Colgate-Palmolive is exploring a sale of some of its best-known but slower-growing personal-care brands — Softsoap, Irish Spring and Speed Stick — in a deal that could fetch more than $1 billion, according to people familiar with the matter Reuters reported on September 11.

The consumer-products giant has enlisted Goldman Sachs to run the process, the sources said. Colgate and the bank both declined to comment on the record, and no deal has been finalized — the company could still choose to sell only a subset of the brands under review, or none at all.

The brands sit inside Colgate's personal-care unit, which spans bar and liquid soaps, deodorants, shower gels and skin care and generated roughly $3.5 billion in net sales in 2025, about 17% of the company's total revenue, Yahoo Finance detailed in its own review of the exploratory sale. Oral care, by contrast, remains Colgate's dominant segment at close to half of sales.

Why now

The move comes as Colgate's North American organic sales fell 3% in its most recent quarter even as companywide net sales grew 4.9%, a gap the company has attributed to soft demand and heavier competition in its home market. Tariff pressure and elevated input costs have squeezed margins across the packaged-goods sector generally, pushing several large consumer companies to prune brands that no longer fit their growth targets — Nestlé, for instance, agreed just last week to sell its vitamins and supplements business to private-equity firm Yellow Wood Partners for about $1 billion, a deal confirmed by multiple outlets covering the transaction.

COLGATE CEO NOEL WALLACE HAS TOLD INVESTORS THE PERSONAL-CARE BUSINESS FACES "INTENSIFYING COMPETITION IN NORTH AMERICA" AND NEEDS A "LONG-TERM TURNAROUND."

Colgate shares carry a market value of roughly $70 billion. Reporting on the exploratory sale diverged slightly on the stock's near-term reaction, with one account noting shares dipped modestly the day the news broke while another cited a stronger year-to-date run — a reminder that this remains an early-stage process, not a signed transaction, and the market's read on it is still settling.

Any buyer for Softsoap, Irish Spring or Speed Stick would likely be either a strategic consumer-goods player looking to bulk up in mass-market personal care, or a private-equity firm betting it can run the brands more leanly outside a large conglomerate — the same playbook Yellow Wood Partners is using with Nestlé's vitamins unit. A separate dispatch from Press Temps' business desk tracks the same sale process, with a closer look at how the divestment fits into Colgate's broader margin-recovery push.

What happens next hinges on whether Colgate can find a buyer willing to meet its price expectations; if the sale goes through, investors are expected to watch closely for how the company redeploys the proceeds — toward buybacks, debt reduction, or reinvestment in higher-margin categories like oral care and pet nutrition — and whether a lighter portfolio actually turns around North American demand.