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Luxury fashion brands have been ramping up their makeup and skincare offers in recent months, but the haircare business remains largely untapped. Balmain Hair, which celebrates its 50th anniversary next year, is an outlier. Now, new CEO Eline de Knoop — who was promoted from international marketing director last month — is gearing up for growth. Will other brands follow?
“For a long time, the haircare category has been overlooked as uninteresting because it was driven through professional salons or through retail at more middle-market segments,” says De Knoop. “There weren’t many high-end brands viable in the area, and if consumers did purchase a high-end brand it was through a salon — in retail the products were tucked away on a shelf and not presented in a luxury way.”
Since Covid, that’s changed: without access to salons, consumers began purchasing high-end haircare products to use at home. The global luxury haircare market was valued at $22.59 billion in 2021 and is expected to expand at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 6.4 per cent to reach more than $32.78 billion by 2027, according to consultancy Accenture. “Consumers are becoming more educated about the benefits of using high-quality haircare products. They are willing to invest in products that offer better results, which is driving demand for luxury haircare brands,” says Jessica Dervyn, senior principal of research at advisory firm Gartner.
Beauty has seen a “premiumisation”, which started with skincare about five years ago and has now expanded to haircare, adds Audrey Depraeter-Montacel, global lead for beauty advisory at Accenture. It’s a clear opportunity for luxury brands: while haircare is a smaller segment than skincare, fragrance or makeup, the haircare market’s CAGR is double that of the global beauty market, per Accenture. Balmain Hair declined to provide figures but says it has delivered double-digit growth year-on-year over the past 10 years, that it has about 50 employees at head office and that it sells to around 3500 high-end salons, 100 high-end retail doors and 10 online platforms.
Balmain Hair’s story began when Pierre Balmain, the founder of the French fashion house, asked Dutch wigmaker Dick Guliker to make some hairpieces to go with his designs. In 1974, Guliker started licensing the Balmain name. His son, Steward Guliker, was CEO before De Knoop took over and still owns the company, which branched out from hair extensions into haircare products in 2011 — the same year Balmain appointed Olivier Rousteing as creative director.
The brand now carries a range of products, hot styling tools and hair accessories alongside extensions. Best-selling products include its moisturising shampoo (€42) and conditioner (€44), leave-in conditioning spray (€40), hair perfume (€119), cordless hair straightener (€270) and tortoiseshell hair barrette (€53), among others. “If you look at our biggest competitors such as Oribe or Shu Uemura, they only focus on liquid [products]. Because of our positioning as a fashion house, it makes sense that we have a much broader category,” says De Knoop, who joined the company from L’Oréal Netherlands in 2008.
Balmain Hair is operated separately to the fashion brand, with headquarters in the Netherlands rather than Paris. The fashion brand is not involved in the creation of any products or packaging designs (though they do work with the same marketing agency on packaging design), but all new products are inspired by the fashion collections. In addition, Balmain Hair offers hair styling services for fashion shows and campaigns, Balmain Hair’s De Knoop says. In September 2022, Balmain announced it will launch a beauty brand in 2024, which will be licensed to Estée Lauder Companies and overseen by Rousteing. De Knoop says she expects to work alongside the new beauty business, especially on retail, fashion shows and marketing campaigns.
Translating Balmain’s inclusive DNA to haircare
As the beauty market grows, experts say there’s an opportunity for luxury brands to tap consumers with textured hair, particularly Black women. The market for haircare products that cater to Black consumers is estimated to be valued at $2.5 billion, and is projected to be worth $6.9 billion by 2026 according to marketing platform Gitnux. Black women spend nine times more on hair products annually than their white counterparts, according to a report by research firm Nielsen in 2018. Black consumers are also three times more likely to be dissatisfied with their options for hair, makeup and skincare than non-Black consumers, according to a 2022 McKinsey report.
“If you want to grow from a business perspective, inclusivity is key. Especially as you go premium or luxury, consumers expect products that have targeted ingredients [and formulas] for their needs, so being inclusive is the only way this can work,” says Accenture’s Depraeter-Montacel.
With the growth of the natural hair movement in the Black community, there’s even more opportunity for products that cater to consumers with textured hair, says Celia Sears, founder of agency Show Division, which provides backstage creative support for fashion shows, working with hairstylists and makeup artists who have knowledge of all hair types and skin tones. “[Women of colour] are very savvy and they have the money to spend. They know what they’re looking for in terms of understanding ingredients and looking at the performance of products,” she says. “And it’s not just Black hair, there are Mediterranean women in Italy [where Sears is based] who also have curly, thick hair and aren’t being catered to.”
Models backstage at fashion shows still report that hairstylists are undereducated on how to work with their hair, and often lack the correct product assortment and skills. “The biggest misconception is that textured hair is stronger than straight hair and that it can withstand all kinds of abuse, when it’s actually more fragile,” says Sears.
For Balmain Hair’s De Knoop, inclusivity is a no-brainer. Since Rousteing joined Balmain, it has become known for its inclusive casting choices and the designer is vocal about topics related to representation. “Inclusivity is one of the big pillars of the Balmain brand, and we wouldn’t do justice to the name if we didn’t incorporate it into Balmain Hair. We make sure we develop our products with all hair types and needs in mind, and we have an international education team that help us develop new products and educate on how to use certain products for different hair textures,” says De Knoop. Aside from product development, she says the brand has been diversifying its campaigns and ensures its team at headquarters is also diverse.
“It makes sense with the branding that Balmain has that they would offer something for women with textured hair, women of colour — it ties into the brand DNA,” agrees Sears.
Balmain Hair doesn’t have a dedicated separate line for textured hair, but has products that work for curly hair and advises distributors and stylists backstage and in salons on which combinations of products work for textured hair types. “We’ve discussed internally if we should introduce product lines specifically for certain hair types but in the end that’s not what our customer wants, they want to have the same product line with some products in there that are dedicated to their hair type and information on how to use them,” says de Knoop. “We shouldn’t create a specific line for Black hair or Chinese hair, we should already have products for people [of all ethnicities and hair types] in our line.”
Accenture’s Depraeter-Montacel says luxury haircare brands could also consider catering to the needs of mature women, particularly those going through menopause and experiencing hair loss and volume loss. “Mature women are also the consumers who [have the money to] go to the luxury hair salons,” she points out. At the other end of the generational divide, younger consumers are seeking higher quality products as they become more educated on certain ingredients and formulations. On TikTok, Gen Z have been breaking down their shower routines, which often include hair masks, multiple shampoos and deep conditioners.
Entering a new growth phase
As well as targeting a diverse mix of consumer groups, de Knoop is gearing up to expand the brand’s retail presence. Until now, around 75 per cent of its sales have been to professional salons, with around 25 per cent being to consumers via online and offline retail channels. “We’re planning to open Balmain Hair shop-in-shops [in department stores in Europe], which we already have in Asia and are working extremely well.”
While Balmain Hair says it has seen the most growth through wholesale channels, Accenture’s Depraeter-Montacel says haircare products are well positioned for direct-to-consumer and online channels because they don’t require a try-on element the way that makeup or perfume do. De Knoop predicts that the challenge will be to bring the luxury experience of using Balmain’s hair products to life in stores and online the same way hairdressers do at salons.
Still, salons remain an important channel for haircare brands. “You need that for credibility — when you go to your salon and see the brand you have in your bathroom, it’s reassuring,” says Depraeter-Montacel.
“In comparison to other beauty categories, the success of haircare products and brands is tied to haircare professionals or hair stylist expertise,” agrees Gartner’s Deryn. “Luxury haircare brands often play in a B2B2C model and successful brands understand that each customer has a different set of needs and wants, and so adjust their marketing and communication strategies to both business models (B2C and B2B).”
Balmain Hair’s key markets are mostly in Europe, but de Knoop is planning on expanding its presence in the US, which is Balmain fashion’s biggest market. “We work with over 40 distributors worldwide who distribute our product in their market because they know the local network, the best hairdressers and the right retailers, but the challenge is to maintain a level of common hair experience that is the same everywhere around the world despite cultural differences,” Balmain Hair’s De Knoop says.
Lookfantastic, which has stocked Balmain Hair in the UK since 2016, says there’s a growing appetite for high-end haircare. “Balmain’s haircare products are known for their luxurious formulations and we have seen strong demand from customers who are looking for high-quality, salon-grade haircare at home,” says senior haircare buyer Sandeep Mahil.
Luxury brands thinking of entering the haircare space may face competition from professional hairstylists who have launched their own salon-grade lines. “It’s an interesting dynamic, the competition between your favourite stylist’s line versus your favourite luxury brand,” says Accenture’s Depraeter-Montacel. Similar dynamics have arisen in the makeup industry with the likes of Pat McGrath and Charlotte Tilbury developing their own brands. “The more competition you have, the more dynamic the market is. Consumers like to choose specific products from certain brands to fulfil specific niche expectations,” adds Depraeter-Montacel.
Brands that already carry skincare lines will find it easier to expand into haircare, she adds, because a lot of the infrastructure for sourcing ingredients and manufacturing the formulations is quite similar. “[To launch a haircare brand] there are a lot of upfront investments, but it’s very similar to skincare so adding haircare is an easy next step because there are synergies and the potential of the market is there.”
Has Balmain Hair set the tone for how luxury fashion brands should engage with the haircare market? “We see potential for other luxury fashion brands to step into the hair category,” de Knoop says, adding that the premiumisation of the haircare market is likely to follow in the footsteps of the skincare market, into which luxury brands are now leaning. “We’ve been contacted by some luxury fashion brands to see if we could help them create their own hair lines too.”
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