Customised Shampoo: The New Luxury

Prose is a shampoo brand that is found by Arnaud Plas who was inspired by his parent’s apothecaries in his native France. He is currently waiting for the arrival of a 60-foot, 10-tonne bespoke machine he has spent two years building. This machine is on its way, getting shipped from Normandy to Brooklyn. This machine will help him churn out up to 30,000 custom-mixed bottles a day.

This ultra-luxe shampoo bottle will cost a $25 for 8.5 fluid ounces, around 10 times the cost of the equivalent amount of regular old Pantene. 

Prose is set to hit a revenue target of $50 million, which is more than triple of last year’s revenue. Looks like the pandemic only made things better for Arnaud. It expects to be profitable for the time in 2021. This is expected to happen because of the growing customer bas and loyal customers returning for more. The company, which has raised $25 million in venture funding, is worth an estimated $350 million.

Arnaud wanted to grow from something much more than just a boutique hair care brand in New York. He wanted to go big and turn this budding shampoo company into a major hair-care brand worth $850 million in the market.

Since people are willing to spend over expensive hair care products from brands like Bumble and Bumble and Olapex. The hair care industry is valued at roughly $13 billion and the super-premium products are only a part of it. It has been growing in double digits since last year and even though the pandemic.

Arnaud wanted to open a bakery as a kid but after receiving a master’s degree in marketing from France’s Neoma Business School, he got a job managing a laundry-detergent brand at Henkel. By 2010, he was working at L’Oréal’, a top hair care brand in Europe. By 2014 he became the vice president of digital and e-commerce strategy.

This is where he received the idea to use technology to improve products rather than just introducing new ones. He soon left L’Oréal to start a business i=of customised shampoo.  With Paul Michaux, whom he had first hired as an intern at L’Oréal; Nicolas Mussat, former chief technology officer at real estate firm Meilleurs-Agents; and Catherine Taurin, a top hair chemist in France, he launched Prose in 2017.

The start was slow ut Prose made its way through. It made shampoos based on each customer answer sheet to a 25-question online survey. This included their hair type, scalp health, and every small detail. The software would then decide which shampoo is best for the person. Prose says it uses more than 60 ingredients which range from coconut oil (prosaic) to exotic butterfly pea flower.

As with any business that relies on data and machine learning, the more customers who complete Prose’s questionnaire (so far, more than 2 million have), the more information it has to refine its products. Helping retain those customers is Prose’s new subscription business, in which members get 15 per cent off and one-on-one styling tips.

Such formulations have not only helped in garnering more customers who shopped at luxury brands like Sephora but also customers who shopped for mediocre brands like Pantene. More than half its customers traded up from a mass brand, a switch no one expected. 

He hopes to expand beyond shampoo and conditioner. The company could move into related areas first (hair colour, perhaps) and eventually go further afield (to skin care, maybe, or other beauty categories).