Salon Stalwart Tricoci Steps Into Scalp Care With Clinical Luxury Brand Nutrire

After nearly 50 years in the salon business, Tricoci is venturing into scalp care with Nutrire, a new brand bringing clinical luxury positioning to the hot category that’s adopted a skincare approach to haircare.

Adhering to that approach, the brand’s hero products are two scalp serums—T.1 Day and T.2 Night—at the heart of a three-step scalp care routine with a shampoo formulated by scalp type (dry, normal and oily) and a conditioner formulated by strand type (fine, medium, thick and damaged). The products contain a blend called Complex8 with ingredients such as caffeine, Reishi mushroom, evening primrose, saw palmetto and stinging nettle chosen to combat hair thinning and loss. Shampoos and conditioners are priced at $36, and serums are priced at $68.

While Nutrire targets scalp-related issues like dandruff and buildup, GM Kristen Chase, who joined Tricoci as CMO in 2021 and previously held marketing roles at PPI Beauty, The Kraft Heinz Co. and L’Oréal, emphasizes it’s not a problem-solution brand and instead geared to everyday scalp health. She compares it to a collision between K18 and Kérastase in the scalp care arena.

“Scalp health really is for everyone,” says Chase. “Ideally, over time, consumers will realize it is part of the routine. It’s not a trend, it’s not a quick fix. It’s not something you need if you have a skin condition or something serious happening, but it’s literally something your haircare routine should be centered upon.”

Developed over the course of three years, Nutrire is the first brand from a three-person consumer packaged goods incubation team inside Tricoci, and it enters a global scalp care sector the firm Coherent Market Insights projects will advance at a compound annual growth rate of 7.1% to reach almost $20.8 billion in 2030. Along with Chase, VP of marketing Jessica Slavicek, former senior marketing director at PPI Beauty, and VP of product development Teri-Ann Marchigiani, former director of product development and innovation at Oars + Alps, are on the incubation team.

“We were able to really critically challenge everything we thought we knew about haircare, look at it completely differently, think about the way it’s been presented to consumers and how we’ve been taught to think, what’s the perfect system to grow healthy hair?” says Chase. “We knew that, to grow your healthiest hair, your scalp needs nourishment. It’s all about the scalp and nourishing the follicle.”

Nutrire is now launching in direct-to-consumer distribution following a soft launch in the fourth quarter 2024 with a pilot program at Tricoci’s 13 locations in the Chicago area, where there are more than 1,000 hairstylists, aestheticians, trichologists and other beauty professionals and 170,000 active clients. The company placed the brand in its retail assortment and unveiled 45-minute and 90-minute scalp services that showcase it. In its retail assortment, Tricoci also has an in-house line of clean haircare products it introduced under its name in 2020. It’s slated to release a skincare line under its name in June.

“Scalp health really is for everyone.”

In 2018, Italian-born hairstylist Mario Tricoci, who started his namesake salon and spa company in 1977, repurchased the company in partnership with investment firm Agman from private equity firm North Castle Partners. North Castle Partners had combined it with Elizabeth Arden Red Door Spas. Rebranded as Mynd Spa & Salon, Elizabeth Arden Red Door Spas declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy and shuttered in 2020. Nutrire, meaning “nourish” in Italian, nods at Tricoci’s Italian roots.

Although scalp serums are proliferating with the rise of scalp care, they haven’t been a regular component of consumers’ haircare regimens, and Nutrire is committed to educating them on the use and benefits of its serums to get them on board. T.2 Night is supposed to be applied on the night before wash day. It gently exfoliates the scalp with lactic acid to prepare it to receive slow-release ingredients, including tea tree, sunflower seed oil, rosemary oil and pumpkin seed, in its formula and ingredients such as tetrapeptide, red clover and pea sprout in T.1 Day, which is applied to freshly washed damp hair the next day.

Nutrire commissioned clinical testing specialist Validated Claim Support to run four-week clinical study of T.1 Day and a six-week clinical study of T.2 Night, each with in excess of 30 subjects. The study on T.1 Day found improvement in hair density, bounce and flakes. The study on T.2 Night discovered users reported their scalp feeling cleaner and looking moisturized and healthier.

“There’s still a huge consumer learning curve to reverse the way we thought about haircare for decades and decades. Shampoo and conditioner are always going to be the largest haircare category,” says Chase. “Within Nutrire, we’ve done our models, and we see serums ideally being at least around 40% to 50% of the total sales. The frequency is higher with the serums, and the potency is stronger. It’s universal, so everyone can add it at any point in their routine.”

Nutrire tapped Established, a New York agency that’s worked on the brands Sarah Creal, Fenty Beauty, Doc&Glo and Commence, to handle its design. Pinning down the eye-catching bright chartreuse packaging for its T.1 Day serum was possibly the hardest element of the design. It took months, but Chase says the color was worth it because it conveys optimism, health and vitality. She elaborates, “We want elegance in the shower, and we want someone to enjoy having it on their shelf, putting it in their hair, opening the bottle, pouring it out, sensing it in their hands.”

Chase views Nutrire’s core customers as skintellectuals translating their understanding of skincare to haircare. The brand is spreading the word with professional beauty relationships—Clariss Rubenstein, a celebrity hairstylist with 35,400 Instagram followers, has already begun advocating for it—influencers, search engine optimization and paid social media advertising zeroing in on scalp and hair health. It declined to disclose the cost of coming to market or project sales for its initial year of availability. There are no immediate plans to retail Nutrire outside of Tricoci’s locations.

As the brand gets underway, Chase says the biggest challenge is “maintaining our message to our key audience” and “continuing to keep the narrative that this is about holistic hair health.” She explains, “A lot of times industry-wise, you’re put into a box of what sells best, and that’s why I think you see a lot of problem-solution brands out there, and scalp is turned into more problem-solution versus overall hair health.”