Yahoo Finance Amika, Known for Clean Hair Care, Goes Back to Roots With Dry Shampoo Launch
On the heels of double-digit growth last year, Amika is going back to its roots.
The hair care brand, which sells at Sephora and Amazon as well as its own website, is focusing on owning its hero product’s category: dry shampoo. That entails the launch of its third dry shampoo, Perk Up Ultra Oil Control Dry Shampoo, an ensuing campaign and pop-ups in New York and Los Angeles.
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“We ended 2023 up close to 80 percent over the year prior, and we plan to be up 40 percent,” said Chelsea Riggs, the brand’s chief executive officer. “We are in the top five hair brands, according to Circana, and we’re beating our goals.”
In 2022, Amika and sister brand Eva NYC were said to reach a combined $150 million in sales. Citing Circana data, the company also said its dry shampoos are growing at over twice the rate of the segment overall, hence the brand’s investment in keeping that momentum going.
“We expand our focus categories every year, but we keep a few of the primary. Shampoo and conditioner, for example, have been a huge focus for us and they’re also 60 to 70 percent of the prestige hair market,” Riggs said. “But dry shampoo is our core product, and we’re defending this as a category. Masks are the other one.”
The appetite for dry shampoos has been strong, Riggs said, noting Amika was an early arriver to the product type in the prestige channel. “Dry shampoos existed in mass, and we sampled ours like crazy. It always had incredible retention rates,” she said. “We have full intention to expand our dry shampoo franchises.”
The brand’s latest launch is reflective of customer feedback on Perk Up Plus, a lighter formula meant for a weightless wear. “We were very deep in our reviews for that, and the bad reviews all came down to it not absorbing enough oil,” Riggs said. “People wanted something more intense, and we saw an opportunity to create one.”
That has, in turn, formed the rest of the brand’s innovation strategy, which is a multipronged effort to double down on core categories while also branch into new ones, as well as new channels.
“We think about our innovation from a category-focused perspective, and then we have things that are more strategic, like our first service product for stylists this year. It’s a different customer, and it’s about maintaining and promoting our brand in the salon channel,” Riggs said.
Salon has also become a greater focus for the business, in addition to specialty retail and Amazon. “We doubled our footprint in the professional channel in the last five years,” Riggs said. “We did our own market research and in terms of how people discover our brand, stylists have always been the number one way, and that actually grew year-over-year.”
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