Better Natured
for Henkel

Zotos Professional has been making salon haircare for over ninety years. Better Natured was their move into clean, vegan, professional-grade product sold directly to the consumer — spirited, youthful and cheeky, aimed at people who color their own hair and refuse to compromise on results to do it.

The launch date was April 2020. Salons across the country were shut, the beauty press had reorganized itself around lockdown, and a professional haircare brand arriving with no salon channel looked, on paper, like the worst possible timing.

We ran the launch on three tracks at once. Trade and business press got the corporate story — Henkel entering clean haircare, Zotos going direct-to-consumer — which landed in Happi, Beauty Packaging, CosmeticsDesign, Drug Store News and PYMNTS. Consumer press got the product. And the national wire carried the announcement to 129 publications.

Then we turned the problem into the pitch. With salons closed, the brand's celebrity stylist ambassador Marcus Francis became the most useful asset it had — positioned not as a spokesperson but as an expert the media could call for at-home color technique, trend stories and how-tos at exactly the moment every editor needed them.

For the color range that summer we secured a media exclusive ahead of the release, sent personalised color drops — each editor's own shade plus a bolder one, with brush, bowl and branded gloves — and ran a Marcus Francis Q&A series with one-on-one sessions for editors coloring their own hair at home, answering questions in real time. The mailer was not a gift. It was an appointment.

Alongside it ran organic and paid influencer seeding to clean-beauty and hair-color creators, a full social content program, and entries into seven major beauty awards.

215.6 million media impressions in the first two months, across national wire, consumer digital, trade and business press. The launch release alone was picked up by 129 publications.

The brand arrived with the trade press treating it as a serious Henkel move, the consumer press treating it as a clean-beauty launch, and the business press treating it as a direct-to-consumer story — three different framings of the same news, which is what you want when a brand has no awareness to trade on.