‘When you’re winning, change your game’: Hair raising success rules from Oribe co-founder Daniel Kaner

0:11Arpit Kaushik:Hello and welcome to The Entrepreneurs on Monocle Radio, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. Today's show is about the business of scent. First, we'll meet the co-founder of a luxury hair care line whose much-celebrated signature fragrance has created something of a cult following.

0:33Daniel Kaner:I want it to smell like I crawled into a Birkin bag and died. I want it to smell like red lipstick, tobacco, fashion and sex.

0:45Arpit Kaushik:And later we'll meet the founder of the world's first alcohol-free, 100 % pure and natural, designed-to-be-layered perfume. It goes against the grain, against the convention of the perfume industry in every aspect, from the composition to the packaging to the way it's built. This is The Entrepreneurs with me, Tom Edwards.

1:16Arpit Kaushik:You're listening to The Entrepreneurs. Daniel Kainer is the co-founder and president of Oribe Hair Care, a luxury professional brand that he launched in 2008 alongside the late legendary hairstylist Oribe Canales. With a background at Aveda and Bumble, Daniel's known for building creativity-led, values-driven brands that scale globally while staying rooted in craft, culture and community. Monocle's luxury markets editor, the always well-quaffed Brenda Toohey, caught up with him in London to discuss the importance of detail in product development, how the brand crafted its signature scent, and the decision to sell the company to a Japanese corporation.

1:56Arpit Kaushik:Daniel began by telling Brenda about his philosophy of gratitude in life and in business.

2:03Daniel Kaner:I do feel like we're extremely lucky, and through the journey, I oftentimes will, in the form of gratitude, sit down, and people will hear me say often, we are really lucky, I am really lucky. And I do say that every morning as I'm sitting and looking at something beautiful with my 21-year-old dog, Mrs. Jezebel, Ms. Jezebel. The little poodle my daughter wanted, we didn't want. My wife surprised us with Jezebel. And it's been one of the supreme loves of my life. I love that little dog. And I didn't even, I never had a dog before. There's nothing like the love of an animal. Fantastic. Yeah. Glorious.

2:44Daniel, before we talk about building a global beauty brand,

2:48Daniel Kaner:tell us about the first moment you realized that hair could be a serious business opportunity rather than simply a service. No one wants a bad hair day. And you have beautiful hair, by the way. Listen, a bad hair day, we were just discussing that. That hair is integral. If your hair isn't right, nothing is right. Well, I think that's the thing is everyone or most people do. They have hair. And everyone wants a great hair day. and most people don't know how to do it. I was lucky to have started in the business with Aveda, and I worked very closely with the founder of Aveda, Horst Recklebacher. And then I was invited to be a partner at Bumble & Bumble.

3:24Daniel Kaner:So I spent a lot of time in salons with consumers, and you see how serious they are about hair. And then the really good stylists train extensively. They're constantly training. I mean, we at Orbe have an academy in Copenhagen and all throughout the world. And we've got educators in almost every language. We're in 42 countries now. So we're constantly kind of teaching kind of master classes in hair. So how did we know? You know, every product range was represented at the best level except hair. So you could find beautiful color cosmetics. You could find skin care. You could find fine fragrance.

4:08Daniel Kaner:but professional hair care lived in the professional world, and there was a great deal of channel conflict. So you couldn't take professional hair care out of the salon. It was no longer professional. So a lot of hair care was sold in salon and sold en masse, and we wanted to create a pillar or a standard in great. Well, you can't just say I want to be great. It can't be a matter of price. It can't just be a matter of design. So we said, if we were to look at all the details, say that all the details matter, from the spray patterns to the formulations to the fragrance to the packaging, if we could get close to all of that, maybe we would have a chance of getting there on that journey.

4:52Daniel Kaner:And that's what we did. We said all the details have to matter, and that was our approach. Horvay sits at an interesting crossroads between fashion, beauty, and luxury. Was that positioning deliberate from the start? Absolutely. I mean, to see Orbe, he was such a cool guy. He was so, so involved in fashion. And so in the beginning, we'd hear ourselves saying we're a fashion brand, not a beauty brand, not a hair care brand. Because it was so much about fashion, hair, makeup, the culture of, and getting the look. And so it was quite intentional. And it still is today the way that we look at it. How did you come up with the fabulous fragrance at Orbe?

5:42Daniel Kaner:Oh, I'm glad you bring that up. It's quite a story. Under the idea or the guise that everything matters, Orbe had wanted a perfume. And he worked a lot with Jennifer Lopez in his early days, I guess, from his later days, her early days. And she read the gutter credits of the fashion magazines. and she said, if I ever get my shot, I want that guy to do my hair. And then Sony Records called him and said, hey, we've got a new artist. Would you come down and do a cover try? And they were together for a very long time. And he said when Miss Lopez would leave a meeting, her fragrance was through the room.

6:20Daniel Kaner:You could smell it in the room. He said that's, he had a log snapper. He snapped his finger and said, that's what we're after. So we went to my friend at Givadon, and we were kind of snuck in this beautiful room where someone like Mr. Tom Ford probably would go, or Mr. Leonard Lager, or Mr. Mark Jacobs. We pitched our idea, and our perfumer said, what does Orbe smell like? And we didn't know, because we had never done a brand before. So she was very gracious. She gave us each a notebook, and we sat down. And Orbe was writing the story out. So she came back in and, you know, Orbe stood up and said, Orbe, what does it smell like?

6:57Daniel Kaner:What's the story? And in his kind of gravelly voice, he said, I want it to smell like I crawled into a Birkin bag and died. I want it to smell like red lipstick, tobacco, fashion and sex. That's wonderful. So we knew where to go with that one. I mean, it's alluring. It's sexy. It's powerful. The brand began in salons, but now has a global presence. How did you decide when it was the right moment to expand beyond the professional hair care world? We did right from the beginning, but we stayed curated with some of the best salon owners in the world. And that was really the point of expansion. We found some, and it was great.

7:43Daniel Kaner:They had a belief. They had education within their salons. They really believed in a beautiful future with beautiful hair and precision. Those were the people that we loved to partner with. So we're broadly distributed in the right places, but we're very selective with some of the salon partners and the retail partners that we do business with. Do you think that through social media or other channels that the consumer now is better at doing their own hair? And did that enable you to take your products, not just sell them in salons, to sell them in specialty stores? I think so. I think way back in the day, I remember coming to the UK and I remember going to Space NK for the first time when it was just starting out in Soho.

8:28Daniel Kaner:And Nikki had like, I think, 30 percent products and 70 percent clothing. And it had all the kind of indie brands and things. And I think they used to call their consumer like product junkies, like those that really were into it. And there's a lot of people that are into beauty, both men and women and young people that are really good at it. Right. They're really good at doing their hair, doing their makeup, sense of personal style. And they're a little bit more interested in. I do think we're in a time now where, you know, we're going to be working a lot later maybe than our parents did because we're young.

9:06Daniel Kaner:And look at you. And I'm never giving up. Exactly. Right. And vibrant. And it's a time of such great personal style that people are kind of doing their thing. So I think beauty is really important today. And I think longevity and people are into plastic surgery. People are into all sorts of things. I think the low-hanging fruit is definitely getting your hair right, getting your makeup right, getting your grooming right. And the man, he has really come into the market with a vengeance. Hairdressers often have an incredibly close relationship with clients. What does that teach us about trust and brand loyalty?

9:42Daniel Kaner:What I've learned in business is that when you're building a team, you've got to build trust with the team. And through trust comes comfort. And once you have that, you can do anything you need to do. And you think about the consumer having such trust with their hairdresser is unbelievable. When you talk about when digital started to become really important, people said that they have engagement. I used to look at them saying, by someone putting a like on your screen, that's not engagement. an engagement as a hairdresser with their client. Like, do anything to me. Tell me everything about your family.

10:18Daniel Kaner:That's deep engagement. Where do you see the most interesting innovation in beauty right now? Formulation, sustainability, or perhaps the way brands connect with culture? You know, for us, I think we've been paying attention to, you know, an audience that's somewhat narrow, a lot of us in beauty. And I think today the exciting thing, our journey is to broaden the audience. all hair textures, all people kind of within our beauty journey. I do think that the market's very interested in longevity, very interested in kind of the medicalization of everything. So as we're working longer, as we're aging more beautifully, anything that can help us do that is, I think, something that's going to be very popular.

11:03Daniel Kaner:If you were launching a beauty brand from scratch today, knowing everything you know now, would you do it differently? No. You know, I thought about this question a lot. And I think, you know, you're always going to have problems with partnerships. You're always going to have aberrations in the market. You're always going to have supplier and supply chain challenges. What I would do is very similar. I'd look for great people, you know, to get, you know, on our bus, as Jim Collins would say in Good to Great, the best people on. I would develop a culture that is shared. I would find something that is needful in the marketplace.

11:43Daniel Kaner:I would try to do it the very best that you can do it. I would be married to the idea of value creation, where everyone walks away feeling like a winner, and everyone walks away feeling really good about it, bringing value. It does sound like a winning combination, truthfully, that everybody's involved, and everybody's getting something out of it and putting something in as well. And it feels like you want to be part of that organization, that brand. You said earlier, Daniel, that, you know, one mustn't become complacent. You have a rule about when things are going really well and the momentum is really rolling along.

12:18Daniel Kaner:What is it that you say that one must do? Yeah, I got it from a book by James Kerr, and the book was called Legacy, and he talks about the importance that when you're at the top of your game, change your game. So this idea of momentum, and so often when we're having success, we think, okay, we're going to hit our numbers or the market's embraced it, and we sit back with our cigar or whatever we're into these days. It provides a certain cover to innovate. The success of the momentum gives you the opportunity to go back in and do more, try something different. And you just continue with that cycle.

12:55Daniel Kaner:and so often in American business, I can't speak as well about business here, is that we squeeze all the juice out. We're not thinking about planting new lemon trees or blending our lemon tree with our avocado tree and coming up with something new. And that's really the interesting cycle of business and life. I'm always thinking about my garden when it's in full bloom. What more do I want to do? You can always see that. Yeah, to keep the flowers blooming for a few more months. Keep it interesting. You don't want to be the biggest, just want to be interesting. And I suppose you need to be challenged, we all do, or if life becomes a little dull.

13:33Daniel Kaner:Yeah. I feel the same way. I feel the same way. I'm glad to be on board. What have you learned about scaling a luxury beauty brand internationally while still maintaining its sense of exclusivity? Again, not all press is good press. Not all press is good press. And not all sales are worthy sales. and by virtue of trying to make sure that we've got the right curator, the right store, the right salon, the right belief system, it created this kind of natural flow of curation for us. So it wasn't just the opportunity to come sell our product in the stores. Who will love it? Who will nurture it? And it's also very important to have the right type of organization and team that have similar beliefs to make sure that they can keep the culture of sales, the culture of relationship moving in the right direction.

14:25Daniel Kaner:You eventually sold the company to a Japanese corporation. What made that partnership right for the next chapter for Orbe? That's an excellent question because sometimes sales are not the best thing because we were not done. So, you know, a lot of salon owners funded our business. There were these people that kind of handed over a check because they believed in me. They believed in the team. They believed in the brand. We promised an exit strategy at some point. So we knew we had to sell it at some point, but we weren't done yet. So we had to find, I guess you use the term strategic. And I knew this company and they had this great color brand called Goldwell, but they didn't have an Orbe.

15:08Daniel Kaner:And I thought if you had Orbe and you had Goldwell, you could compete at the very highest level in that channel. And so I knocked on their door. I had some friends there. and they agreed. And they kept me on. I mean, I've been there for 8.3 years now since the sale. Okay, so you're definitely doing it right. And what do you think is the buzzword? What is it that people want right now, not just from Orbe, but from hair products, really? I mean, have you got something new in the pipeline? Well, it's confidence, right? It's feeling like I look good, I can hold my hair up. I mean, the world kind of beats us down a little bit.

15:50Daniel Kaner:We're in, you know, it's been complex times for a while. So if we can have a little bit of self-confidence, I think that's the most we can hope for. So I think we're feeling good about it.

16:00Arpit Kaushik:That was Daniel Kainer, the president and co-founder of Oribe Hair Care. You can find out more by heading to oribe.com.

16:18Arpit Kaushik:You're listening to The Entrepreneurs. Arpit Kaushik is the founder of Dilly House, a London-based small-batch artisanal perfume brand with a remarkable origin story. After a life-changing cycling accident in 2022 left him with a brain injury, Arpit was advised to avoid alcohol entirely, even on the skin. Discovering that no high-quality alcohol-free perfume existed, Arpit set out to create one. The result is Prem Rouge, a water-based, 100 % natural fragrance duo designed to be worn alone or layered. Our pit stopped by Midori House to discuss the challenges of starting a new product category, personal resilience, and the creative process.

17:00Arpit Kaushik:He began by telling me what he thinks makes a great fragrance. Perfume, as such, it's a very personal choice. So what works well for one doesn't work for the other, because each one of us, like our thumbprint, we have an olfactory blueprint as well. So the only way I would say to test whether a perfume is good or not is whether it fulfills its objective as defined in the breeze. So in our case, it was bring about the feeling of calm and ease, the concept of gentle moments, and of course, love. That's the central theme of the perfume. Now, you say it's personal. and I guess the very origin story actually of Dilly House is profoundly personal for you.

17:45Arpit Kaushik:And it's interesting we talk about eureka moments here that lie behind the creation of great businesses. And actually the story of Dilly House begins from a really challenging circumstance. Let me ask you a bit about that because for founders, business is always personal, but this is uniquely so. Tell me a bit about what happened actually sort of before Dilly House began. So I'd spent 20 years plus in tech and I was running a tech startup. We just started and had a couple of big names as clients. Then in Feb 2022, I was cycling back after meeting someone over coffee. Someone opened their car door without looking, hit me as I was cycling past.

18:27Arpit Kaushik:I went flying, landed on my head. I was wearing all this gear, a high-wis jacket and a helmet. But since I landed on my head, I had multiple seizures and air ambulance, coma. And statistically, I shouldn't have survived that. 89 % people in that state die. 7 % survive in a vegetative state. And only 4 % go on to make a recovery. And off edge, actually, only 2 % without severe neurological deficit. it. So I don't know how, but I managed to beat the odds. But brain injury, it's a lasting thing. You just learn how to manage it. It doesn't go away. So the neurologist said no more alcohol. Giving up drinking, easy peasy, but giving up perfumes, which are 70 to 90 percent alcohol, that was difficult.

19:17Arpit Kaushik:I went around looking for alcohol-free perfumes, couldn't really find anything that I liked. And plus, because water and oil don't mix, you don't have alcohol-free perfumes in a spray format. So couldn't find anything myself, thought, let's create one. Let's do something about it. Isn't that amazing? So many of the innovators we talk to on this program and just in Monocle's world generally, it's that moment of saying, specifically what I needed, specifically what I wanted wasn't there. So I thought, right. So you've had that moment of, well terrible luck misfortune serendipity good fortune a confluence of events the decision is made right i'm gonna do it what does then that next phase look like because i think if people explore dilly house the brand now hopefully they can actually engage with the products as i've been fortunate enough to do but to check it out they'll see it's beautifully realized very coherent vision How do you go from that in the abstract to delivering that in a relatively short period of time?

20:22Arpit Kaushik:When I started, you wouldn't have ever placed your bets on me. I was not from the industry. I didn't have any network. I'd never built a commercial grade perfume before. I was going about this on my own. And I was bootstrapping this without any external investment. So all odds stacked against me. But I don't know, one door opened and then the other door kept on opening. So first was deciding the technology that, OK, we want an alcohol-free perfume in a spray format. So then discovered this French technology called Water Plant Emulsion, which allows water and oil to be dispersed together. And that's what makes alcohol-free perfumes in spray format possible.

21:03Arpit Kaushik:So chose the technology. And then he introduced me to a few master perfumers whom I had conversations with. the one we finally found 10-15 minutes later of our conversation I knew she's the one she just totally got a brief let me ask you more about that why was it because you struck up a great rapport was there some key words or key notion that you'd maybe struggled to communicate to someone else that she seemed to understand how could you be that confident in just a few short minutes yes so most others they had a very technical or very functional view of making a perfume She was the first one who asked me about what you want people to feel, what journey you want them to be on.

21:46Arpit Kaushik:And I was like, OK, we are on the same wavelength. And she calls herself a creative explorer. She and her colleague who actually teaches perfumery. So yeah, it was the perfect team. One of our master perfumers. She doesn't speak English and I don't speak French. But regardless of that, we communicated really well. The language of fragrance was shared by both of you. And tell me a bit about the model, because this was the origin of Prême Rouge, which debuted in October, of course. So it's all natural, alcohol free. But it's not just about that. I guess the model is a little different. You have these limited sets.

22:22Arpit Kaushik:There's a scarcity, which obviously is a draw. Tell me about how do you decide where in the market you pitch that? How do you balance scarcity with commercial imperatives and this kind of thing? How did you formulate your sort of structural business approach as well? Yeah. So the first thing is that what we ended up building is what I tell people, it's the anti-perfume. Because it goes against the grain, against the convention of the perfume industry in every aspect. From the composition to the packaging to the way it's built. We chose the technology. We chose the master perfumer who started work on the formulae.

23:03Arpit Kaushik:We then started designing the packaging. Again, someone I met at Dewales. And then I started exploring, you know, suppliers for each of these products. And then I realized that the whole supply chain is set up against micro brands. They all operate in scale. They have minimum order quantities. So I went from supplier to supplier, trying to get the minimum, minimum order quantity that they can provide. plus the other thing was you know all the labeling so we chose to do it ourselves and i reasoned out i can't personally label more than 729 sets because each set is two bottles and a couple of quick questions i know you're super interested in in the layering of fragrances and again this is an industry which is skewed to work for bigger players but it's also quite prescriptive this fragrance this fragrance choose the one you're interested more in what happens at the intersections what about a bit of this and a bit of that tell us how unusual that attitude actually is in this space actually this this is the world's first alcohol free 100 pure and natural designed to be layered perfume when i wrote the brief i wanted it to be 100 natural and the other thing was those who love perfumes, they know expecting one perfume to do the job all day long, it's a tough ask.

24:26Arpit Kaushik:So they normally layer their perfumes. I used to do that as well when I could have used alcoholic perfumes. So the brief was, okay, it has to be layerable. And I knew that the rose and tuberose combination works very well. So yeah, that's why we chose the layering concept. And you may find natural perfumes, you may find alcohol-free perfumes you may even find individual bottles like Joe Malone for example you can mix and match different perfumes and they all layer well together but yeah none have all these three together and most people they experiment that okay does this work with that or we know that these notes they are in work in harmony with each other I love it and I like this meeting of instinct and feeling with yeah clear fascination with this sort of almost academic rigor of the these processes and i think if people enjoy the products they'll really get a sense of how that's all come together just tell me maybe finally what are the challenges now an amazing origin story so thoughtful and said i think it's a really is it really they're really great products what are the challenges that you're facing currently it's kind of smallish batch so i I guess that has some challenges.

25:44Arpit Kaushik:But tell me, you know, with your founder's hat on, what kind of preoccupies you day to day in terms of what's happening next? A senior marketing person told me that you don't have a product problem. It's a very unique product that no one else makes. You don't have a brand problem, even though you're new, but you have a fairly okay brand story. You don't have an operations problem because that's your strength and you've managed to launch this within a year. said your biggest problem is what he called distribution, getting people to know that you exist and then trying out and eventually becoming customers.