Private label hair care: what to brief and why it matters

Most hair ranges are built from shampoo, conditioner, a treatment and a styling product. Everything else is an extension.

Shampoo covers the widest formulation spread: sulfate-free systems on mild surfactants, anti-dandruff with zinc pyrithione or piroctone olamine, colour-protect, keratin and protein systems, baby and sensitive-scalp, and 2-in-1 formats.

Conditioner ranges from everyday rinse-off to leave-in sprays and creams, deep masks, detanglers for wavy, curly and coily hair, and cleansing conditioners.

Treatment is where perceived value lives: keratin repair masks, bond-building treatments, protein reconstructors, scalp care and pre-shampoo masks.

Styling is a category of its own — gels, waxes, clays, pomades, pump sprays, mousses, heat protection and curl definition — and usually deserves its own brief.

Brands normally launch the pair together, and the pair only reads as a line if the fragrance carries across both. That is harder than it sounds: the same fragrance oil behaves differently in an anionic surfactant base than in a cationic conditioning base. Concentration, stability and the way the scent survives rinsing all change.

Develop them together, lock the fragrance once, and keep it as a reference standard. Reorders should smell like the first batch — customers notice a drift in scent long before they notice a drift in performance, and they read it as a quality problem.

The same logic runs through the rest of the range. A body wash sharing the hair fragrance is one of the cheapest ways to lift average basket size, but only if the scent was engineered to survive both bases.

Fill sizes are not a detail to settle at the end. They determine who can sell the product.

Small formats — 50 to 100 ml — are sampling, travel retail, hotel amenity and discovery kits. They are also the cheapest way to test a new market before committing to a full production run.

Retail sits at 250 to 500 ml, with 750 ml as a value tier. Salon and professional channels want 1 L and 5 L, and that is a different conversation about closures, handling and pallet economics.

Sachets deserve a mention of their own: in several markets a multipack of sachets outsells a full-size bottle as a first purchase, and the sachet fills on the same line as the retail format — so what the customer tries is exactly what they later buy.

Wavy, curly and coily hair are the fastest-growing segment of the category and the worst served by generalist ranges. A formula built for waves and a formula that performs on coils have almost nothing in common beyond the category name.

Slip requirements, humidity resistance, cast versus soft hold, protein-moisture balance, whether the product survives a wash-and-go or needs sectioning — all of it changes with curl pattern.

If this is your positioning, specify the curl type in the brief rather than asking for "a curly hair range". A range that tries to serve every texture usually serves none of them well, and it shows in the reviews within a month.

Five things, and they can fit on one page. The format and fill size. The claim you intend to print on the pack. The hair type and concern. The target retail price and channel. The volume you actually intend to order.

Fragrance direction and a competitor reference help, but they are not a substitute for the five above. "Like this product but cheaper" leaves the manufacturer guessing which corner you want cut — the surfactant system, the active percentage, or the packaging.

Send those five and a first sample from an existing base can move in days. Anything that needs new formulation adds development time, and any manufacturer who tells you otherwise is quoting you something from a shelf.