Copenhagen-Based Haircare Startup Achieves 700% Growth with Plecto

Company Background

Founded in 2017 in a Copenhagen couple’s living room, Hairlust’s mission is to create the best natural, holistic hair care products on the market. Offering its wide range of products at over 1000 physical retailers, Hairlust operates 12 local webshops and one international online store, serving customers worldwide. Currently, 78% of Hairlust’s revenue is derived from outside its native Danish market. As testament to its ethos grounded in the Scandinavian principles of sustainability, innovation, and transparency, Hairlust is a Certified B corporation, indicating an exemplary standard of commitment to environmental and social well-being.

The Challenge

What do you get when you combine passion for hair care, attention to consumer well-being, and an entrepreneurial spirit?

Answer: Hairlust, a young company with serious dedication to all things hair. “Our goal is to still provide natural hair care without compromising on the quality, no matter how much we grow,” says Alexa Kemp, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Hairlust. “We still want to have our focus on our values that we have had from the beginning.

“We want to be conscious of what we're doing but still reach as many people as possible. Especially in recent years, we've been focusing on providing hair care for every need, because we are aware that everybody has different needs and every hair is different. We want everybody to be able to tell the story of their hair.”

Hairlust has allowed people to tell these stories since 2017, when it was founded in the living room of Rasmus Serup and Sofie Tidemand’s Copenhagen apartment. At this fledgling stage, the new company’s data-tracking system was bare-bones as it comes.

“We had our own setup where we calculated our data by ourselves using spreadsheets and everything. I mean, we were really, really small in the beginning,” Alexa says.

“To combine our data, we needed to do exports and do spreadsheets manually, which took so much time and so much work to analyze it. We just noticed that in the long term, it wasn't sufficient enough and efficient enough for us to do this.

“To look at each store separately while having all the tabs open and then going between the different stores—for instance, with Shopify—it just didn't work anymore in the end.”

Hairlust’s ambitious market expansion plans in those early years were the catalyst for a system upgrade to Plecto in 2018, a partnership that has remained rock-solid over the past six years.

“We knew right in the beginning that the Nordics were not the end of the story for Hairlust,” Alexa says. “We knew that we wanted to grow more and we needed a platform that allowed us to do so as well, by showing the data, helping us visualize the data, and keeping those dashboards.

"We knew we wanted to grow more, and we needed a platform to support that growth and not limit us. We wanted to go with a company in the beginning that also supported our goals in the long term. So of course, the investment in Plecto was that it was a reliable product with fair prices. And for us, it worked."

Here’s how.

The Solution

Out of the myriad BI software solutions available on the market, Hairlust chose to adopt Plecto, as the startup needed data from their sales and marketing channels to be synthesized and easily visualized.

“We noticed that it was very hands-on and very easy to navigate through Plecto, and visualize our data in a unique and customized way that we required and requested as well,” Alexa says.

Hairlust utilizes Plecto’s dynamic dashboards plan, which provides employees individual dashboards, and management the ability to toggle between them with ease. With this in mind, Alexa says Plecto has proven itself valuable for two reasons: that it’s allowed for both short- and long-term goal-setting, and that individual dashboards allow market trends to be easily accessed and analyzed.

“It was very nice for us to have our own KPI dashboards, especially in the beginning, and compare them to the mature markets,” she says. “Now we have the new markets, but still keep an eye on the mature ones where we get the cashflow from loyal customers.”

Hairlust further enhances the versatility of its Plecto dashboards with several integrations including Google Analytics, Google Ads, E-conomic, and Shopify.

Marketing

From its earliest days in Denmark to its current push into markets across the world, Plecto has been by Hairlust’s marketing efforts at every step.

“We started in Denmark,” Alexa says. “This is where we come from. We're still based in Denmark, and our main production and warehouses are in Denmark.

“But then we quickly expanded to Sweden, Norway and Finland; later on to the Netherlands and Belgium; and then to DACH, France, and Poland. And now we’re actually available around the world with our international store.”

The secret of this rapid—and effective—expansion? Plecto’s ability to provide top-notch KPI analysis.

“It was very easy to set targets for ourselves in the beginning: what we wanted to achieve, how much investment we wanted to put into the new markets, what we wanted to get out of them,” Alexa says.

“We were able to very strategically use Plecto in the context of achieving those targets to see if we met them or not. Based on that, we could make strategic decisions about which channels to invest in.”

With the deep dives Plecto offers into marketing channels, Hairlust has been able to focus on lucrative partnerships with big-name brands across Europe and the US—a recent example being a request from American fashion retailer Urban Outfitters to feature Hairlust products on its website.

“It's like a give and take a little bit. We do some initiatives of reaching out to retailers that we see as a match in our values,” Alexa says.

“We focus on natural cosmetics a lot. But we also get a lot of requests from smaller retailers, from smaller boutiques and, for instance, the DACH countries, because they want to feature our brand as they've tried it themselves. They had a customer trying the brand and really liked it. So it's kind of a hand-in-hand situation.”

Sales

Originally and still primarily a B2C company, Hairlust has gradually shifted its focus to capture a larger B2B audience in recent years. Once again, Plecto has proven pivotal in assessing market values as Hairlust continues its ambitious expansion plans.

“As team members, we have access to Plecto to look into different sales where we can see the effect we eventually have on that channel,” Alexa says. “We don't usually see this in our everyday work situations. What we see on an everyday basis are the sales coming in, and then the percentage growth in comparison to the prior month, for instance.

“Of course, we also look at how sales have developed on a yearly or quarterly basis. We can see the different markets, see what percentage comes from these, and how they’ve shifted over the years.”

Plecto isn’t just used to give Hairlust’s sales and marketing teams raw, up-to-date BI. During big transactional campaigns especially important for e-commerce and sales, such as Black Week and Cyber Monday, Hairlust’s ordinary Plecto usage gets a fun, gamified twist.

“We always try to do a guessing game in our team to see who is the closest to projected sales numbers across the markets,” Alexa says. “It’s really nice to see, especially on a daily basis, if we are close to our customers, or if an employee is already out of the race. So it's very nice to have this motivation in seeing those fun daily updates while beating the previous year's KPIs.”

This gamification takes on an added dimension, as Hairlust is an international group and every employee has a personal connection to their home markets.

“It’s friendly competitiveness of which market is performing the best,” Alexa says. “If we did a special campaign in a certain market, it’s really nice to see the direct results, especially for our transactional campaigns. And so you root a little bit for your own country in a friendly manner!”

Hairlust’s primary marketing efforts, however, lie not in country-specific channels, but on campaigns that transcend national boundaries. And it’s here where Plecto is a big help too.

“If, for instance, my colleague who focuses on influencer campaigns tries a new campaign, we can see the results directly. Especially with influencer campaigns, or a specific email marketing campaign, some of them are very transactional,” Alexa says.

Seeing the relevant data for these high-risk, high-reward campaigns gives the team a feeling of excitement and encouragement for the one taking on the challenge.

“It's very nice to see the result, and then you're rooting for the person to take the risk a little bit and see the results directly,” Alexa says. “It's very motivating in the sense of daring to do something new, and how seeing the work we've put into preparing for campaigns together is paying off.”

The Results

The DACH potential

Perhaps the biggest way Hairlust has grown with Plecto can be illustrated by their expansion into DACH, the crown jewel of European markets.

DACH—or the German-speaking countries of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland—is Europe’s biggest market. With a combined population of over 102 million, it’s one that Hairlust had in its sights for years. But business-wise, it’s a tough nut to crack.

“What we've noticed now for ourselves is that it's highly competitive, especially in the area or in the niche we are in,” Alexa says. “There's a lot of brands that are vegan, that are sustainable, that focus a lot on the values that we share.

“A lot of Germans love German brands. We, of course, came from an outside country into the market. To gain the first trust in such a competitive landscape was a bit of a challenge in the beginning.”

Nevertheless, Hairlust took this challenge as an opportunity: a sign that there was significant interest in holistic hair care itself, regardless of companies’ national origin.

“We have the benefit that we are a Scandinavian brand and Germans love Scandinavia,” Alexa says. “That was a huge benefit for us. We could brand ourselves as a trustworthy brand, even if we're not from Germany.”

Turning to Plecto, Hairlust was able to obtain real-time data insights into sales and marketing performance in the DACH region, giving Hairlust a crucial overview and understanding of the DACH market.

And these Plecto-based insights paid off—big time.

“We launched in DACH in late 2020, and in our first full year of presence in DACH in 2021, we had sales of 3 million DKK (€408,000)—then 5 million DKK (€677,000) in 2022, 7 million DKK (€1.1 million) in 2023 and expecting 10 million DKK (€1.34 million) in 2024.

“Today, 78% of our sales are from outside our home market, Denmark, and sales from DACH take up 15% of our revenue.”

Growing with customers

Even beyond their DACH expansion, Plecto has proven to be an integral component of Hairlust’s growth journey, in tandem with its customers from all over the world. Alexa highlights that orders from faraway countries bring Hairlust into personal proximity with its customers across the globe.

“It's sometimes a little bit crazy to see how many people we reach on a daily basis. It feels a bit surreal in the sense to see that,” she says. “But of course, that keeps us very motivated, considering we're such a small team and the impact we can have in so many people's lives—trying to make sustainable haircare more accessible for everybody and sharing that with everybody.”

Alexa also stresses the close interplay between internal transparency within Hairlust’s teams and external transparency to consumers, with Plecto dashboards facilitating this general culture of openness and data-sharing.

“It’s not only sharing everything with our potential customers, or showing our customers all of our ingredients, but it's also by showing all of our marketing initiatives and outputs, and inputs again through the dashboards,” she says. “It’s very much like sharing the values and seeing that in our everyday work, the impact we have every day.

“To just see how much we've been growing over the past seven years—to see that we've been growing 700% in revenue just by looking at each year at the yearly sales—it's been really impressive, and we're really grateful to be doing what we're doing every day.”

Advice for new users

Alexa “definitely” recommends using Plecto’s 14-day free trial to set up the platform, especially if your datasets are complex.

“But if you spend half a day, or even a day, just setting everything up and then trying it for 14 days, you will see how quickly you kind of become a master at using Plecto,” she says. “Also use the customer support, because it's been really great in helping us set up our data and everything else.”

Alexa encourages potential Plecto users to cut to the chase: don’t waste time trying to use spreadsheets and track data manually, as Plecto performs these tasks automatically. Even better, Plecto data visualizations can inspire new means and opportunities to grow your team’s potential.

“Once you get started with Plecto, you don't really want to stop visualizing how you can show the data and how it can motivate all of your colleagues and yourself as well,” Alexa says.

As Hairlust has expanded in size and popularity over the years, Plecto has not only helped Hairlust grow, but to do so in alignment with their mission: bringing the best natural and holistic hair care to people across the globe, grounded in the values of transparency, sustainability, and innovation.

“We want to provide people with vegan, sustainable and transparent and still very high quality and efficient hair care,” Alexa says. “We know that our products have an impact on the hair, our health, but also the environment. And we are still determined to improve our impact every day, also over the years to come.”

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