Haircare junkies and even fashion enthusiasts will recognise SACHAJUAN as a pioneering and influential name in the industry. A brand founded in Sweden by celebrity hairstylists and co-founders Sacha Mitic and Juan Rosenlind, SACHAJUAN started as a salon which then branched into creating products to help their clients, and ultimately the rest of the world, achieve healthy hair.
We had the pleasure of meeting Sacha Mitic, who visited Kuala Lumpur for the first time together with KENS Apothecary, to talk all things SACHAJUAN and hair care. After years of working for the biggest names in entertainment, fashion, and beauty, we picked his brain for insights and recommendations in this edition of Behind the Business with the CEO and co-founder of the renowned brand.
Briefly talk us through SACHAJUAN’s history, since its start in 1997 as a salon in Sweden, to the launch of the haircare products in 2004, and up till today as a globally loved named in haircare.
We launched in 1997 as a salon. Before that I had a long career in hair dressing, and though today I mainly work as the CEO, I am still hands-on with the salon. I think it’s always interesting to meet people and to interact within the salon environment.
Since 2004, when we launched the first products, we’ve been able to penetrate more than 35 markets, and the US is currently our biggest single market. We’re really happy to see that our products are functional across different cultures and different regions in the world. It doesn’t restrict where we interact with our consumers, and I think that’s great proof that we are on to something.
The core complex in all SACHAJUAN products is Ocean Silk Technology, powered by extracts from cold-water algae species. What about Ocean Silk Technology makes it key to healthy hair?
Well, Ocean Silk Technology is one of the key ingredients in our many formulations. But if you can imagine, when you cook you wouldn’t only use salt, you’d use other herbs and spices as well. It’s about the right balance of ingredients that will make something great, whether it’s a dish or a shampoo.
Cold-water algae contain nutrition for hair which gives it great shine and manoeuvrability without weighing the hair down. This is something we discovered in 2000, which was when we started the lab. And since launching the first products, we kept that approach [using algae bioscience]. Nowadays, we have a trendy word, which is “skinification of hair”, but we’ve always looked at it as creating a skincare-like routine you can do with your hair.
We were lucky because the way we balance our formulations was appreciated, and the way we approach hair and hair care has been recognised by hairdressers and consumers. We’re still a very small brand but we’ve been able to penetrate really influential department stores, retailers, hairdressers, who all embrace what we do and I’m very happy for that.
Your mission and philosophy with SACHAJUAN from the start has been to ‘simplify hair care’. More than 20 years on, and with several award-winning products under your belt, would you saw you’ve managed to achieve this goal?
From a communication perspective, I think we have. Over the years, the way people want to have information has been different – when we launched in 2004, nobody asked about the ingredients so we never really talked about them. Instead, we talked more about the performance of the product. Now, we have more of a consumer awareness about what is actually in the bottle, so we can kind of lift up what we’ve been doing all this time and shift communication a little bit.
But for me, the simplifying thing – which many brands do today but we did in the early stages – is to have people instantly understand what a product does. The thing is if you can’t understand what a product is for and if its name isn’t clear either, you can end up with a product that’s maybe really good, but isn’t right for your texture.
So with SACHAJUAN, we wanted to have people instantly understand that for a product called Moisturizing Shampoo, it’ll be for you if you need moisture or have dry hair. Or if you’re looking for scalp care, then you can go for the product called Scalp Shampoo. It’s simplification in the way we communicate, and even today we still try to tell you either what it is or how it functions in a simplistic way without over-complicating. We did this in the very early stage, and now a lot of other brands have been following in those footsteps.
There is another layer too nowadays in how we talk too much about ingredients. Sometimes I feel that discussion is getting a little too complicated for consumers because they’re starting to think about singular ingredients, while they don’t understand that it’s all about levels.
For example, if you drink 90% alcohol it’s going to kill you, but if you have a glass of Chardonnay, maybe you’ll feel good. This is the same with ingredients in cosmetics. You can talk about the ingredients but at the same time you need to talk about the levels used and how they’re safe or clean in that context, which gets a little bit lost in the conversation. There’s a misconception of what ingredients really do and why you need them, and this is a deeper conversation that I think sometimes just confuses the consumer.
In your decades of hairstyling experience and in creating pioneering products, what is one haircare or hair styling fact or advice that you want more people to know or keep in mind?
People think sometimes products are going to destroy their hair, but the most aggressive thing I’ve seen women do during my decades is the mechanical impact they can make on hair. Especially after they wash it or when they brush it, they are very aggressive.
You need to use products that gives you the position to gently detangle the hair and to use tools in a gentler way. I would say to pay attention to how you treat your hair and think about the routines you have to make sure you’re not being too aggressive with the hair.
A second one is understanding what it is to have a well-balanced cut. A lot of people think they have a great haircut but, in my experience, most people don’t. And just with a haircut, you can actually balance hair and your look really well. With a good cut, you can feel the difference.
Though hair and scalp needs are very much personal to the user, for your customers here in tropical, sunny and humid Malaysia, what products would you recommend as a must-try from SACHAJUAN?
If you have scalp issues, I definitely recommend the Scalp Shampoo. It’s super effective and it’s our best-selling product, which you then you follow up with the Scalp Conditioner.
Then, if you feel like your hair is collapsing, I recommend using the Ocean Mist Sea Salt Spray or the Ocean Mist Volume Hair Mousse because that will give some grip to the hair.
What’s next for SACHAJUAN? What can we look forward to from the brand in the near future?
We’re currently working on a Clarifying collection which is about detoxing hair and clarifying hair, especially if you use too much styling product or if you need a deep cleanse. And that will come out with a new formulation of our Scalp Scrub.
Read more from interesting people here, or catch up on the beauty industry here.