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Hey Reader,

My fourth email has been a little longer in the making than I would have liked, but I have waited (and waited, and waited) until I could tell you about one of the biggest brand deals in the company's history. If you are a new subscriber and would like to read the first three emails, you can do so by clicking here. Without further ado, here’s everything you need to know about our newest brand addition...

Enough with the teasing… What’s the brand? ⭐

Color Wow.

Arguably one of the most innovative and desirable brands in the world. I couldn’t believe it when the call came in, and even though my door is mostly closed to new brands, I swung the thing open and nearly off the hinges for Color Wow. I had secretly (and with much envy) been watching the brand grow and already understood the potential. The brand was founded in the USA by Gail Federici who had previously co-founded John Frieda.

The magic in the brand is that it is completely problem based. Gail, along with Dr Joe, the brand’s in-house scientist, focus exclusively on problems that consumers are facing and spend years building products to fill the gap and solve those problems. They are slow and methodical in their launches (a strategy I wish other brands would implement) and take great care and consideration in what they bring to market.

What I love about the brand ❤️

I can’t deny that having an existing customer base and existing revenue streams is attractive – there is great awareness in Ireland for Dream Coat and Dream Filter. But I am equally attracted to the opportunity that lies in the wider range which has really not been explored by the Irish market to date. There has also been very little in the way of Irish education happening, and as I have seen with other brands in the portfolio, an education focus here can see salons sales increase by up to 100%, 200% in some cases.

The brand really lives in the ‘white space’. I am resistant to launching another full-service brand (one that does both consumer products and professional colour) as we already have KEVIN.MURPHY, ELEVEN Australia and AVEDA for that. What I do love about Color Wow (just like Epres and K18) is that it lives in the gaps. You don’t need to make the brand your singular focus but it provides a solution to so many consumer problems.

The plan for the brand is to layer it on top of our existing professional sales team (currently seven people, soon to be nine). I briefly considered hiring two or three new people and making their primary focus Color Wow but on balance, it would be foolish of me not to leverage the existing relationships of our primary sales team with their customers. This is a perfect fit for them and with our new state of the art Online Ordering System launching soon, the timing is perfect.

What are we going to do differently? 🤔

It’s clear that specific products (like Dream Coat and Dream Filter) are well distributed. They are everywhere. But therein lies the problem. We have a marketplace full of stylists and colourists who love these two SKUs but have not been exposed to the rest of the range. There is some incredible technology across the range and as we go into 2024, we will move to make it mandatory to stock a core range of 8-10 products.

For now, and to hit the ground running, we want to service the marketplace as it is and provide stockists with what they need in the short term. This launch is a little trickier than normal as there are already 500+ stockists of the brand and of course, we don’t know who they are. We are fortunate that National Beauty Distribution has a large social reach and we can leverage this to get the message out there that we will be their Color Wow partners going forward. We have created a very simple grab-all form which gathers the existing or prospective salons’ details, which we can then reach out to within 24 hours. You can see that form here. We feel that through all our socials as well as our email lists, we can get this message to the vast majority of salons in the country.

Going forward, we will be putting a dedicated National Head of Education for Color Wow in place. This person will manage both national events and education as well as carrying out a host of pop-up education sessions in salons across the country through a network of freelancers that we will train. We are currently hiring for that role which you can see here.

Finally, Color Wow will have a central role in the NB LIVE show happening in Lyrath Estate in February 2024. More details to come on this event but it's going to be huge.

Upcoming Travel 🎒

If you’ve been following me on Instagram, you will see that I was in Las Vegas a few weeks back for Cosmoprof. It’s absolutely the weakest of the three shows (the other two being Bologna and Hong Kong) but I do enjoy the buzz over there and it’s a great place to network with industry colleagues without the same level of distractions you get in Italy and HK. I caught up with some of the US distributors for KEVIN.MURPHY and ELEVEN Australia for dinner and had some fascinating conversations regarding how they build brands in an enormous territory. I also caught up with Aankith who looks after KM and Olaplex in India. Again, another intriguing chat about how business in a market of 1.4 billion people works.

I am staying in Ireland now until late September when I will travel to Minneapolis for AVEDA Congress followed by flying straight to Malaga for the KEVIN.MURPHY annual DSC event. It’s a 450+ person gathering of all European distributors and their sales teams to hear all about 2024 and beyond.

As always, I love feedback on these so, just hit reply and tell me what’s interesting and what’s not.

take care,

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