Frédéric Fekkai Reintroduces His Namesake Brand at Target

A little over a year after buying back his namesake brand, Frédéric Fekkai is ready to reintroduce it to the market.  The new Fekkai hair-care line, now billed as clean, vegan and sustainable, is set to launch on Jan. 6 at Target, target.com and fekkai.com before rolling out to broader mass retail and international markets, including Canada, the U.K., France and then Asia later in spring. The price point — $20 per product — is at the high end for the mass market, and while Fekkai declined to discuss sales figures, industry sources estimate the brand could do $50 million in sales in its first year.

The Fekkai brand has gone through a series of ownership changes since its creation in 1995 as a joint venture with Chanel, including sales to Catterton and Procter & Gamble. Last year, WWD reported that the hairstylist-turned-entrepreneur had partnered with Cornell Capital to acquire Fekkai Brands, the joint venture created by Designer Parfums and Luxe Brands that bought the business in 2015, marking the fourth time the brand had been sold.  Before Fekkai and Cornell Capital, a $2.5 billion private investment firm founded by Henry Cornell, former vice chair of Goldman Sachs’ merchant banking division, bought it back, the orig­i­nal Fekkai, meant to be an up­scale brand, is said to have lan­guished for some time in mass re­tail, with the ma­jor­ity of its sales com­ing from the di­verted prod­ucts in the gray mar­ket.

With Fekkai him­self now back at the wheel, aided by beauty in­dus­try vet­eran Pierre Laubies, CEO of hold­ing com­pany Blue Mis­tral which in­cludes Fekkai’s body-care line Bastide that he ac­quired in 2016 with his wife Shirin von Wulf­fen, the 25-year-old brand has been rein­vented and is ready to lan­guish no more.  “We’re very proud — we’ve been work­ing very hard with a lab to de­velop a for­mula to re­place the [orig­i­nal] Fekkai line with the same pur­poses and same great per­for­mances, but with­out sil­i­cones, sul­fates, parabens and ph­tha­lates,” Fekkai told WWD.

Twenty nine­teen is a to­tally dif­fer­ent land­scape for the hair than 1995. When Fekkai orig­i­nally launched in the mid-nineties, the hair­styl­ist sought to bring very high-end, high-per­for­mance, salon-tested for­mu­las to con­sumers. Now, he says, con­sumers still want high-per­for­mance, but they are far more con­cerned than ever with the in­gre­di­ents in their prod­ucts.  “It’s not a trend, this clean beauty,” said Fekkai. “I look at my­self and how my life has changed in the last five years — I’m ve­gan, I banned plas­tic in my house three years ago. There are no plas­tic straws, no plas­tic cups in the of­fice.”

Fekkai feels fully tuned into con­sumer con­cerns about po­ten­tial health haz­ards stem­ming from in­gre­di­ents used in beauty prod­ucts — he hears their con­cerns in his sa­lons, which he spends time in to test prod­ucts and help ed­u­cate stylists. He’s even be­gun us­ing cot­ton in­stead of foil for highlights.

The Fekkai re­launch is co­in­cid­ing with a boom in new tech­nolo­gies that labs are us­ing to de­velop for­mu­las for hair prod­ucts with­out tried-and-true in­gre­di­ents that con­sumers have grown wary of.  “Clean for­mu­las were a chal­lenge in the past,” said Fekkai. “You could not have clean for­mu­las with per­for­mance — the prod­uct sep­a­rated or it smelled ter­ri­ble.”  With the ad­vent of new, more af­ford­able tech­nolo­gies, Fekkai felt the right place to launch the line in the U.S. was in mass re­tail. He still con­sid­ers it a high-end line, and the price point — $20 per prod­uct — re­flects that. In the U.K., the brand will launch at Sel­fridges and in Paris at the Le Bon Marché.

The launch is com­ing at a time when the lines be­tween pres­tige and mass have never been more blurred, and Fekkai is very aware that con­sumers want to shop across a va­ri­ety of price points, and more im­por­tantly, are look­ing for high­end prod­ucts at lower prices. “I go to the Tar­get — Tar-jay, if you want to call it that — in up­state New York, and the beauty depart­ment is clean, it’s mod­ern.  Shop­pers to­day are shop­ping at Louis Vuit­ton and Tar­get.”

The mod­ern­ized Fekkai brand con­sists of 15 stock­keep­ing units, mainly sham­poos, con­di­tion­ers and treat­ments, across five ranges — Baby Blonde, Ful­lBlown Vol­ume, Bril­liant Gloss, Su­per Strength and Tech­ni­cian Color. Plans to add more styling prod­ucts are al­ready in the works. The prod­ucts are made with a wide range of nat­u­ral in­gre­di­ents, such as green co­conut wa­ter, veg­etable-de­rived poly­mers, French oak ex­tract, cold­pressed olive oil and rice pro­teins. Fekkai em­pha­sized the fact that his bot­tles are sus­tain­able — they are made of mostly PCR­plas­tic, and he is work­ing on get­ting the bot­tles up to 100 per­cent.

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Photo Credit:  Ovidiu Hrubaru / Shutterstock.com