The Wella Co. is taking its most recently acquired brand to familiar territory.

Briogeo, which Wella acquired last yr for an undisclosed sum, goes to the skilled channel in a 600-door partnership with Salon Centric, the distribution platform for licensed salon professionals, launching Aug. 1.

Though the skilled side of the business is familiar to Wella, where it also sells Nioxin, Sebastian Skilled and the remaining of its Wella Professionals portfolio, it marks an inflection point for Briogeo, said founder and chief executive officer Nancy Twine.

“We had been an exclusive partner with Sephora for about eight years before going into Ulta in 2021, after which since we’ve had our acquisition,” Twine said. “Wella had this core competency in salon, which was something that we’d never really dabbled in before.”

Though it’s unfamiliar territory to Twine, she said the appetite is there. “Over the past 10 years that we’ve been in business, now we have gotten 1000’s and 1000’s of inquiries from independent salon stylists, salon chains, independent salons about carrying Briogeo,” Twine said. “I knew it was such a possibility not only to get Briogeo into the hands of stylists, but additionally to leverage that credibility and ambassadorship to propel the brand forward.”

Annie Young-Scrivner, Wella’s CEO, contended that the brand’s awareness in specialty retail would translate into the salon environment. “When a retail brand expands to the professional channel, the brand already has built-in awareness from the prestige environment, bringing with it a built-in fame. It makes point of purchase easily recognizable,” she said in an email. “Certainly, Briogeo’s quality and performance credentials live as much as its pro ambition and shall be well received.”

Nearly the complete range will go into Salon Centric, excluding products that currently have retail exclusivity agreements, amongst others.

From a communications perspective, it’s required chief marketing officer Claudia Allwood to begin from scratch for a latest client base. “We all know our products work beautifully, but how can we make it really convenient and simple?” Allwood said. “The content that we deliver has to talk their language, and must be led by them, so we’re partnering with some stylists who will help us craft our salon menu, and all those different stories we are able to pull to make sense within the salon chair.”

One in all the important thing differentiators, Allwood contended, was the brand’s “clean” positioning. “It will possibly be a polarizing term, but we do offer a set of products that don’t have a few of those ingredients,” she said. “We’re more of those natural ingredients, biomimetic-performance ingredients, skincare derivatives, things like that. And it’s a unique story [from professional brands], and that may be what their clients are in search of.”