CEO Christian Brickman is taking the global hair care and beauty products company into the social media age.
Christian Brickman is taking a brand that has long been content to exist in salons and on store shelves into a modern digital world. He’s five years into a stint as CEO of Sally Beauty, a Denton-based company that generates $3.9bn in annual revenue, selling hair care products and tools and cosmetics to consumers and professional stylists. Those businesses were strong enough that prior leadership, Brickman says, never felt compelled to wander into digital marketing.
“For the first seven or eight years of the smartphone, we didn’t exist on the smartphone,” Brickman says. “We had no digital media. We had no social media. We had no apps. We had no connection to the smartphone at all. Between 2007 and 2015, we basically didn’t play in that arena.”
Brickman says Sally Beauty has seen strong growth in segments like vivid color hair products and products developed for curly, natural hair. And the business is live—a celebrity posts on Instagram with honey-blond hair, and sales in that color soar. On the heels of store closures and streamlining last year, the company announced the creation of 40 new jobs around digital commerce and branding in October. It also added 270 jobs when it opened a new, 500,000sq ft automated distribution centre in Denton County last March.
“Part of what happened here at Sally was that it had an incredibly differentiated business model that obviously everybody made a lot of money off of,” Brickman says. “But the problem was it got tired. They failed to invest, they failed to change, and they failed to adapt. What we’re doing is taking that wonderfully differentiated model and adapting it and making it fresh.”
