By Anne Ready https://www.readyformedia.com/about-us/anne-ready\
Published April 24, 2020 Updated April 25, 2020 7:00 a.m. PT
LOS ANGELES – Personal care is one of the non-essential essentials in our new normal of sheltering at home. But a few companies were way ahead of the curve when it comes to at-home, do-it-yourself salon and barbershop quality.
Courtesy of Health Awareness Community
In an excerpt from his new book, Billion Dollar Brand Club, award-winning journalist, Lawrence Ingrassia includes a chapter acknowledging the AI adage:”The Algorithm is Always Right.” It tells the story of how eSalon, launched in 2010, tapped data analytics to create customized hair coloring. And this forward-looking company hired READY FOR MEDIA to media train one of their founders for interviews.
Data from more than five million customers who have walked through its digital door and answered its questionnaire has given this company a significant advantage over bigger, long-established brands. “Clairol doesn’t have this data,” Mr. Ingrassia concludes, “because the customers they deal with directly are retailers. The people who use the product are largely anonymous to Clairol. They walk into a drugstore, pick a box of hair coloring off the shelf, pay for it, and walk out.”
But for an e-Salon customized kit, you upload a photo and answer a questionnaire about your current hair color, the length of your hair, percentage of gray, texture and thickness, your ethnicity, eye color, etc.
“I apply the color after the kids go to bed,” said Brook McShane Bock, a 43-year-old chief product officer in Greenwich, CO. She maintains her rich brown hue with eSalon. “[The color] looks real, not a scary monotone,” she told the Wall Street Journal. “My hair still has shine and depth.”
Drugstores Redefined
Another successful direct-to-consumer personal care brand, Dollar Shave Club, began in Los Angeles in 2011 as a way to help a friend’s father offload a surplus supply of razors. But founder and CEO Michael Dubin told CNN that he also saw it as a solution. To what he believed was the “cumbersome” and “expensive” experience of buying razors at drugstores..