Tiger Group: Appraiser, Lender, and Liquidator in One

When Glossier raised $45 million in June 2026, the headline was the beauty brand. The more interesting name was the lender: Tiger Finance. It is worth knowing who that is, because the firm behind that loan does something most operators never think about until it is too late. It lends money to consumer brands, and it runs the going-out-of-business sales when consumer brands fail. Same firm, both ends of the cycle.

If a financier like this turns up in your category, on your cap table, or in your lender's diligence pack, you want to understand exactly what you are looking at. For how we think about reading your own capital structure, see how a fractional CFO for ecommerce frames debt, and our guide to inventory write-downs, which turns on the same idea as everything below: what your stock is really worth.

Who Tiger Group actually is

First, the disambiguation that trips up almost everyone, because it matters enormously. Tiger Group is not Tiger Global. Tiger Global Management is Chase Coleman's venture and hedge fund, the firm that wrote enormous startup cheques through the 2021 boom. Tiger Group, legally Tiger Capital Group, is a completely separate company with no shared ownership. It is a liquidator, appraiser and asset-based lender. They share a name and nothing else. When a brand takes money from "Tiger," which Tiger it is tells you almost the whole story. We trace the full arc from one Tiger to the other in the DTC capital cycle.

Tiger Group has been at this for more than 50 years. By its own published figures it has appraised over $490 billion of assets, monetized (its word for liquidated and auctioned) over $38 billion, and deployed more than $849 million of its own capital as loans. It runs six offices, with its global headquarters in New York, and describes its business in three words: Advisory, Finance, Monetization. Translated into plain English, that is appraise, lend, and liquidate.

Source: Tiger Group corporate site (firm-reported scale figures, accessed June 2026); RetailDive and ABF Journal (Glossier); ABL Advisor (francesca's).

The three doors: appraise, lend, liquidate

Most finance firms do one thing. Tiger does three, and the three are the point. Think of them as doors a brand can walk through.

Door one: the appraiser (Advisory). This is the quiet, high-volume business and the one you are most likely to meet first. When an asset-based lender or a bank is deciding how much to lend a retailer against its inventory, equipment or brand, it hires an independent appraiser to value the collateral. Tiger is one of a handful of firms lenders trust for this. They send in a field exam, look at your stock by category, age and channel, and produce a recovery value. That number, more than your revenue or your story, sets how much you can borrow.

Door two: the lender (Tiger Finance). This is the arm that made the Glossier loan. Tiger Finance makes asset-based loans: revolving credit lines and structured facilities secured by inventory, receivables, equipment and, increasingly, brand and IP value. Its borrowers are companies that are rich in assets but light on the steady cash flow a bank wants to see, which is most growth-stage and turnaround-stage consumer brands. It has deployed over $849 million this way. The pitch to a brand is simple: a bank lends against your profits, which you may not have yet; we lend against your stuff, which you do.

Door three: the liquidator (Monetization). This is the business the firm is oldest and best known for. When a retailer files for bankruptcy or decides to wind a chain down, someone has to run the going-out-of-business sales, clear the inventory, sell the fixtures and auction the equipment. Tiger does this, usually as part of a joint venture with the other big liquidation houses. In early 2026 it was engaged, alongside SB360 and GA Group, to run the store-closing sales for francesca's, the specialty retailer that filed its second Chapter 11 and is closing roughly 400 stores. Years earlier it was part of the group that liquidated 279 Stein Mart locations. This is the end of the line, and Tiger is one of the firms you call to manage it.

Here is the part to sit with. The same company runs all three doors. The firm that wrote Glossier a cheque is the firm that buries francesca's. That is not a contradiction. It is the entire business model, and the next section is why.

The one number behind all three: NOLV

Everything Tiger does runs on a single number: net orderly liquidation value, or NOLV.

NOLV is the cash you would actually net if you sold your inventory in an orderly wind-down, over a reasonable period, after paying the costs of running that sale. It is not what your stock cost you, and it is nowhere near what it rings up at retail. A rack of apparel that retails for $100 and cost you $35 might have an NOLV of $20 to $25, because in a liquidation it sells at a steep discount, on a clock, with fees coming out of the proceeds. Beauty and supplements take their own haircuts for shelf life and regulation. Seasonal goods get marked for the calendar. NOLV is the cold, downside number for your warm, full-price inventory.

That number is the hinge of the whole operation:

• The appraiser exists to estimate NOLV.
• The lender sets your borrowing base as an advance rate applied to NOLV. Carry $10 million of inventory at cost, have it appraised at a 50% NOLV, lend against that at an 80% advance rate, and you can borrow roughly $4 million, not $10 million. The rest is air, as far as the loan is concerned.
• The liquidator is the arm that goes out and proves the NOLV by actually selling the goods.

Now you can see why doing all three under one roof is an advantage rather than a conflict. A pure appraiser guesses at recovery values. A pure lender has to trust someone else's guess. Tiger appraises the assets, lends against its own appraisal, and has a liquidation business that tells it, deal after deal, what these assets really fetch when the music stops. It can get comfortable lending against inventory and brands that a bank will not touch, precisely because it knows exactly how to turn them back into cash if it has to. The liquidation expertise is not a separate business from the lending. It is the underwriting.

What it means when Tiger shows up

So a firm like Tiger appears. The useful question is not "is this good or bad," it is "which door am I walking through." The same name means three very different things.

If Tiger is the appraiser, your lender hired them, and your available credit is about to be decided by their recovery percentages. This is routine and not a danger sign. But the appraisal is negotiable in the sense that it is built on assumptions, about how fast your categories sell, how aged your stock is, what channel clears it, and a brand that walks in knowing its own inventory cold can push back on a lazy discount with data. A brand that has never thought about NOLV takes whatever number it is handed.

If Tiger Finance is the lender, the read is that you are a real business with real assets that a bank would not fund on cash flow. That can be exactly right. Asset-based debt is the correct tool for a working-capital cycle, where you buy inventory now and sell it over the next two quarters. The caution is the one we gave in our piece on Glossier's decision to borrow rather than raise: an asset-based line is for self-liquidating needs, inventory that turns back into cash. The moment it is quietly funding operating losses instead, the same lender who is fluent in liquidation is watching your borrowing base shrink as your stock ages.

If Tiger is the liquidator, the other two conversations are over. This is the scenario the appraiser was estimating and the lender was pricing against, made real. For an operator, the value of understanding the first two doors is that you never get surprised by the third.

Know your NOLV before they do

The thread through all of this, the thing almost no founder can state about their own business, is the spread between three numbers on the same pile of inventory: what it cost, what it retails for, and what it is worth in a liquidation. Most operators know cost and retail. NOLV is the blind spot, and it is the one a lender cares about most.

That blind spot has real consequences even if you never go near a liquidation:

• It is your true borrowing capacity. If you are planning growth around the inventory on your balance sheet, the borrowable number is NOLV times an advance rate, not cost. Founders routinely overestimate how much their stock can raise.
• It is your downside. If anything ever forces a sale, the recovery is NOLV, not cost. That is the number that decides whether a bad season is a write-down or an existential event.
• It is your negotiating position. When an appraiser values your collateral, knowing your own categories, sell-through and aging lets you argue for a higher recovery percentage and a bigger borrowing base. That is real money.

You do not need Tiger to run the exercise. You need to look at your inventory the way an asset-based lender does: by category, by age, by how fast it actually sells and at what discount. The brands that get blindsided, by a borrowing base smaller than they expected, by a fire-sale that recovers a fraction of cost, are the ones who only ever looked at the cost column.

The operator takeaway

Tiger Group is not a villain and not a white knight. It is a mirror. It shows you what your business looks like stripped of its story, valued purely as a pile of assets that can be appraised, lent against, or sold off. That is a useful and uncomfortable picture, and the operators who do well are the ones who have already looked at it themselves.

This is exactly the lens a real CFO brings that a bookkeeper does not. A scorekeeper tells you what your inventory cost and what it is carried at. An operating partner tells you what it would actually raise from a lender, what it would actually recover in a downturn, and which of those three doors your current capital structure is steering you toward. The point of knowing who Tiger is, and what NOLV means, is not to fear the call. It is to have done the math before anyone else does it for you.

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