Haircare Deal Flow Continues With Dae Hair’s $8M Series A Round

Dae Hair, the 2-year-old haircare brand founded by hairstylist and influencer Amber Fillerup Clark, has closed a $8 million series A round.

The round was led by Verity Venture Partners, an existing investor and backer of Arrae, Noto and August, along with participation from Willow Growth Partners, another existing investor, Digital Brand Architects, and individual celebrity and influencer investors Whitney Port, Aimee Song and Christine Andrew. The latest round brings Dae’s total funding to $10.6 million. Last year, it raised $2.6 million in seed funding.

Verity Venture Partners co-founder Tina Bou-Saba says Dae sits in a haircare category with strong tailwinds and has an “exceptional founder and team, outstanding brand DNA and excellent business economics.” She continues that Fillerup Clark is “uniquely qualified to lead and build the business, given her credibility in hair and magnificent creative vision. She has a highly engaged, loyal community that affords Dae a significant competitive advantage in building its customer base and bringing excitement to retail shelves.”

Bou-Saba highlights Dae’s ability to be capital efficient as a big draw, particularly in a rocky economy. Dae president Jenny Son says that ability “came from being very laser focused on our strategy, how to deploy investments across marketing ops and product development, being tight on a SKU assortment and new perspective, having a strategy to ensure that all SKUs are super productive. Nothing will change in how we operate because we’ve always operated with a very disciplined kind of mindset when it comes to growing.” Son, a digital marketing expert, joined the brand last year.

Launched in 2020, Dae’s vegan haircare range spans shampoos, conditioners, treatments, styling products and tools priced from $10 to $36. The series A funding is slated for a further increase of the brand’s executive ranks, retail support and marketing. Dae has registered a 124% year-over-year spike in new customers. The brand, which told publication Women’s Wear Daily that it’s doubling its sales from 2021 to 2022, aims to 5X sales by 2025. 

Dae is sold on its own e-commerce website and in retail exclusively at Sephora, where it’s part of the Clean at Sephora program. The brand is currently in nearly 550 North American doors that contain a The Next Big Thing display featuring  emerging brands. The lion’s share of the series A funding will go toward nurturing Dae’s business at Sephora, where it will be expanding from The Next Big Thing displays to custom endcaps. 

“We have a supportive and collaborative relationship as an exclusive brand with Sephora to grow within its four walls,” says Fillerup Clark, who has 1.3 million Instagram followers on her own account. “From exposure in store, with a rollout of endcaps in over 250 stores and minis and more bin space to digital animation, Sephora has been instrumental in fostering our growth. We have become one of its fastest-selling clean hair brands.”

Son says Dae’s Cactus Fruit Styling Cream is the No. 4 styling cream across Sephora. “That’s including the really bigger brands,” she says. “That styling cream just launched in March this year. It’s amazing that its loyal base is coming from this year only.” From 2020 to 2021, Dae reports it generated a triple-digit retail sales jump at Sephora. 

Fillerup Clark emphasizes she’s been frustrated with other haircare brands’ strategy to launch products “just to launch them” and strives to carefully augment Dae’s assortment so as to not confuse consumers. She’s especially interested in introducing multitasking items.

“As I was doing people’s hair, I would use one product over and over again, but brands would have a different product for each use case,” says Fillerup Clark. “I felt like there was so much fluff and I wanted to have a simple lineup where the products spoke for themselves. I really love when you can just have less things. When we go into product innovation, I definitely have boxes it needs to check.”

The boxes she needs to check encompass whether there’s true demand for the product, and if it can offer superior a scent and texture, be as clean as possible, and delight customers with compelling features. 

While beauty mergers and acquisitions activity has slowed of late, haircare has seen steady deal flow. Gisou, Crown Affair, Alodia and Arey are among the haircare brands that have raised funding rounds this year, and Curlsmith, Briogeo, Nutrafol, Bellami, Amika and Eva NYC were acquired.

Fillerup Clark initially ventured into beauty entrepreneurship with BFB Hair, a hair extension brand that debuted as Barefoot Blonde Hair in 2016. Recently, she became an investor. Last week, she announced on TikTok that she invested in Julie, the emergency contraception provider company started by fellow beauty entrepreneurs, Starface, Plus and Futurewise co-founders Julie Schott and Brian Bordainick.