Gen Alpha Brand TBH’s Focused, Data-Driven Approach To Converting A Target Rejection Into A Distribution Deal

Founder Risa Barash’s quarter-century of experience building children’s brand Fairy Tale Hair Care’s distribution at chains such as Meijer, Hy-Vee, Walmart, CVS, Ulta Beauty and Target, where she’s watched insurgent brands come and go, convinced her not to chase massive brick-and-mortar retailers when she launched TBH, a haircare, skincare and body care brand for tweens and teens, in 2019.

“What it takes to ramp up to do something like that is a fortune, and without retailer support, it is very difficult for small brands,” says Barash. “I do hope retailers will one day better support smaller brands as they enter stores.”

But after early success on Amazon and in direct-to-consumer, where TBH has been advancing annually by double-digit percentages and crossed $1.5 million in 2024 sales, Barash felt that, by 2022, the time was right to expand the brand at retail, specifically Target, the favorite retailer of its core audience of millennial moms and their kids. That feeling was bolstered by parents seeking alternatives to Drunk Elephant and Glow Recipe as the Sephora kids phenomenon cranked up in 2023 and 2024.

At Target, Barash says, “It truly is our customer, and as great as online is, there’s just nothing better than wandering a store with your shopping cart, finding things, putting them in and having that instant gratification. And we want to be everywhere our customer shops.”

In the fall last year, Target approved TBH, which previously landed at H-E-B, rolling out to roughly 800 stores this month with two products, shampoo and conditioner priced at $12.99 each, in haircare sections alongside Method, Sun Bum, Odele, Monday and Happy Hair People. Shoppers in the sections will understand little of the hard process it took to get there. For TBH, it involved rejections, a carefully crafted pitch to persuade Target it could increase sales and customer reach, and an emphasis on certain products that made sense for the brand’s heritage with Fairy Tales.

Below, Barash and Alexis Salerno, senior director of digital marketing at Fairy Tales and TBH, tell us about their strategies to accomplish TBH’s Target partnership and how they plan to move its products off the retailer’s shelves.

TBH, the tween brand from the maker of Fairy Tales Hair Care, has entered 800 Target stores with its shampoo and conditioner. © Jacqy Law, Jacinta Law

Focus, Focus, Focus

With the Sephora kids coveting skincare, Barash was intent on selling TBH’s skincare at retail in addition to its haircare and body care. The response wasn’t receptive. “We began pitching retailers the entire line, but it’s a hard sell,” she says. “They say they want the new and the innovative, and they want to take on this gen alpha category, but they’re very slow to pull the trigger.”

Not defeated, TBH pivoted its Target focus to haircare. Fairy Tales had established relationships within the Target buying team in haircare and could highlight its history cultivating haircare customers in its TBH pitch. “We played up the longevity,” says Barash. “We are on our second generation of customer with Fairy Tales Hair Care, and it’s a natural progression from Fairy Tales into TBH.”

Communicate Strategically

As it was rebranding last year, TBH kept stores in mind. To determine colors for its bottles, it scoured the assortments at Target to identify shades that weren’t common in them that would allow the brand to stand out. It chose saturated purple, orange and green hues. Along with the colors, its bold logo lettering screams from shelves.

The retail-forward rebranding efforts, though, wouldn’t be appreciated by Target unless TBH filled it in. Originally, Barash recounts TBH pitched the retailer with the old packaging, but introduced mockups of the new look and asked for feedback on it to see if it was in line with design that would fit at Target. The solicitation of feedback caused buy-in on the part of the buyer that Barash believes helped TBH nail down a partnership.

In its PowerPoint pitch to Target, TBH leaned heavily into data showing market growth in its segment and its strength on Amazon.

Bring Data

TBH creates unique pitches for every retailer it’s interested in. For its PowerPoint pitch to Target, it leaned heavily on data, both pertaining to the broad market and the brand individually to show its traction. On the former, it pointed out in a slide, for example, that “gen alpha is expected to be the largest generation in history and their purchasing power is on pace to dwarf millennial and gen Z spend.”

With Amazon its largest single sales driver, TBH informed Target of its Amazon progress. For February 2024, it mentioned that its Spot Wash product was No. 2, with 13% click share, just ahead of Aveeno’s 12% click share. It also mentioned it holds the No. 2 and No. 3 spots for Amazon click share in kids’ face wipes with its products Gentle Wipes and Spot Wipes at 17% and 15%. No. 1 Johnson & Johnson held 20% click share.

Plan To Push Products Off Shelves

Barash says the era of retailers working closely with brands to grow their businesses is over. TBH is aware that it’s responsible for drawing eyes to its products in stores and being appealing enough to shoppers for them to shell out for them. If it doesn’t deliver, it will fall short of the selling velocity required—about one in a half units daily is its goal per store—to stay in the haircare selection at Target.

In its pitch to the chain, it indicated it could execute a 360-degree marketing program, including beauty advisor training, sampling events, national public relations, trade promotions and influencer marketing. For trade promotions, its retail brokerage agency MPG fills it in on what’s possible, and the opportunities can easily set brands back thousands of dollars, a difficult proposition for tightly-strapped small brands.

TBH expects to spend an amount in the six figures to support its presence at Target, encompassing thousands of dollars per week. Around 20% of its marketing budget is dedicated to Meta advertising. With its Meta ads for the Target launch, Barash says it’s going “a mile deep versus a mile wide” by concentrating on Target customers from above average income households with parents and tween or teen children in 200 zip codes in the United States aligned with its Target footprint.

TBH realizes it’s up to brands to push products off of retail shelves. It came to Target with a full-circle marketing plan, and it expects to spend a six-figure amount to execute it in support of its Target launch.

TBH is constantly monitoring the effectiveness of its ads to pin down the best creative. So far, not highly stylized ads featuring its team jumping for joy outside a Target store, and discussing ingredients and their efficacy, and gen alpha and Sephora kids have been effective. An old ad demonstrating how its haircare products resolved a tween girl’s greasy hair has been a constant hit, too.

In its influencer marketing, Salerno says TBH is taking a two-pronged approach. It’s enlisted Target-oriented influencers that are hosting giveaways and spotlighting that the brand’s products are in Target stores during their Target runs. In addition, it’s gifted about 20 larger influencers and 20 beauty editors its two haircare products.

Overall, though, Salerno stresses that inspiring TBH’s gen alpha community—it has over 6,300 Instagram followers and 6,078 TikTok followers—to spread the word about the brand and its Target availability through user-generated content is crucial. It will conduct contests and host giveaways to excite them. “They’re our biggest cheerleaders,” says Salerno. “So, the more that we can hype up our community, the more our brands can grow.”