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For hair accessories brand Emi Jay, the decision to branch into hair care 15 years after founder Julianne Goldmark first started the company in 2009 was calculated and thought out.
Instead of going the traditional hair care route with shampoo and conditioner, Emi Jay launched its hair care line in fall 2023 with a singular styling product, Angel Stick, and has slowly grown each year by introducing two to three new, but similar styling products. The expansion has been successful, giving Emi Jay, a brand beloved by both Gen Z and millennials, a new and growing revenue channel while boosting its existing ones.
“Our foray into hair care has been successful due to the love and trust we’ve received from our community throughout the years,” Goldmark said in an email. “As we segued into brushes and other hair tools, our customers naturally gained an admiration for their Emi Jay hair wardrobe and routine, so hair care and liquids felt like a very natural, trusted direction.”
Hair care boom
To date, Emi Jay’s hair care range consists of five styling products, compared to the hundreds of products it offers under the hair accessories and brushes categories. Despite the comparatively smaller category, Emi Jay’s fractional chief marketing officer, Claudia Allwood said revenue from its hair care division has grown by 42% YoY, which has contributed to Emi Jay’s overall YoY revenue growth of 34%. The company declined to provide revenue numbers.
This growth can be attributed to Emi Jay’s new retail partnership with Sephora, which launched in February. Allwood said hair care has performed better at Sephora but added that the partnership hasn’t negatively impacted the brand’s direct-to-consumer sales.
She said of customers shopping at Sephora, 63% are new to the brand.
“I come from a very traditional beauty world, so for me as a CMO to watch this business, I was expecting to take a little bit of a hit in liquids and to really see what happened,” Allwood said. “What we have really seen is where I think the best-case scenario for Sephora, which has been completely incremental growth that we have not seen outside of the typical ebbs and flows during the Sephora [Beauty Insider] sale. Our dot-com business has been extremely successful.”
Brush rush
The category launch has also given a boost to the brand’s existing products, namely its brushes.
“As a result of our liquids business starting to get more credibility, our brushes have also become extremely popular,” Allwood said. “They’ve always been really strong, but the way that they work together with their design has really brought a lot of credibility to our brushes in a way that was a nice little halo and lift that really showed that they’re pairing together.”
According to the brand, all of Emi Jay’s brushes are in the top 10 omnichannel bestsellers post Sephora’s recent Beauty Insider sale. The brand’s two brushes offered in-store are also among Sephora’s top 10 best-selling in-store brushes this year.
Going forward
Emi Jay plans to continue its slow and steady approach to building out hair care, all while staying in tune with both its DTC and Sephora customers to see what products they want.
“It’s offering something new to our consumer,” Allwood said. “It’s a reason for them to come back. I also think that right now, we have a lot of copycats. There’s a lot of Amazon knockoffs and all that. It’s a very competitive space for us. It’s building the entire world of Emi Jay around not just a clip or something functional, but it’s the entire feeling of how you put yourself together.”