The No. 1 dandruff shampoo producer in the country heard that shoppers wanted a version with fewer ingredients and less plastic — so Head & Shoulders developed a minimalist product line called Bare that tackles dandruff with nine ingredients, in a bottle that uses nearly 50% less plastic.
Bare launched as a test in one retailer last year, but an executive from Head & Shoulders told The Cool Down that it's been so successful that it's now been put onto shelves nationwide.
Gwynedd Davis is the senior brand director at Head & Shoulders and Old Spice Hair, which she "lovingly calls the 'Dandruff and Dudes team.'" In an exclusive conversation with The Cool Down, Davis said they've seen a "big movement towards [an] elevated consciousness of what is in your product. … We've now seen it move from a desire for naturalness to more of [a] desire to understand the science behind it."
We spoke to Davis about reimagining a dandruff shampoo with fewer ingredients and less plastic, and how Procter & Gamble (Head & Shoulders' parent company) is using those insights to keep improving its other products.
👊 How many ingredients do you need to fight dandruff?
Head & Shoulders caters to the nearly 50% of people in the U.S. who have dandruff. And within that market, Davis and team "knew there was a group of consumers looking for a simpler, more minimalistic solution to dandruff and scalp issues, and so we set off to create this product."
But when it comes to dandruff, she told us the interesting thing is that "consumers who have some of the worst scalp issues are actually the most nervous about seeing long ingredient lists or a lot of things in their product, because they're actually concerned that maybe more ingredients might make things worse."
The Head & Shoulders team was seeing customers using all sorts of "natural" remedies popularized by social media (like olive oil and mayonnaise) "to try to solve their scalp issues in a more simple, more natural way," Davis said. "But those things, based on the science of dandruff … don't really work, so we were able to create something that was effective, and clinically proven."
And unlike shampoos with a laundry list of hard-to-pronounce chemicals, the ingredients for Bare shampoo are listed on the front of the bottle. The shampoo is free from sulfates, silicones, and dyes:
To get to nine ingredients, the team "[started] from scratch and [built] from the bottom up. … The goal was to find the nine things that could perfectly balance the formula while still making it effective."
🧽 The squeezier, the better
Creating a dandruff shampoo with just nine ingredients was the ultimate goal. But "the cherry on top is that we were able to do this [in] our super lightweight bottle … which has 45% less plastic than our regular Head & Shoulders bottles," Davis told us.
🧴Besides being better for the environment, with 45% less plastic the bottles got "squeezier."
"One of the cool things we've seen anecdotally," Davis mentioned, is that "we've seen a couple of reviews from people with arthritis, for example, who say it's easier to open — it's easier to squeeze out in the shower."
"It's squeezier," she added.
The team has also "seen a lot of consumers buying it for their families and for their kids. I think the minimalism, the gentleness of the formula, [makes] it easy for them to buy for their family," Davis told us.
💬 What else are customers saying?
So, how's it selling? Davis reports things are going well. "Consumers are reaching for it, which has been really exciting."
According to Davis, the Bare shampoos have been among the top 10 new launches in the hair care category since January and have had "great ratings and reviews" on Amazon and other retailer sites.
"We spent a lot of time looking at those and making sure … we're catching not just what people like, but any potential places we can improve, and generally the response has been really positive," she said.
"And the really fun thing, too, is as we've asked consumers, 'Why did you choose this? What do you like about it?' [The response is] exactly what we set out to do. A simpler, gentle formula that worked in more minimalistic packaging."
Beyond that, "We spent a lot of time working with dermatologists as well, and dermatologists love it and are recommending it."
🌿 Message in an (innovative) bottle
Head & Shoulders is part of the broader Procter and Gamble (P&G) ecosystem, which owns brands like Tide, Herbal Essences, and Old Spice. As Davis pointed out, this means all the innovations from the Bare shampoo line can be applied across the P&G platform.
The Bare bottle's 45% reduction in plastic "was a bit of a test, to figure out if we can make the packaging work and if it could do what we wanted it to do. … we're taking the learnings and seeing where we can expand that, both across Head & Shoulders and across the rest of our P&G hair care products."
"From a packaging perspective, we were already able to reapply the 'lightweighting' of the bottle" to a new Herbal Essences product, Davis said, which "has 25% less plastic in the bottle. … And so we're already starting to reapply some of these learnings from the packaging front."
Anna Robertson conducted this interview for The Cool Down.
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