Braun Haircare was “male and stale,” still speaking to an older audience while competitors had already moved on to young women. I rebuilt the brand’s entire DNA from the ground up – new positioning, new communication, four product launches in eighteen months. Market share turned around in Canada, Germany and the UK.
Braun Haircare had a problem it hadn’t quite admitted to itself yet: it was male, and it was stale. A whole new wave of categories was emerging to court women aged 16–24 — and Braun’s haircare portfolio was still speaking to an older, mostly male base, in a mostly male voice. The audience that was about to define the category’s next decade wasn’t in the room.
The brief, stripped down, was blunt: build an innovation pipeline fast enough to matter, and build a way of talking to young women that Braun had simply never had. Not a repositioning exercise on paper — a real one, grounded in who these women actually were.
I started with the people, not the product. Focus groups, in-home visits, hairdresser groups, fashion influencers — across the UK, Germany, the Middle East and Canada. Not a single round of research, but the kind of sustained listening that tells you what a brand’s tone should actually sound like, not just what features to ship.
Alongside that, I brought in a major design and innovation agency to work hand in hand with Braun’s own in-house designers — one team on the short-term pipeline, one eye always on the years after that. And from the insight came the harder work: rebuilding Braun Haircare’s DNA itself. New positioning. New communication platform. A new TVC, built to actually earn attention from an audience that had every reason to scroll past it.
Four new products launched within eighteen months, with a longer runway of innovation already planned for the years after. The new communication platform — TVC included — rolled out across Braun’s key markets. And the numbers moved where it mattered: market share and brand equity both shifted meaningfully, most notably in Canada, Germany and the UK.
The deeper win was less visible on a slide: a legacy brand that had been talking past half its potential audience for years finally had something real to say to them — and the sales to prove it landed.
