How Hally Hair Expanded Retail Sales While Maintaining a Large-Scale D2C Influencer Program

Hally Hair is modern, at-home hair color for the next generation. Their clean, vegan, good-for-your-hair products are revolutionizing the hair care aisle. Newly added to their assortment is Totally Clean Bleach—the first certified clean hair bleach product on the market made without ammonia that still delivers maximum lightening efficacy. 

One year after its launch, the team at Hally could see the brand headed for big growth. They were primarily a D2C beauty brand but knew they needed to build an omnichannel strategy for maximum scalability. 

Andy Donaldson, CFO/COO at Hally Hair says, “A young brand like ours needs to constantly innovate—how do we accommodate our existing business when the ecosystem of launching products is quite extensive? We were really looking for a partner who had a deep experience handling all things, who could scale and help us grow.”  

DCL’s decades of experience helped this growing, trendsetting beauty brand achieve true omnichannel sales while maintaining the premium quality and accuracy of their established channels. Andy says, “What makes DCL different is that there hasn’t been anything from a warehouse and a logistics perspective that I’ve needed that DCL hasn’t been able to provide. DCL has all the services we’ve ever needed—to have everything under one roof has been nice.”

Ecommerce Case Study: Hally Hair

• Problem: Hally Hair wanted to grow into B2B channels and put time into innovating new products while maintaining D2C sales and individual orders for influencers.
• Solution: DCL’s user-friendly tech stack gives the entire Hally team access to order management, real-time inventory information, and a quality control process that ensures each of their shipments is perfect every time. Hally can scale with an omnichannel strategy and all the services they need are under one provider. 
• Result: Hally continually expands their retail presence—more than doubling its points of distribution in the US—which means getting their products in front of the right customers, while never sacrificing order quality. 

Getting Products to Individual Influencers Quickly  

Hally Hair is pioneering hair products that are better for the environment and better for your hair.

“Because we are on the trend side of things, we have a huge pipeline of innovation, and we are constantly coming out with new products.”

To ensure each product launch is successful, the Hally marketing team manages a robust influencer program. They have brand ambassadors who need to get new products quickly to test, use, and share their experience.

“One of the most important aspects of launching new products like ours is leveraging modern marketing techniques, which means reaching content creators on an individual basis. The ability to place orders and get them out quickly to individual influencers when we identify them is critical to our brand’s success. DCL makes this really easy for us to execute.”

Through DCL’s ecommerce platform, the Hally marketing team can take charge of order management for their influencer program. They can easily place new orders, customize orders, track and manage existing orders.

“The eFactory interface is really user friendly,” Andy says. “We can have multiple team members who use it regularly. Our marketing team can easily use eFactory to see the orders, troubleshoot, and make sure influencers are getting exactly what they need. There’s not a whole lot of training that needs to happen. For a lean team like ours, it’s been so helpful to diffuse that workload. Anyone on our team can make updates on their own instead of having to go through somebody who has been trained. Having a platform that everyone on our team can use is so helpful.”

“The eFactory interface is really user friendly. Anyone on our team can make updates to orders on their own instead of having to go through somebody who has been trained. Having a platform that everyone on our team can use is so helpful.”

Omnichannel Fulfillment Support for a Growing Beauty Brand

Hally started as a D2C brand, but they pivoted to focus on retail. Almost overnight they were in many big retailers, Ulta, Walmart, Target, CVS, and Amazon too. As their business shifted quickly, they needed support managing new sales outlets without sacrificing the quality of existing sales.  

Andy explains, “We didn’t want to deprioritize D2C, but we also wanted to meet our customers where they shop, so these big new accounts needed most of our attention. DCL had the expertise to help us manage that type of wholesale distribution and get things sent out exactly as we needed.” 

Each DCL customer has a dedicated account team who becomes an extension of each brand. This means when spikes in orders happen overnight, the teams work together to plan accordingly so nothing gets missed.  

“Our physical space needs went up dramatically, and they are still going up to meet the volume requirements of these retailers. It’s great knowing that DCL can keep growing with us,” Andy says. 

Leveraging Tech to Enable Accuracy and Quality Control

When coming to DCL, the Hally team was very focused on quality control (QC). Having had issues in the past, the QC process is one they doubled down on.  

Andy says, “I visited DCL’s facility and had the team walk me through all the quality checks, from start to finish, everything involved is to ensure that orders go out correctly the first time.”  

What they found was DCL’s tech-enabled equipment and automation throughout the warehouse which aids high accuracy rates and order throughput. 

“DCL has a whole tech piece to their operation which I think is a real differentiator. They’ve made a clear investment to leverage technology to make sure that they take human error out of the process as much as they can.”  

Our attention to quality is not taken lightly. Where there are any potential errors in a package, it will get kicked out of the system so that it’s not sent anywhere. Andy explains, “I saw their process, it’s very rigorous on the small parcel side—orders have printed bar codes, there’s one person picking it, another checking it, and another sealing it all up. It’s clearly a well-defined, well-manicured process of getting things sent out exactly right.”  

Andy continues, “On the LTL side, what really struck me was how organized the warehouse is. Their system is very spatial and visual. Pallets are built in the warehouse and then they are moved through different stages of QC—literally moved to different parts of the floor so it’s very clear to everyone in the warehouse who’s looked at what.”  

At DCL, quality is a core value. We understand that each unit needs to be as perfect as the original. We’ve honed our process for decades to meet our customers’ needs, exactly as they want. All our warehouses are ISO certified ensuring we match a global standard of quality in our operations.  

Andy says, “What stood out to me is DCL’s QC process leverages technology where it can have the most impact, but they also apply all the human resources necessary to make sure things are correct. It’s just very clear that it’s a well thought out process that’s been refined over many years.” 

About Hally Hair

A female-founded startup, Hally is on a mission to build confidence through self-expression and to create totally clean hair products that make it easy to accessorize your hair and experiment with color. Hally has reimagined the at-home hair color experience and taken the guess, the mess, and the stress out of DIY hair dye.  

Hally currently has four distinct product lines that are all certified clean: Color Cloud – the first ammonia-free foam hair dye, Fluffy G – foaming hair gloss that revives color and adds shine, Shade Stix, one-day temporary hair color that’s as easy to streak in as it is to wash out, and Brow Pal, temporary eyebrow tint that leave you with brows that wow. New releases in Spring 2024 include a Totally Clean Bleach, Glitter Shade Stix, and a Lighten-Up Mist sun spray.  

Hally is sold at hallyhair.com, Ulta Beauty, Walmart, Target, and Amazon.