At first blush, Ivest Consumer Partners LLC might seem an unlikely buyer for CloudCo Entertainment, which owns the Care Bears and other properties that combine consumer intellectual property and content.

“There are very few pieces of IP that we would call multi-generational evergreen, classic brands. Most of those are acquired by large IP houses,” Ivest co-founding partner Aston Loch said following the firm’s August purchase of CloudCo at a roughly $100 million enterprise valuation.

“Care Bears is a multi-generational evergreen brand that’s done $5 billion in sales at retail,” Loch added. “It’s not typical that a group like ours gets to own something this significant and this important to pop culture.”

While behemoths such as Walt Disney Co. (DIS) or Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. (WBD) often win auctions for content and IP, Ivest’s plan to keep CloudCo an independent company swayed the Weiss family that owns the company. The strategy centers around developing a symbiotic “flywheel” relationship between the consumer products and media properties, while tapping Ivest’s expertise in licensing, M&A and what Loch terms a “private equity 2.0” approach.

“It’s got the genetic code of a much larger business,” Loch said of CloudCo. “For that reason, we can scale it and turn it into a very significant company.”

CloudCo was part of American Greetings Corp. for decades. The controlling Weiss family sold a 60% stake in American Greetings to Clayton, Dubilier & Rice LLC in 2018 but kept CloudCo.

“In good Care Bear spirit, they love their management team, who’s done a great job of growing the brand and stewarding the brand,” Loch said. “They wanted somebody who cared about the brand and who could collaborate with their management team.”

The investor describes CloudCo as a mini Warner Bros., combining two separate but related businesses. “The first is an independent entertainment studio that produces content for Care Bears and for many of their other properties as well,” he said. “The second half is an IP house that primarily licenses the Care Bears IP to a cohort of leading product companies.”

The comparison to Warner Bros is not arbitrary. Ivest founder and managing partner George Jones, operating partner Mark Matheny and others came from the team that grew the studio’s consumer products to a multibillion-dollar business with 27% operating profit growth for seven years, Loch noted.

“You have a flywheel effect where the content feeds the consumer products business and the consumer products business feeds the content engine,” he said.

CloudCo could target consumer products and brands that would benefit from content, or vice versa. “So just think of any toy brand that’s popular and that could become more popular with content,” Loch said. “The flip side is we could buy content IP that would benefit from consumer products.”