Post by Jon Goldstone, Managing Partner Global
Any guesses on the fastest growing haircare brand in the US?
I recently had the pleasure of working with the team at Not Your Mother’s, a brand that has doubled in size over the last 3 years and grown by a spectacular +45% in the last 12 months. Based in humid Tampa, Florida (‘where good hair is hard’) and led by the awesome Charlene Patten and her team of hair fanatics, Not Your Mothers has climbed to become the #10 brand in overall US haircare and the #2 brand in styling, with sales accelerating to over $300m (1).
They are also the most loved haircare brand amongst the valuable teen audience. According to Piper Sandler’s survey of 10,000 Americans aged 13 to 19 years old, Not Your Mothers is their top-pick in haircare, preferred to much bigger names such as Amika, Aussie or Dove.
So what has been the secret to their success?
1. Don’t just understand the consumer. BE the consumer
The Not Your Mothers team have a more heightened and intuitive understanding of their consumer than just about any brand team that I have ever worked with. This is what we at the brandgym call “consumer empathy“.
The team have this deep insight as they ARE the consumer. Every member of the team uses their own products and eulogises about them. Even one of the guys that works in product development has grown his hair long so that he can experience the effectiveness of the products himself!
The social team also create a lot of their own content, often featuring the office and members of the team (see example below). This provides a freshness and authenticity that is usually lacking in the big-name brands who outsource so much of their digital content.
2. Position Distinctively
When Not Your Mothers launched the competitive set were generally positioned either as quasi professional brands (i.e. Tresemme) or as specialists (i.e. Head and Shoulders). Very few were personality based.
Not Your Mothers does exactly as the name implies. It offers a brand that is uninhibitedly teen in its outlook, with products that are definitely not for your mother to use! This sense of safe rebellion permeates through all consumer touchpoints. This is especially true in the fun naming of the collections, such as Curl Talk, Beach Babe or the newly launched Aura Boost.
Whilst buyers enter the brand as teenagers, the products are so good that they tend to stick around. Not Your Mothers heavily over-indexes on gen Z and gen X consumers, but millennials still represent a third of consumers.
3. Offer Exceptional Value
Not Your Mothers was founded based on the insight that three products from the range could be bought for $20, the average allowance of teenagers at the time.
But this is not a cheap, low quality brand. The product quality is exceptionally high, matching the performance of much more expensive competitor brands. Ratings and reviews back this up with almost all reviewers being blown away by the amazing value that Not Your Mothers provides.
Across today’s selection of 86 items the majority of products are priced from $7.99 to $10.99. As Charlene Patten said in a recent interview talking about the core consumer, “Whether she has a dime or a dollar, she wants to express herself, we’re accessible so she can afford to buy us over and over again”.
4. Deeply Commit to your key media channel
Not Your Mothers are a classic digital native. They never had the legacy of advertising in traditional media and have thrown themselves into the connecting power of social media from launch.
They were very quick into TikTok. In 2022, Not Your Mother’s struck a partnership with Greta Wilson for their Curl Talk collection, and the lifestyle and hair content creator regularly posts about the brand.
As Charlene says “Our tone of voice is super fresh. She calls us her hype girl, and it’s not forced. She sees it’s real because she’s the first to call BS on a brand. We like to say Not Your Mother’s is a state of mind as much as it is a brand.”
The team are highly skilled at both building social hype and closing the sale, driving exceptional conversion rates. They recognise that their consumers are typically ‘spear fishing’, searching for very specific products they have seen online, and they make it very easy to find and buy those trending products in social commerce, ecommerce or regular stores.
5. Work Closely With Retail Partners
Founders Rocky and Bethany Pagliarulo launched Not Your Mothers with six items at 400 Walmart stores. It was very much a collaboration with both parties spotting a gap in the market for haircare directed at young consumers.
Ever since then the team have established a very close relationship with their retail customers. Ranges are continuously being refreshed with great agility and each retailer feels that they are getting exactly what they need to address their shoppers unique needs.
Today the brand is available in over 40,000 stores across the US with their closest partners, Ulta Beauty, Target and Walmart, accounting for the majority of sales.
In summary, it is great to see the Not Your Mothers brand that is maintaining its fresh, start-up vibe and scaling with such success, fifteen years after launch. As many global CPG businesses struggle to evolve into a new brand-building model, they could do much worse than spend some time hanging out with the magnificent team at Not Your Mothers.
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