Olaplex at Canaccord Genuity: Strategic Transformation Insights

On Tuesday, 12 August 2025, Olaplex Holdings (NASDAQ:OLPX) showcased its strategic transformation at Canaccord Genuity’s 45th Annual Growth Conference. The discussion centered on innovation, marketing, and international strategies, highlighting both opportunities and challenges. CEO Amanda Baldwin shared insights into Olaplex’s journey and future direction, emphasizing a balanced approach to growth in the dynamic prestige hair care market.

Key Takeaways

• Olaplex plans 2-3 meaningful product launches annually to drive innovation.
• Revamped marketing strategy focuses on brand building and emotional consumer connections.
• International business restructuring aims to tailor strategies to diverse market needs.
• The pro channel remains a critical component of Olaplex’s growth strategy.
• Despite increased marketing spend, the company maintains healthy EBITDA margins.

Innovation and Product Development

Olaplex has made significant strides in innovation, leveraging its patented technology and R&D capabilities. The company aims for 2-3 significant product launches each year, a strategic move to capture consumer and professional interest. In the first half of the year, Olaplex introduced three new products, expanding into the scalp care category. This focus on innovation is part of a broader strategy to maintain a strong market presence with fewer than 30 SKUs.

Marketing Strategy

The company’s marketing efforts have undergone a transformation, focusing on brand building and storytelling. The "design to defy" platform aims to create an emotional connection with consumers, supported by a constant content engine. Significant changes have been made in the brand’s visual identity, with every image updated in just over a year. The marketing spend is strategically allocated to maximize brand impact and awareness.

Pro Channel Strategy

The professional channel remains integral to Olaplex’s identity and success. Baldwin emphasized the importance of this channel as a business flywheel, providing authority and credibility. While the industry faces challenges due to evolving consumer patterns, Olaplex is committed to investing wisely in the pro channel to sustain its growth trajectory.

Omnichannel and International Business

Olaplex balances its omnichannel strategy with a focus on retail partnerships and direct-to-consumer (DTC) access. Operating in over 60 countries, the company tailors its international approach based on market size and complexity. This involves categorizing markets into three types: large markets with direct involvement, markets with omnichannel partners, and lighter touch markets with select partners.

Competitive Landscape and Consumer Trends

The prestige hair care market is still in its early stages, with an influx of new brands since COVID. Olaplex aims to differentiate itself through innovation and brand strength. Despite some slowdown in prestige beauty, Baldwin is confident in the sector’s resilience, driven by consumer demand for effective, self-care products.

Margins and Long-Term Outlook

Olaplex maintains healthy margins, even with increased marketing investments. The company is focused on long-term growth, making strategic decisions to ensure future dividends. With a robust cash balance, Olaplex has the flexibility to continue marketing and innovation efforts. Key strategic initiatives include generating brand demand, harnessing innovation, and executing with excellence.

For a deeper dive into Olaplex’s strategic plans and insights, refer to the full conference call transcript below.

Full transcript - Canaccord Genuity’s 45th Annual Growth Conference:

Susan, Analyst: Analysts in the consumer space. And we’re very excited to have Olaplex here, and in particular, CEO, Amanda Baldwin. Amanda, so you joined, Olaplex from Supergoop back in December 2023. So you’ve been there a couple of years now. Maybe if you could talk about how the business has changed since you’ve been there.

What have you been focused on? What you see going forward as opportunities within the business?

Amanda Baldwin, CEO, Olaplex: Good morning, everyone. Thank you for having us, Susan. It’s great to be here. You know, think it may make sense just to even take one step back and talk about kind of what why I joined the business. And, I think it puts everything in perspective.

Think the first and foremost was that I really saw something special in the product, and the science of Olaplex. I’ve been in the beauty industry for twenty plus years now, and I know when you have something that really is different, that’s really differentiated, that really works, and how unique and rare that is. The second thing is that Olaplex has real scale, which in the beauty industry is also something that is not to be taken for granted. There’s a lot of new brands that come out. Olaplex has just turned 11, and to reach the scale the Olaplex has in the time frame that it has says, you know, something also very unique is happening.

And third is the space in which we play. And I’ve always been a big believer in white space and kind of what’s coming next in our category. And prestige hair is also, I think, in its very early innings. As you mentioned, I was at Supergroup for seven and a half years, joined that business when nobody talked about sunscreen, in the prestige category. Saw the same sort of thing of is gonna be a really interesting and how do I actually drive a category forward?

And I would say sunscreen has changed dramatically since I joined that business in 2016, and I I saw some of the similar parallels to prestige hair where you have a category that people care a lot about, but is very underpenetrated. About 20 some odd percentage of hair care products are bought in the prestige channel. You look at anything else, makeup, skincare, etcetera, it’s more like 50%. And so that’s a pretty big shift that I think we are just seeing early innings of. So I got really excited about all these pieces of the puzzle, but there was a lot to change.

And I think I’ve been very upfront about how many elements of a transformation are that we’re And, you know, really, I think the business has changed dramatically in the last eighteen months, since I came on board, and we’re really kind of just taking a step by step approach, and we can certainly go into every element of that. But the first and foremost thing that I really worked on in my first year in the business was, do I know where we’re going and do I have the team that can get us there? And then you start chipping away at it one thing at a time, and that was really kind of what the focus was. So I think we have a very clear plan now about what we’re building, that we’re really transforming this business to be a foundational health and beauty business that’s gone from a pretty narrowly defined damage repair bond building business into something that’s much broader than that.

It’s much more significant base. And we’ve built an extraordinary leadership team, and obviously one is always filling out other opportunities within that organization. We keep adding incredible talent, but I always think if you know where you’re going and you have a great team, then you chip away at it. And that’s really how, my career has been built thus far.

Susan, Analyst: Great. Maybe if you I guess on that front, talk about innovation. You’ve rolled out several products this year. I think it’s been a focus of yours and looking forward, you want to continue that innovation pipeline. So maybe if you could talk about where you’re at with your, you know, product set and then also where you see yourself going as we look forward in the white space opportunity that you have.

Amanda Baldwin, CEO, Olaplex: I think it’s a great innovation is a great example of building off the foundation that Olaplex already had. Right? We talked about extraordinary science, patented technology, the ability and an incredible r and d facility that quite frankly, I think with being underutilized, and the pace at which one needs to innovate in our industry is quite rapid. Right? And you need to have newness to drive attention of the consumer to drive the attention of the pro.

That doesn’t mean that your core products aren’t really, really important to you, but you need to have both. And what I found when I joined the organization is that we had amazing science, some incredible chemists. We didn’t have an innovation engine. And really the distinction between those two is how do I take the ideas and bring them to market, commercialize them in a way that’s predictable to my retail partners, that my marketing team knows what’s coming when, that I have real innovation that’s going to be meaningful to the consumer, meaningful to the pro. And that is not an overnight process, but we started to see last fall the beginnings of that engine, and now we’re really at a nice pace.

So in the first half of this year we launched three products versus one a year ago, and I think we need to be at two to three meaningful launches a year, I think is a good healthy pace for a business like ours. And so this and we’re really, I think, as we’re thinking about our product development process, thinking about it in a really balanced way. And again, that’s where the strategy and the structure of how do I use the science really comes in. Yeah. So the first half is a great example of that.

We launched into the scalp category. That’s a very early nascent category, but it’s profoundly important to the health of your hair. If you think about it in the most simplistic sense, my scalp is healthy, my hair is going be healthy. So if I want gray hair, I’ve got to have a healthy scalp. We did that in a two pronged approach.

We had both a consumer product as well as a pro product, so you’ll see us also really balance the importance of that consumer business with the importance of driving more people into a stylist chair because that’s really important to supporting them. So that’s a great example of finding something new and innovative that we could do differently. Our patented technology impacts the scalp. Okay. Great.

And then also having a shampoo and conditioner, is a large existing category.

Susan, Analyst: Okay. Great. And then I know you’ve talked about in the past just being underpenetrated in the SKU count versus a lot of your competitors. It seems like a lot of new brands came into the space and just blasted out new products, you know. So I guess where do you see Olaplex in terms of, penetration, in terms of the white space out there?

You know, how much opportunity, I guess, is left in here for you guys, and would you think about going into tangential categories?

Amanda Baldwin, CEO, Olaplex: So I’m an innovator at heart. Being in the lab, being in a stylist chair, ideating about what’s gonna come next is always gonna be a place that I’m going to gravitate to.

Mhmm, Unidentified speaker: Mhmm.

Amanda Baldwin, CEO, Olaplex: I think it’s how you do it in a strategic way. And as I was mentioning, I think we think that two to three meaningful launches a year is really a healthy pace. To put that in perspective, we have under 30 SKUs, and we you know, if you look at any of the competition, you see three, four shelves, when you walk into either a salon or in a retailer where we have sort of large, large SKU counts, that can get very complicated to manage. And Olaplex was really built on what I’ll call a hero SKU philosophy where you’re having sort of a tighter lineup but very meaningful businesses. But again, you need a pace that goes that.

So we’ll we’ll find the place in between, as we think about the innovation going forward. And again, that’s not to take away from the SKUs that are really important to us. So as we build up a marketing engine, which is a whole nother topic, we’re really thinking about how we’re both supporting the core as well as our innovation at the same time.

Mhmm, Unidentified speaker: Okay, great. And then

Susan, Analyst: maybe turning our focus to marketing. Marketing spend has been ramping lately over the past couple years. Maybe if you could talk about where you’re at with marketing spend, particularly as a percent of sales and where you think that could be longer term if you’re, you know, at a level where you think is, you know, makes sense.

Amanda Baldwin, CEO, Olaplex: Yeah. So I think when you think about what drives the beauty business writ large, it’s great product and great brand. Anything that you see out there that’s being successful is figured out how to combine those. So we talked about innovation. The other half of that equation is how do I have a marketing engine?

Mhmm. What’s fascinating about the Olaplex story is that is a very new muscle for this brand because the product was so incredibly powerful, it sold itself. Yep. That is not my personal experience in my career. It’s always been as a marketer and how do I kinda tell a story.

So as we got in there, the other thing that we were really focused on was how do we build out a marketing engine and a brand that supports it. And I think it was in one of my first calls I talked about it’s not just the money you spend, it’s how you spend it. On what image, saying what to the consumer, saying what to the pro. And so there’s there’s a real piece of work that was done again. It’s a lot of the planning that went into last year was what’s this brand and what am I saying and how am I communicating?

And we live in a very visual world. And so what something looks like is gonna have a huge impact on how people respond to it. So we’re building out what I call a three pronged process to the marketing engine. The first was to build a brand. So we flipped every single image in this brand in little over twelve months, which is no small feat.

That started to roll out in February. We’re at a nice pace. We’ll finish out the last few countries on the other side of the globe, in the next few months. Then we’ve launched what’s called a brand platform, which is really how do I connect one of the things we did a lot of consumer and pro research that we heard was you have amazing science, you have amazing product, but I’m not sure I have any emotional connection. I think all of us know we have our favorite brands and there’s something more than logic that’s going on there.

And we had to find our space for that, which we call design to defy. And then the third piece is like a constant content engine, which if you think about, you know, marketing today versus what it was before, I have to be able to produce content at a rapid pace up and down the funnel targeted to every consumer. That’s the last leg of the journey, and we’re kind of, you know, mid mid phase of that.

Susan, Analyst: Yeah. Okay. Great. Yeah. You guys definitely reinvigorated the site and the merchandising on the show.

Looks so much better.

Amanda Baldwin, CEO, Olaplex: Yes. Thank thank you for saying that. It looks totally different. I think that was so that we felt comfortable. Last year, I wasn’t yet at the place where I felt like comfortable enough to drive to those endpoints.

Right? And so we really before we started marketing in a more upper funnel way, we wanted to feel like the shelf that you showed up at the website that you went to convert on. Those websites are sometimes owned by us, sometimes owned by Sephora, Amazon, etcetera. Mhmm. And and that they were places that you could actually be proud to send your potential consumer.

Susan, Analyst: Yeah. Okay. Great. Maybe if we could turn to the pro channel, you mentioned creating new products not only at retail, but also for the pros. Just talk about that channel.

It’s been a little bit difficult over the past couple years. You know, you’re not the only ones. It’s kind of been the channel itself. But talk about how you think about that channel, how important it is to Olaplex, and then also how you think about driving the sales that are going forward.

Amanda Baldwin, CEO, Olaplex: So I think when I looked at the strategy for this business going forward, a lot of that was about going back and really understanding what led to such an explosive origin story for Olaplex. It’s a science that we’ve talked about, and the other thing was the pro. This business would not be where it is without the power of the pro. That was a nice molecule, but it was really once it got on the head of, some very early stylists and colorists who were out in LA, and they started using this product on Hollywood stars who were changing their hair from blonde to black to red back to blonde again that really the power of Olaplex was shown, and that’s because it allows you to do transformation and enables the craft of hairdressing in a way that I think no other brand does. So it’s part of our origin story to be, pro first in our thinking.

It’s also the flywheel of our business. It’s something that many players in the prestige hair care space would be envious of because it gives us a sense of authority. I spent actually a day yesterday. Was in Chicago, spent the whole day with, our pro community. Okay.

And they’re an incredible source of inspiration. They are they tell the story of this brand to their clients, to each other in a way that, you know, no marketer could possibly do in the way that they can with the with the sense of authenticity. So making sure that they’re part of our business and part of what I the really the flywheel that drives this business is incredibly important. You’re right that their their industry does have pressure on it. There’s there’s no shying away from that, and that has to do with the patterns at which consumers are going into the the salons.

The styles of today and the coloring and the how long our hair is, things like that has changed the patterns in which people go to the salon. But Yeah. They’re still absolutely going. Yeah. Don’t think you can get your haircut using AI.

Susan, Analyst: Yeah.

Amanda Baldwin, CEO, Olaplex: And so this is a business that I think is really meaningful and important and it’s about investing in it in a smart way.

Susan, Analyst: Okay, great. And how do you think about balancing the omnichannel strategy between retail, your own DTC site and then the pro channel as well. I guess do you think about them as kind of different segments with I mean, you talked about somewhat different products between the pro and the retail side, but maybe if you could just talk about the balance there. So I think

Amanda Baldwin, CEO, Olaplex: channel strategy in a business is a balance of how do you really focus on the things that drive your business strategically, but at the end of the day, the consumer also decides, right? So I think we’re seeing some pretty interesting and exciting shifts and kind of where the consumer is buying the product. Now that’s the end consumer. That’s different than again getting a service in a salon. So we have to find the balance of both of those.

But I really believe that a great brand is gonna live above any particular channel, because those those things do shift over time. And I’ve certainly seen in the last twenty years a lot of changes, and I’m I’m sure there’ll be something else. So how do we have great partnerships with our retailer partners? But also how do we continue to support the pro through that? And the DTC part of our engine is, you know, gives you access and scale in a way that quite frankly nothing else can.

But we have relationships with the most important retail partners that one could want. It was really part of when I said Olaplex had scale to begin with. We, you know, exist in 60 plus countries. We have the best relationships with all the places that one would want to be. So how do we go deeper and have more meaningful partnerships is really what that’s all about.

Mhmm, Unidentified speaker: Okay, great. And then

Susan, Analyst: maybe moving on to the international business, you talked about the 60 plus countries that you’re in right now. I know you’re in the process of kind of resetting it after, you know, maybe it that was getting a little bit too growth too fast, guess. Maybe talk about what the work that you’re doing there, of the time frame, and what do you think is gonna be different about the international business after the reset versus before?

Amanda Baldwin, CEO, Olaplex: I think the international business is a great example. It’s about half of our business, give or take, something that is extremely meaningful and important to us, but needs to go through a transformation in how we actually run that business. So what does that mean? Naturally, again, if you go back to kind of what we were doing last year versus what we were doing this year, we were figuring out what that meant, and now we’re in the execution phase of of going against it. And what we really learned is that not all markets are created equal, both their size as well as the complexity of the distribution channels can be different.

And we needed to systematize how we go to market, and we figured out that there are really three different buckets. There’s buckets of there’s large markets that we think we can have a more direct hands on approach. They often, we have direct relationships with the retail partner, several pro distributors, and we can be marketing and educating directly. Those are going to be meaningful and important investments for us. Second is gonna be in markets where we have a great omnichannel partner.

There are some distributors that can touch both pro and retail all at the same time. We can work through them. And the third is what I would call lighter touch where you have a single partner, maybe multiple partners, and you’re on more of a semi self serve model. So we actually put up a portal so they can access materials in that way. So putting some systems behind it and also building a team, as we said before, how do we actually enable the organization to be a better partner to our distributor partners on the other side is a big part of the work.

Mhmm, Unidentified speaker: Okay, great.

Susan, Analyst: And then maybe if you could talk about the landscape a little bit. It does seem like the prestige hair category has remained fairly healthy. I agree with you. There’s a lot of opportunity there. I think a lot of growth left.

And then the competitive environment seems like a lot of players jumped in during COVID. Has that died down at all? Do you think that’s ease? It seems like the promotional environment, you know, a couple years ago maybe ramped up, but has settled down now. So maybe if you could just talk about the landscape a little bit.

Amanda Baldwin, CEO, Olaplex: I mean, beauty is a very exciting, very dynamic category. I think that will never change. I hope it never changes. It certainly makes it a fun place to be. And prestige hair care is no different.

I think it is earlier in its penetration in terms of how much the consumer is purchasing in the prestige arena, but it’s always been, you know, a place where you have a lot of new brands. That’s kind of how the the business works. That’s where I think we have the power of scale and where that really comes in. But you this is not a category where it’s winner takes all and you get to rest on your laurels. Yeah.

And I think that that was one of the challenges that this brand really had was that it did come in first. It created a lot of the norms of the category. It created the conversation around bond building, skinification of hair, really put prestige hair on the map in a big way, and didn’t necessarily move from that. And now we have to kind of really say, okay, well, how are we innovating? Why is the brand important?

How are we all these things that we’re doing is so that we can be competitive in a very meaningful category. And so, you know, in my way of thinking that competition is part of what makes you better. And so it’s really something that we need to know what we do and why we do it differently, but always be aware of what’s going on around us.

Yeah, Unidentified speaker: Yeah. Okay. Great. And then maybe if we could

Susan, Analyst: just talk about the consumer a little bit. How are you seeing the health of the consumer versus last year? Do you think anything’s changed in their will to purchase? And it does seem like beauty’s always been a little bit more defensive and they are willing to spend on beauty. We have seen some slowdown in prestige beauty, but, you know, still pretty strong relative to some other categories out there.

Maybe if

Amanda Baldwin, CEO, Olaplex: could just talk about I think among beauty’s many strengths, dynamism is one, and sort of the allure of the category never seems to end. And I think that’s great. I think it says a lot about how and why we purchase what we do. And I think that beauty is always something that little moment of self care and and people may choose different ways to embrace that. But that moment and that that seems to have extraordinary resilience.

I don’t see that ever stopping. Being good at playing during those moments, again, I think is really important. How are you driving value? I think it’s a great moment to be an efficacy driven product because if I have great results, that’s gonna be one of the most powerful I think the most powerful loyalty program you can ever have is an extraordinary product. So I think we’re really well positioned to make sure that we can take advantage of the continued growth in the category.

Yeah.

Susan, Analyst: Okay. Great. And then I guess I have to bring up tariffs just because it’s such a hot topic, even though you guys are not necessarily that exposed. Maybe if you could just talk about your exposure there at all. Yeah.

For today,

Amanda Baldwin, CEO, Olaplex: it is, minimal. We make about 95 percent of our product domestically. So we have, you know, some small things that are coming from other places, but fortunately it is not, top of our list in terms of things to deal with. But that doesn’t mean, you know, look, it’s it’s our job to always be thinking about what could change and have plans, and we certainly have talked through all those things should something come our way. But for now, we can be focused on the base business.

Susan, Analyst: Okay. And are you guys exposed in the componentry at all? No. I mean,

Amanda Baldwin, CEO, Olaplex: it’s a few things here and there,

Susan, Analyst: but it’s really not a material effect. Yeah. Okay. Great. And then maybe if we could just move on to the margins.

You guys have very nice EBITDA margins even with the increased marketing spend. So maybe if you could talk about those and where you see those longer term.

Amanda Baldwin, CEO, Olaplex: Yeah. So I think we’re learning every day. And one of the things that Catherine, our our CFO, Fiona, and I have talked about is, like, we will continue to communicate as we go through our transformation, but we’re not gonna put things out there that we can’t live up to. Right? And not be you know, have absolute clarity around.

So we haven’t put any long term, numbers out there at this stage. But I do think what’s important to recognize is that we are building a business for long term. We, you know, we have invested heavily not just in what’s going to drive the business today, but we certainly have not been shy about making hard decisions that maybe make it harder for us today, but are are gonna pay dividends in the future. And that’s always gonna be our philosophy about things. I do think it’s important, as we were saying, to be able to market and innovate in this category in order to be successful.

And I think we feel like we have the flexibility to do that. I think that’s been the great part about running a transformation in a business like this is that it continues to be a very healthy business. We have a lot of cash on the balance sheet. We have the flexibility to make the right long term choices.

Susan, Analyst: Yeah. Okay, great. And maybe just to wrap up, if you could talk about where you see the business going longer term. You’ve already made a lot of changes. It does look like we’re seeing an inflection in the sales.

You know, what what areas do you think you wanna touch on as we look forward as well?

Amanda Baldwin, CEO, Olaplex: I think we’re now in this position where we have set a long term strategy. We know what we’re building.

Mhmm, Unidentified speaker: The

Amanda Baldwin, CEO, Olaplex: the three things that we put out there as the strategic initiatives this year of generating brand demand, harnessing innovation, executing with excellence. Those we need to keep focused on. I mean, I really think that now we have our our clear path ahead of us, and Yeah. It’s gonna be about getting and I and I watch this in the team every single day that we get better at each one of those things. Mhmm.

And so really staying focused on that is what I see in the near term.

Susan, Analyst: Okay. Great. Thank you so much, Richard. Thank you.

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