Walmart Moves To Integrate Haircare By Assorting According To Hair Type

Walmart is moving to arrange its haircare merchandise by hair type and phase out multicultural haircare sections long criticized as limiting the consumer reach and sales of products placed within them sold primarily to Black shoppers.

The retail giant began testing the reorganization in select locations early this year and is rolling it out more widely. Straight, wavy, curly and men’s are among the hair types products are sorted by in the updated haircare departments.

“We are always looking for ways to make shopping easier for our customers and continue to make changes across all categories in store and online based on how customers shop,” says Walmart spokeswoman Tricia Moriarty in an email. She adds, “Oftentimes, within one home you will have multiple hair types, so to make the shopping easier we have organized all hair wash and care items by hair type.”

Walmart’s integrated haircare aisle is being welcomed by brands that point out it reflects the mounting diversity of the United States and how people usually shop haircare, which is by hair type or need rather than race or ethnicity. They believe it will expand their business as they garner consumer notice they previously wouldn’t have received.

Market research firm Statista Market Research estimates the size of the 2024 haircare market in the U.S. at $13.6 billion. In 2021, market research firm Mintel valued the Black haircare market in the U.S. at $2.5 billion. In 2022, data from the U.S. Census shows non-white Hispanics constituted 58.9% of the population. By 2060, they’re expected to decline to 44.9% of the population.

“This is definitely a multicultural world. We are not just Black. We are not just white. We are mixing and loving,” says Miko Branch, CEO and co-founder of Miss Jessie’s, a haircare brand stocked by Walmart, and the child of a Japanese mother and African American father. “The hair textures are dynamic, and moms who may not have textured hair may want hair products for their kids who have textured hair.”

Walmart’s haircare assortment has for years featured distinct sections with brands selling products primarily directed at Black consumers. Early this year, it started realigning the assortment along hair type stratifications in select locations, and it’s now rolling out the hair type approach more broadly.

In unifying its haircare selection, Taniqua Bennett, CMO and chief growth officer at Ebin New York, a haircare brand carried by Walmart, infers the retailer is drawing from merchandising that’s worked for skincare. “When you go down the aisle for beauty and you’re looking at skincare, it doesn’t say multicultural skincare,” she says. “There are products targeted to needs that typically are more of an issue for consumers with darker skin. It might be hyperpigmentation, but many consumers buy that. So, I just see the haircare aisle really mirroring what we see in standard beauty aisles.”

A vocal advocate for integrated haircare merchandising, SheaMoisture co-founder Richelieu Dennis, executive chair of the Sundial Group of Companies, developed the brand’s haircare products to address hair needs crossing ethnic and racial classifications, but discovered it couldn’t get in front of the entire audience for those needs if it was isolated to ethnic or multicultural sections.

“We used to say the only place in America where segregation was legal was in the beauty aisle,” says Dennis. “You would have brands miss out on opportunities to grow and service broader demographics because they weren’t allowed or they weren’t engaged with the larger audience.”

Dennis explains that the original intent behind merchandising haircare products for Black consumers together was to convey to them that retailers weren’t ignoring them as they’d done historically. However, the segregation became detrimental to brands’ sales as the country diversified, and retailers tended to give Black haircare products undesirable and constrained placement in stores.

Romina Brown, founder and CEO of category management firm Strategic Solutions International, says, “It wasn’t merchandized well. The inventory was low, but, as the cultural shifts began to heighten in the United States and more people were being born into this space with the needs for that aligned with what was considered ethnic haircare, there became more attention to it.” Along with the cultural and demographic shifts, the natural hair movement that emerged in the 2000s caused attention on textured haircare and sales in the segment to increase.

Leveraging that attention and the success of SheaMoisture, which was acquired by Unilever in 2017, Dennis began over two decades ago fighting for haircare products designated as multicultural or ethnic to be combined with what’s been called “general market” haircare. In 2016, he took the conversation about the segregation of haircare predominantly aimed at Black consumers national with SheaMoisture’s first television campaign entitled #BreakTheWalls.

“We are always looking for ways to make shopping easier for our customers.”

Although he faced resistance from intransigent retailers fearing haircare assortment integration could undermine sales, about three years before the #BreakTheWalls campaign, Dennis’s arguments for it were persuasive to Shannon Curtin, then group VP and GMM for beauty and personal care at Walgreens. She presided over the drugstore chain eradicating the division between ethnic and general market haircare and reports integration resulted in greater sales.

“It’s good for category growth. It’s good for the brands in the space,” says Curtin, today COO of ABS Consumer Products, parent company of EDEN BodyWorks, a haircare brand available at Walmart. “It makes everyone stronger.”

At Walmart, the initiative to unify the haircare assortment started during Creighton Kiper’s tenure as VP of beauty merchandising, and it’s been implemented by Danielle Jackson-Howard, senior merchant of multicultural haircare. Kiper recently became VP of home at Walmart, and Vinima Shekhar assumed the VP of beauty role.

As the biggest retailer in the U.S. holding 24.2% beauty industry market share in 2023, per market research firm YipitData, Walmart’s decisions have a tremendous impact. According to Brown, it’s the top destination for Black haircare consumers, and retail is responsible for 60% of textured haircare sales. Beauty supply accounts for most of the remainder. SSI figures the textured haircare category is generating $1.3 billion in annual sales, up 5% in dollars and flat in units from the prior year. Market research firm Circana has mass haircare overall up 2% in January to June this year versus the same period last year.

A possible downside of the transition away from ethnic or multicultural haircare sections is Black consumers may be concerned about brands focused on them turning their focus elsewhere. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all in terms of how consumers feel about it,” says Brown. “Some of them, probably in the younger cohort, are more accepting of it being unified. But the consumers who have those super distinct characteristics associated with the most tightly coiled, textured hair, they’re not necessarily in favor of it, nor are some of the more mature consumers.”

Bennett suggests haircare brands can calm the concerns of their core Black consumers through their marketing messages, and retailers like Walmart can help with targeted promotions, in-store activations and social media campaigns. Curtin says signage spotlighting founders can get shoppers excited about the brands in the haircare aisle.

Shannon Curtin, COO of EDEN BodyWorks parent company ABS Consumer Products, presided over the integration of Walgreens’ haircare assortment when she was group VP and GMM for beauty and personal care at the chain. The integration led to higher sales.

On the part of certain smaller haircare brands, there are concerns that being situated on haircare shelves next to larger brands from conglomerates with massive marketing budgets will put them at a disadvantage, and they could be squeezed out. Brown says, “There had been different requirements for smaller brands. They didn’t have the hurdle rates, the velocity measure metrics [of larger brands].”

Ebin New York isn’t concerned about the competition because of category strength in its specialty of products for people using wigs and weaves. The brand’s sales have been rising at a double-digit rate at Walmart.

“What isn’t happening is that there’s more brands on the shelf and therefore we’re diluting share because the category continues to grow overall,” says Bennett. “So, the consumer is saying, ‘I’ve got my conditioner, I’ve got my leave-in conditioner, I’ve got my traditional shampoo, but this other brand may offer me a [different] shampoo,’ and they’re buying more products, their basket size is not shrinking.”

Curtin and Brown think Walmart’s haircare aisle integration could trigger retailers still separating out ethnic haircare sections to emulate its approach. Curtin approximates there remains hundreds of thousands of grocery and independent retail doors with such sections.

Brown says, “I’m absolutely sure all of the other retailers will be looking intently at what Walmart’s doing, how they’re leading the way and the success of that, and we will be seeing mirroring to some extent based on the success of this strategy.” Branch says the strategy is “a sign of the time. We are totally integrating in the world, and it’s nice that the retailers are aligning with what we are seeing in real time.”