Wellness is everywhere, even in hair care.
Briogeo, the natural hair-care brand selling at Sephora, Space NK, Revolve and Nordstrom, launched two wellness products in mid-January, representing its first foray into the category. The products, a castor oil and tea tree oil, are part of its “B. Well” product line, which are meant to be multifunctional — for example, for the hair, scalp and skin alike. Nancy Twine, Briogeo founder and CEO, declined to specify how many additional products will be added to the line but said it will be less than a dozen and they’ll be available in September.
For Briogeo — which launched in 2013 and earned $40 million in retail sales in 2018 — the wellness category represents an opportunity to tell the brand’s story around natural ingredients and how hair and health are related. “I always knew that Briogeo would be bigger than hair care, but I didn’t know how we would tell that story over time,” said Twine. “The idea of clean and conscious ingredients should not be focused on one part of your lifestyle but a holistic decision.”
Despite the beauty-wellness market being worth over $1 trillion in 2017, the latest appearance of hair care as a wellness category shows the opportunities that still exist for the market to expand. For Twine, that Briogeo’s retail partners showed interest in wellness provided the opportunity to show the correlation between skin, hair and health.
“Our brand has helped to define the concept of the skin-ification of hair,” she said. “The 2.0 version is the wellness-ification of beauty. We were thinking about hair care the way we were [thinking about] skin care, and now we are thinking about hair care as part of the 360-degree wellness story.”
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For now, Twine is not focused on customer education around wellness. The primary method of communicating the new launches will be through in-feed posts and GIF videos of the products on Briogeo’s social channels. (It has over 170,000 Instagram followers and nearly 26,000 followers on Facebook.) The B. Well line will not have a specific marketing campaign behind it until September, Twine said. The brand wants to first establish communication around holistic natural beauty and the correlation between wellness and hair quality, she said.
“I have learned that our customer appreciates being in the journey with us and not being caught off-guard,” she said. “Our soft-launch announcement about our [intentions], allows us to get some learnings. It allows us to get some early reads on what our customer is thinking and what we can do better, and whether our communication is working.”
