Yahoo Movies R+Co Dips Into Color With R+Color Debut
R+Co is dabbling in professional hair color with a new collection.
The collection, dubbed R+Color, includes 152 stock keeping units that will start with select R+Co salons. Those products include powder, clay and cream hair lighteners, demi-permanent, semi-permanent and permanent hair dyes and ancillaries, which are going into around 300 R+Co salons.
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Executives said the brand continues to perform well, both in the professional and consumer-facing sales channels.
“We have R+Co, and we have our couture collection, R+Co Bleu, and now, R+Color, which we’ve been working on for almost half a decade to perfect,” said Dan Langer, R+Co president and group president of Luxury Brand Partners’ prestige hair business. “Salons have two sides to their business: hair coloring, and cutting. It was important to offer the full complement to our partner salons and we were able to bring a line we think is a game changer in the industry.”
Tev Finger, founder and chief executive officer of Luxury Brand Partners, noted it was the company’s first foray into an all-encompassing color range.
“We were being asked by our salons constantly about when we were going to do color,” Finger said. “Pulp Riot [which L’Oréal acquired in 2018] gave us the confidence that we could actually execute a color offering.”
Langer also sees it as an opportunity to rethink how consumers interact with professional hair color. “Historically, hair color has been a hidden secret and most customers don’t know what brand their colorist is using,” he said. “We’re in a position to create a line that’s visible, and will hopefully be requested by the customer.”
The range is all recyclable, and incorporates post-consumer-recycled components, and is also vegan, cruelty free and gluten free. Products also incorporate bond-building technology to preserve hair health, and were developed with the R+Color Collective, a consultancy of colorists like Jenna Perry, Richy Kandasamy, Renée Valerie and Jay Wesley Olson, among others.
Though neither Finger nor Langer quantified sales, industry sources estimated the brand will reach $10 million in sales for its first year on the market. Finger did say, though, that he expects color to eventually reach the same sales volume as the R+Co brand.
“Once you get a salon to carry a color line, it becomes a very sticky relationship,” Finger said. “We don’t worry about competitors coming in as much. We’ve forecasted this long-term to be a mega part of our business, but in the short term, we’re doing it methodically.”
“We have a lot of salons now coming to us for color first, and then bringing in R+Co and R+Co Bleu,” Langer added. “We’re creating this huge awareness based on the efficacy of the product, and that’s one of the currencies of its success.”
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