How Not Your Mother’s is leveraging its viral Curl Talk moment as wavy hair routines thrive

When Gavyn Melgar joined hair care brand Not Your Mother’s this year as its VP of marketing, the industry vet, who has worked on premium and mass brands from Kristin Ess to Oiudad, was tasked with harnessing the buying power of the increasingly engaged curly-haired community with its 5-year-old Curl Talk product line.

This community, with wide-ranging hair types from waves to coils, are particularly open to peer-to-peer recommendations, Melgar told Retail Brew. This year, influencer Greta Wilson mobilized these consumers with her step-by-step hair product routine TikToks, which led to a boom 1.2 billion views-strong of “wavy hair routines,” as even straight-haired consumers bought her recommended products to coax out a bit of natural kink, she added.

Seeing this, Melgar said Not Your Mother’s, which had previously put little marketing effort behind Curl Talk, worked quickly to leverage HairTok’s it girl to become the it curl product on the platform. Over the past few months, Not Your Mother’s has worked with Wilson on videos using the Curl Talk line’s curl cream and mousse and introducing users to new additions, with one ad in June amassing over 850K views. Since then, Curl Talk products have filled HairTok as consumers try out the products, most of which are priced under $14.

Now, the line has become so popular that TikTokers are posting videos of empty retail shelves where the products should be, and the 13-year-old brand, sold nationally at retailers like Ulta, Target, Walmart, and Walgreens, is making the most of this viral moment.

Curl power: Efforts to grow the Not Your Mother’s brand have been in the works for several years, Melgar said. When Not Your Mother’s brought in a new innovation head, Procter & Gamble and L’Oréal vet Efrain Vasquez, nearly three years ago, one of his main priorities was to grow the Curl Talk line, Melgar said, with new additions like a Bond Building Curl Talk collection debuting earlier this year.

• The brand can bring a product to market in six to eight months, Melgar said, but depending on the product type it could be more like 12 to 14 months.

The brand has a strong presence at Ulta, selling 78 products across brick and mortar and e-commerce. The beauty retailer is often used as a “testing ground” for new products, Melgar said, with fresh launches introduced during Ulta’s two annual merchandising resets in January and July. Once Not Your Mother’s gets a sense of products’ performance, it takes them to mass retailers like Target and Walmart, she said.

“It works from not only a sales perspective, so once you roll out to those bigger retailers, you’re kind of ensuring that they’ll succeed, but also too it allows us to get the products to market faster,” Melgar said.

Having a viral product has made retailers more willing to give the brand additional opportunities, like more shelf space or off-shelf placements throughout the store, while also turning to Not Your Mother’s to identify trends.

“They come to us more for more forward look-ahead of ‘What's going on?’ or ‘What are you doing?’ or ‘What trends are you seeing?’” Melgar said. “You become more of a partner and helping them to kind of understand what are the trends and what products should we have.”

Taking hair of business: In stores, the popularity of Curl Talk has also had a halo effect on other products. Melgar said a retail partner recently said consumers will go to the Not Your Mother’s display and buy multiple products from the brand, a rare move for beauty consumers who usually cherry-pick individual products.

And the brand isn’t slowing down: At Ulta, the brand is testing the waters of more premium pricing with a bond-building Tough Love line sold for $14.99. It also has an Ulta-exclusive Curly Kids line hitting Target nationally in January, and entered the hair color aisle for the first time with Target-exclusive temporary hair color line Love for Hue that debuted this year and will likely go national next year. Plus, it’s working on new partnerships with Wilson as Curl Talk sales continue to grow.

“We’ve heard from retail partners that normally if a product goes viral, you see those sales lift between four to six weeks, and then it drops off,” Melgar said. “We haven’t experienced that yet. So I think we’re at a new normal for the brand.”