A stylist from Aix-en-Provence on Fifth Avenue.

Fekkai is named after its founder, the hairdresser Frédéric Fekkai. The company says he was born and raised in Aix-en-Provence and trained in Paris; English Wikipedia, citing a 2010 profile, says he apprenticed under Jacques Dessange in 1979 before moving to New York to work for Dessange there.

His own business began with a salon. He opened his first namesake salon atop the Bergdorf Goodman department store on Fifth Avenue in 1989, according to The Moodie Davitt Report, the travel-retail trade journal, in 2022; the company’s own history describes a month-long waiting list and clients including Meryl Streep and Naomi Campbell. More salons followed: when Procter & Gamble sold the business in 2015, its announcement counted seven salons in New York, Connecticut, Florida, Texas and California, with the flagship on Fifth Avenue.

The products came after the salon. The Moodie Davitt Report dates the haircare brand to 1995. BeautyMatter, reporting in 2018, said Fekkai founded the company in 1996 but first introduced his range in 1995 through a joint venture with Chanel. The company credits him with creating Technician Color Care, a line for colour-treated hair that remains one of its core ranges.

Four sales, the last a buyback.

According to BeautyMatter, the private-equity firm L Catterton (then Catterton Partners) acquired the brand in 2007. In March 2008 Procter & Gamble bought it; Cosmetics Business reported on 25 March 2008 that the deal gave P&G a foothold in prestige haircare, and that the brand was sold through Neiman Marcus, Saks and Nordstrom and ran salons including one in Beverly Hills.

P&G kept it for seven years. On 21 May 2015 Designer Parfums and LUXE Brands announced a joint venture, Fekkai Brands, LLC, to buy the haircare brand and its salons, with the sale taking effect on 30 June 2015. Cosmetics Business called it the first brand in P&G’s planned beauty divestment. About 225 salon employees were to move to the new company, and Frédéric Fekkai stayed on as an adviser and brand architect at the Fifth Avenue flagship.

Then the founder came back. In November 2018 BeautyMatter reported that Fekkai, working with the investment firm Cornell Capital, had bought the brand back — the fourth sale of the business. A new holding company, Blue Mistral LLC, was set up to own and run Fekkai Brands together with Bastide, a Provence fragrance and body-care business that Fekkai and his wife, Shirin von Wulffen, had bought in 2016; Fekkai became chief executive of Blue Mistral. Cornell Capital was founded by Henry Cornell, a former vice chair of the merchant banking division of Goldman Sachs, and the outgoing chief executive of Fekkai Brands, Joel Ronkin, said the founder’s return would help drive innovation. At the time, the report said, the brand was sold in mass-market retailers, a line called The One by Frédéric Fekkai was sold at Ulta Beauty, and the company ran six salons in North America.

One executive link runs to another brand in this guide: Melisse Shaban, who went on to found Virtue Labs in North Carolina, had earlier been chief executive of Frédéric Fekkai, according to the Raleigh magazine WALTER in 2017.

Haircare and its owners.

The seven brands in this group are all hair-care names: KEVIN.MURPHY, Sachajuan, Maria Nila, IGK, Virtue, Fekkai and Pureology. Hair-care brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from small houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger beauty groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a hairdresser’s back bar to a department store or an online shop.

A hair-care brand’s identity is usually carried less by any one formula than by a bottle, a name and a colour code on the shelf, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its offices or grown far beyond the salon or city where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and how its packaging and name have changed over time.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, its packaging and how its look has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word. None of these guides assesses what a product does for hair; claims about ingredients or results are the companies’ own.

A 2020 relaunch and a Provençal story.

Under its founder’s ownership again, the brand was rebuilt. The company says it relaunched FEKKAI in January 2020, and BeautyMatter listed “the relaunch of Frédéric Fekkai’s namesake brand” among Target’s new haircare launches that February. The company says the relaunch brought new formulas, new packaging and a new mission, summed up in the line “Salon Hair Gone Clean.” The Moodie Davitt Report described the formulas in 2022 as vegan, gluten-free and cruelty-free, and made without parabens, sulfates, silicones and phthalates. Its five relaunch collections — Technician Color, Brilliant Gloss, Full Blown Volume, Super Strength and Baby Blonde — were each paired with an ingredient with a French association, such as Mirabelle plum seed oil, cold-pressed French olive oil and Camargue rice water, according to the company.

Packaging became part of the message. The company says its bottles and tubes are made from 95 per cent recycled plastic, sourced domestically, and that each is recyclable. When the brand entered travel retail through DFS Group in April 2022 — in DFS stores at US airports and in the T Galleria stores in Hong Kong and Macau — The Moodie Davitt Report listed six core ranges, including Shea Butter and Apple Cider Detox, alongside a Clean Stylers collection. The New York agency Barrel says it redesigned the brand’s website, adding how-to videos and a blog for hair and scalp education.

The brand’s visual story leans on its founder’s two cities: Provence, where he was born and where Bastide — relaunched from an Aix-en-Provence lifestyle brand called Côté Bastide, according to English Wikipedia — is based, and New York, where the salons began. The company’s own copy talks about “simple, natural ingredients, a nod to French heritage,” and about treating hair the way skincare treats skin.

For a design guide, Fekkai shows how a founder’s name and biography can carry a brand through several owners and back again. Compare Oribe, another New York luxury haircare brand named after a stylist, and Bumble and bumble, the New York salon brand. For this guide we use olive, cream and lavender with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Fekkai’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.