rare reaction classes and produces retrosynthesis predictions that better align with chemists’ judgment (Figure 3). In blind tests, expert chemists preferred disconnections of complex molecules suggested by RetroChimera over those obtained from its constituent sub-models, as well as those from more established approaches, and even from the test set itself.
We believe RetroChimera could help researchers identify promising synthesis route more efficiently, supporting faster design-make-test cycle across molecular science applications, including drug discovery and design of smart materials. RetroChimera could enable chemists to assess more—and more complex—candidate molecules at large scale. Paired with increasing levels of laboratory automation, we expect further acceleration toward closed-loop, self-improving systems for synthesis planning and execution.
RetroChimera is available on GitHub (opens in new tab) (MIT license) and accessible via Microsoft Foundry (opens in new tab). For instructions on how to access the checkpoint, we refer to the GitHub repository.
We invite the broader chemistry community to experiment with RetroChimera, helping us identify its strengths and shortcomings so we can enhance it in the future. We are looking forward to hearing how it performs on various targets you care about!
For a deeper look at the findings, including evaluation experiments with our external research collaborators, see the full Nature publication (opens in new tab) and the accompanying Microsoft Source article (opens in new tab).
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