Hally Hair’s Kathryn Winokur: ‘Gen Z is not static — she’s growing up’

“We see hair and fragrance as some of the most individualistic forms of self-expression. That was the driving force behind Hally’s new hair perfume,” Winokur said.

In this episode of The Glossy Beauty Podcast, Winokur talks about filling a white space with Hally, getting insights directly from Gen Z and launching the brand’s new product, Lady H hair perfume. The scent has notes of ripe cherry, jasmine vanilla and deep moss.

Below are highlights from the episode, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

Discovering a white space

“There’s this bifurcation in that there’s permanent color, which is typically used when you are either lightening your hair or covering gray — and there are all the legacy brands that have been around for forever in that space, plus Madison Reed has done an incredible job innovating. Then, there are the fantasy shades, or the semi-permanent [shades], which are everything that’s not natural color — the pinks, purples and greens of the world. There are a bunch of very similar brands that have semi-permanent formulas that have this intrinsic rebellious, punk spirit to them. But when you looked at the middle — and when I thought about someone like me or my intern Meredith — [there was nothing for] someone who wanted to experiment with her hair as a part of her beauty routine but wasn’t trying to do permanent color to cover gray. That was the real moment where I was like, ‘There should be a brand catering to her in the same way other beauty brands are talking to her for skin care and color cosmetics.”

Tapping Gen Z for insight

“We’ve built an insider program with our college ambassadors of about 3,000 members, and they’re a great pulse check all the time. We can send them surveys with the press of a button and get feedback. But what I found is that the live interactions are also important. We were very early to college activations. … We were the first brand at scale that went big at college. And we clocked thousands of hours [on college campuses] and did tens of thousands of girls’ hair. You learn a lot, and it’s very different sometimes than what someone says in a survey. … Gen Z is not static, she’s growing up — she’s totally different now than she was four years ago when I was interviewing her or when we were starting Hally. There’s a big difference between when you’re 18 and when you’re 22. That is something we have to continually remind ourselves — it’s not a static generation.”

Launching Lady H on TikTok

“We launched [the hair fragrance] Lady H in concert with TikTok, at the TikTok headquarters in New York City, and their live creator studio, which is super impressive. It dates back to about seven months ago. We made a conscious company shift into focusing on TikTok. It’s quite obvious [that you have to] meet her where she is, and that’s on TikTok. We’ve made huge strides in the last six months. We had our first product go viral on TikTok: the Gem Pen that we launched last fall, which is a fun device that stamps gems into your hair. We saw the wild effect that creators can have when their videos [resonate] with their audiences and how that affects our Ulta and Amazon businesses. So not only have we started having this great TikTok shop presence, but we’re a star shop — we’re in the top 4% of literally all TikTok shops, from a sales point of view. We’ve also seen this surge in out-of-stocks in Ulta that we have to manage. We’ll look at our weekly performance and see a 300% sales increase on the Gem Pen on Ulta.com and 85% of all of our Amazon sales coming from organic traffic searching the term, and we’ll know it originated from TikTok — we had this focused strategy where we didn’t really have much [marketing] running on any [other platform]. …

So, when we thought about the best way to launch the Lady H fragrance, we thought, ‘We want to be able to educate the creators, so that he or she can tell the story, because fragrance is so personable.’ At our event at TikTok, we had over 100 of the top GMV-driving creators in the New York City area, plus people who flew in from Texas and L.A. … [In addition to our] three-hour livestream, we were able to spend hours with these creators and seed the product in a very intimate way. We had the perfumer on site, talking about how the fragrance is made and its Aquafine technology. Myself and the team [got to] interact with them. And what we’re hoping to see out of it is this drip effect [where] the creators go home, they know all about Hally, they know all about Lady H, and they’re going to create their own videos in the next few weeks. And we’re hoping we’re going to have the same effect we saw with the Gem Pen that is truly, authentically creator-led.”