As chief executive officer Amanda Baldwin’s strategic vision for Olaplex comes into focus, she’s casting both narrow and wide nets.
For one, she’s thinking broadly about the brand’s visual identity and introducing a refreshed logo and rejiggered visual merchandising across retail partners, Olaplex’s website and social media. Baldwin is also doubling down on the professional channel and revving up what she called the company’s “innovation engine.”
Baldwin, who took the helm in December 2023, said she’s spent the last year studying the brand’s most resonant attributes, and figuring out how to iterate upon them.
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“If you don’t know exactly what you’re trying to build or what you want to be when you grow up, it’s hard to know where to grow,” Baldwin said. “That was the journey I’ve been on for the past year.”
One of the first brands to capitalize on the then-fledgling prestige hair care boom, Olaplex has faced headwinds across channels in recent years. For its most recent financial results for the third quarter of 2024, net sales decreased 3.6 percent to $119.1 million over the quarter.
In a statement at the time, Baldwin said, “While we have seen meaningful progress against our strategic goals, we have revised our outlook for fiscal year 2024 as the trajectory of our transformation has shifted, with a particular focus on the realignment of our international business.”
Olaplex recently fielded a class-action lawsuit regarding the provenance of its products that alleged products were falsely advertised as being made in the U.S. The brand settled the suit, per a notice of settlement, which read that the court found no evidence of wrongdoing and the agreement to settle was meant to “avoid the time, risk and expense of litigation.”
The company declined to comment on the settlement. Citing Olaplex’s quiet period ahead of its next earnings release, the company declined to comment on the general state of the business or sales expectations for the brand’s new product.
Baldwin’s strategy has three key tenets: a more less clinical feeling to the brand’s expression, including packaging and a new logo; a recommitment to the professional channel, and finding novel applications of Olaplex’s technology.
“We’re able to go beyond damage repair. The technology is creating healthier hair, and that’s fundamental to the brand,” Baldwin said. “We’re linking that with where we believe the future of the beauty industry is, which is in foundational health, from the inside out.”
Enter the brand’s No.0.5 Scalp Longevity Treatment, which includes a proprietary complex meant to bolster the scalp barrier and microbiome, as well as hydrate. It features the brand’s hallmark bond-building technology, as well as an antioxidant blend, lavender extract and tazman pepper extract.
The product, which debuted Tuesday, will retail for $44 on the brand’s website as well as with Sephora.
“When you talk about hair health, you have to start at the root,” Baldwin said. “If you’re going to really think about turning the page onto the next chapter of the brand, what better way to start than with the beginning of where all hair starts? It’s a very nascent category.”
Scalp health has become a global phenomenon and a key driver of prestige hair, according to 2024 data from Circana, which cited the category grew 9 percent.
“When you look at the penetration of prestige in hair, it’s about 25 percent, whereas it’s around 45 percent in other categories,” Baldwin said, nodding to her previous act as the CEO of Supergoop. “It’s a huge delta, and scalp is this tiny baby that feels a lot like sunscreen did. The thinking is that if I take care of my scalp today, my hair will be better tomorrow.”
Though scalp care has become synonymous with the “skinification” of hair in recent years, Baldwin pointed out that Olaplex’s original patent for its bond-building technology was for hair, scalp and skin.
“It turns out you have disulfide bonds in your scalp area,” she said. “When you think about your scalp barrier, it keeps good stuff in and bad stuff out. Then you mix in an antioxidant blend that’s similar to skin care, and then it balances the scalp microbiome. From what we know, we’re the only ones that are thinking of it with this holistic approach.”
The product is also getting an in-salon counterpart for professional hairstylists, packaged in monodoses, and due out later this year.
“It’s a good example of how we’re thinking about bringing more services into the salon and giving the pro something very specific and special for them. This is the same concept but with higher levels of actives,” Baldwin said.
Baldwin said the professional roots of the business “needed to be unearthed. The brand has always presented itself as scientific, but this power of the pro is so critical to that origin story. It was all just science until it’s brought behind a chair and put into mixing bowls.”
Although science will continue to drive Olaplex’s product development, but she’s hoping to tap into the post-salon buzz. “It’s that kind of feeling that we all have when you walk out of a salon with a pep in your step and that’s what we have to capture,” she said.
Science “is a part of the journey of the brand, but the brand felt cold and clinical for a category that is not cold and clinical. The question was how to start to infuse emotion into what we do, the feeling, the texture, a little color? We were very choiceful,” she said.
“You’ll start to see a new logo that’s bolder and stronger, and this manifesto becomes the future of foundational hair health and leading to stunning results,” she said. “You’re going to see a very different-looking brand. If we’re going to be pro-first, we have to show them [in campaigns].”
Baldwin, who jumped into the brand’s refresh when the company brought on Katie Gohman as chief marketing officer last year, who previously held the same role at Marc Jacobs.
“We have all sorts of marketing coming up, ways to experience the brand, and a lot of storytelling to do,” Baldwin said. “We’re thinking about marketing and storytelling in a way that lives up to the power of the product, but that also shares a point of view.”
