Hawthorne Heads to Target With 14 Exclusive Products

Hawthorne is heading to Target.

The New York City-based men’s personal care brand this month is exclusively launching at Target and target.com a new line of 14 co-developed products ranging from skin, body and hair care but with an emphasis on hair care. The range will be available for $9.99 each at 1,200 doors nationwide, marking, according to Hawthorne cofounders Brian Jeong and Phillip Wong, “their biggest men’s launch ever.”

“This has been our dream from the start and for them to give us this platform feels amazing,” Wong said. Jeong added that the brand will have displays at “95 percent” of Target’s stores.

The brand-new range of products serve specific needs like the Frizz Fighter Shampoo and Ultra Nourishing Conditioner for curly hair, Thickening Shampoo and Weighless Conditioner for thinning hair, Scalp Cooling Shampoo and Scalp Reviving Conditioner for dry or itchy scalp, an Everyday Shampoo and Conditioner for moisture, as well as various cleansers, exfoliators, lotions and body washes for dry or oily skin.

“We’ve seen that for the Target customer base, hair is the place where men are most likely to buy their own products,” Jeong said. “The majority of customers are women buying for themselves, but hair indexes the highest for men. We wanted to leverage our array.”

The cofounders said they leveraged data from millions of responses from their new customer surveys to help develop the products and better serve the needs of the “underserved and unserved.”

“When we started talking about this [Target] was looking and prioritizing their base and looking at their base evolve,” Jeong said. “A lot of products are differentiated on scent, but we were one of the few, if not the only one, that had numerous products that serve skin needs and hair types.

“It’s very hard to find a stand-alone conditioner and we’re coming in with four different ones for different hair types and needs, and formulas that are highly functional and delivers benefits that the customers haven’t had a chance to buy.”

Hawthorne launched in 2016 with fragrances before venturing into personal care products. The brand fields a quiz so new shoppers can more easily pick the best products to serve their needs.

Last fall, it raised $12 million in Series B funding led by Coefficient Capital and entered its first retail stores at Nordstrom and Ssense. The cofounders said they saw considerable growth in their personal care and skin care products, as well as fragrance. Now at Target, they are expecting to double their overall business and see a two-times increase from their first-year sales of Target.

“We always have expectations, but what’s been really exciting for us is even at pre-launch, the Target team is very optimistic and doubling down on this launch,” Jeong said. “They’re doing reorders and replenishment before we even launched.”