Focus On: Beauty By Imagination seizes the ‘hair moment’
Officials at Beauty by Imagination, or BBI, know how empowering, transformative and fun the right hair tools, accessories and hair care products can be to a consumer’s everyday hair routine. They also know how to turn this experience into stronger sales and profits for its retail partners.
The New York-based company, with offices around the globe and a founder-based culture, offers a wide range of products across the
hair care/tools/accessories sections. Its portfolio includes the iconic Goody brand, cult favorite WetBrush, Ouidad and the Bio Ionic hair tools brand, as well as the newly introduced Twist, a Gen Z-targeted curly hair care brand. The company carries in excess of 1,500 SKUS across these hair categories. It also has recently entered into a partnership with Curls, a growing Black-owned Texas-based company with a focus on multicultural hair care.
“This is most definitely a unique company,” said Francesca Raminella, the co-CEO of BBI, who has more than 25 years of experience in the category with such companies as Procter & Gamble, Revlon and L’Oreal. “We are a platform company with a number of brands that have a lot in common. Even more importantly, these products are created out of the passion we all have here for the industry and what we are doing.”
Raminella, who joined BBI in 2018, has been guiding the company’s growth including the integration of Goody with Wet Brush, said that the company’s 200-plus employees also bring a great deal of expertise and “real hunger for innovation” to the mix. The result, she noted, is the ability to quickly offer new brands, like Twist, and new products into the hair care market. “We are on a constant search for meaningful innovation to help our customers,” she said. “We also work with our retail partners to help them create growth and success from these exciting hair categories.”
The key to all of this, Raminella said, is winning the consumer over during what she calls “hair moments” — those multiple times during the day, such as after a wash or morning detangling and styling — when consumers are most involved with their hair. “The focus for us is to offer solutions to the customer in a unique way,” she said. “We provide solutions to the consumer that are imaginative and fun. We get them excited about the hair care category and what it can do to help them look their best all day long.”
The Curls partnership should help BBI expand its reach with multicultural consumers. “The Curls and BBI partnership will rapidly expand Curls’ distribution,” said BBI’s co-CEO Gary Dailey. “By leveraging BBI’s omnichannel sales platform, Curls will benefit from our vertically integrated supply chain resources, bringing the brand to more consumers while enabling Mahisha Dellinger (Curls’ founder and owner) to focus additional time on product innovation, leadership and inspiration. Mahisha will continue to oversee Curls’ product formulas and product development with BBI by her side to optimize operations, logistics and sales.”
Obviously, this strategy is working. Raminella said that sales at the company, which is financed by ACON, a Washington, D.C.-based private equity firm, will finish between a broad range of $250 million to $500 million this year and she expects robust growth well into the future as current and new innovations pique consumer interest.
Driving consistent innovation that addresses consumer and customer needs is critical to BBI’s and hair care category success.
“Overall, our job is to help the retailer drive category growth,” Raminella said. “We have developed the right merchandising support for them that creates higher engagement at the point of sale. And Gary and I plan to keep doing this in the future with new lines, acquisitions and partnerships. It is a very exciting time for BBI.”