“The world should know about us at scale,” says Boris Oak, founder and CEO of Evolvh, who’s working to make that happen with new distribution and marketing initiatives.
The clean haircare brand has entered Anthropologie and will soon launch at Free People. The retailers add to Evolvh’s network of e-commerce outlets and physical stores that includes Credo, Beauty Heroes, The Detox Market, Dermstore, Verishop and Well.ca. Both via its wholesale accounts and direct-to-consumer reach, the brand’s sales have jumped more than 60% this year.
“We’ve been kind of an under-the-radar brand because we never took venture funding. We’ve grown the business in the old-fashioned way, just through revenue,” says Oak. “So, we’ve been the quiet tortoise, if you will, but, in reality, we’ve been the fastest growing haircare brand at Credo.”
With its individual full-size products priced primarily from $24 to $36, Evolvh is part of a prestige haircare category that’s been strong during the pandemic. In the second quarter of this year, market research firm The NPD Group estimates sales in the category rose 70% to reach $346 million.
Evolvh has launched at Anthropologie and will soon launch at Free People. Outside of those lifestyle chains, it’s available at Credo, Beauty Heroes, The Detox Market, Dermstore, Verishop and Well.ca, among other retailers and e-tailers.
Oak was enmeshed in haircare from a young age. At 12 years old, Oak had recently arrived in the United States from the former Soviet Union when his mother opened a hair salon. As an adult, he ran his family’s salon business Visual Image as managing director until 2009, when he introduced Evolvh before, he points out, “clean beauty as a term even existed.”
“I named the brand Evolvh because I always wanted to be ever evolving,” says Oak. “My own personal mantra is, ‘If it’s not broke, let’s try to break it,’ because that’s how to get real progress much faster. So, I’m a big believer in not staying with the status quo. We just want to continue to push the envelope.”
“We’ve been the fastest growing haircare brand at Credo.”
Not sticking with the status quo at the start of Evolvh meant steering clear of common haircare ingredients like panthenol and silicones. Oak compares those ingredients to makeup for the hair. Evolvh takes a skincare approach to haircare. He says, “We were able to put together formulations that were very different from the products we were already using in the salon with a very different impact on hair, and I began to see that skincare approach to haircare really work as far as how it affected the hair texture.”
Evolvh kicked off prior to Credo opening its first store in 2015—it was one of the retailer’s early brands—and Oak was happy its formulas didn’t contain ingredients on Credo’s The Dirty List of ingredients to avoid. “Those are things that we don’t need to get the results that people want most,” he says. “And we found that we can achieve amazing science-driven performance with plant-derived ingredients.”
Evolvh founder and CEO Boris Oak jeremychan
A decade ago, Oak predicted all beauty would be clean beauty—and he wasn’t that far off. Certainly, emerging brands largely adhere to clean beauty tenants. The ubiquity of clean beauty has made it harder for brands in the segment to stand out, and it’s elicited a backlash. Oak isn’t afraid of either circumstance. He says, “If everybody is using clean, and that’s no longer that high level point of difference, I think what’s really going to matter is performance and the kind of results your products can deliver.”
Oak welcomes the debate over clean beauty. He acknowledges there’s a lot of confusion around what clean beauty is and isn’t—and believes it’s healthy for brands, retailers, consumers and influencers to hash it out. At Evolvh, the products are central, and their classification is secondary. Oak says, “The real lead story was always going to be the efficacy piece, the piece around having a transformative impact on your hair’s texture to the point where you can really see and feel the difference.”
“We’re kind of obsessed with frizz fighting.”
Evolvh began with five products and has since expanded to 25. Today, its assortment is grouped into four main areas: color care, curl care, smooth and volume. Evolvh has developed a loyal following for its curly care products. In particular, its WonderBalm Magic For Curls serum has become a cult favorite. Oak declares, “We’re kind of obsessed with frizz fighting.” In September, Evolvh is releasing DreamGel. Oak says the product is “really unique in that it offers a high level of hold, but the hair never gets crunchy, and it actually contains a lot of amino acids, so it’s also a treatment.”
Evolvh has two primary customer cohorts: women 40 years old and above, and girls and women in their late teens to 30s. The former group is experiencing hair texture changes, especially as gray hairs propagate, and turns to Evolvh to enhance hair texture. Oak says, “It just has this profound impact on making your hair so much softer and silkier, and it does that better than probably any other product on the planet right now.”
Evolvh started in 2009 with five brands and has since expanded its assortment to 25 products. It separates products into four principal groups: curly care, color care, smooth and volume. WonderBalm Magic For Curls is one of its bestselling products. KAYLINN GILSTRAP
He anticipates the acceptance of gray hair exhibited by celebrities such as Andie MacDowell will persist. “Hair color is always going to be a big thing, but more people feeling more confident or comfortable if they have grays is a viable, beautiful option,” he says. Oak figures the latter, younger customer group comes to Evolvh “for the ingredients and, then, they stay because of the performance.”
Last year, Evolvh detected influencers were driving 20% of its business. The brand has incorporated the hashtag #EmbraceYourCurls in its social media posts for about eight years. This year, Evolvh decided to double down on influencer marketing and public relations. It’s tapped the software platform Grin for influencer marketing and Lisa Lauri Communications for public relations. Oak says he gravitated to Grin because “they allow you to have that direct one-to-one relationship with the influencer versus creating a middle layer.”
The next step for Evolvh is to seek out department store and beauty specialty store retailers. Oak names Neiman Marcus, Ulta Beauty, Nordstrom and Sephora as possible targets for the brand. He says, “We’re going to be looking at taking the product to a much wider audience moving forward.” In five years, he envisions, “We’re going to be in the conversation in terms of the top tier of great haircare brands, not only in terms of business size, but also consumer love.”
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