From Los Angeles in 1975 to a Shiseido subsidiary.

Joico began in Los Angeles in 1975. The trade magazine Estetica, marking the brand’s 50th anniversary in April 2025, credits the hairdresser Steve Stefano with the founding idea: a haircare system that would work deep inside the hair rather than only on its surface. Shiseido, announcing its purchase of the company in 2001, also named Stefano as the founder of Joico Laboratories, Inc. and as its president and chief executive until shortly before the sale.

The company’s own timeline puts keratin at the centre of the story from the start. Joico says it built its range around keratin protein from 1975, and that its scientists developed a method of processing keratin protein in 1984, which it calls the Triamine Complex. It dates a cationic version, added to all its conditioners and treatments, to 1992, and a blend it calls Quadramine Complex, used in its colour lines, to 2006.

By the end of the century Joico was a full-line salon supplier. Shiseido’s announcement listed shampoos, conditioners, styling and treatment products, hair colour and perms aimed at the prestige salon market, under four main brands: Joico itself, the original line; I.C.E. Hair, a styling line aimed at Generation Y; Vero, for hair colour; and Triactive, for perms. At that point the company gave its address as the City of Industry, east of Los Angeles.

K-PAK, colour and a word built on the name.

The product that defines Joico is K-PAK. Estetica describes the K-PAK Reconstructor as the brand’s hero treatment for damaged hair for around half a century, and dates Vero K-PAK, Joico’s first professional colour range, to 1991. The K-PAK name now runs from care products to the company’s K-PAK Waves perms, listed alongside its ISO perms on its professional site.

Later launches followed the same pattern of a named technology behind a product line. Joico dates its Bio-Advanced Peptide Complex to 2013 and ArgiPlex, a technology it developed to replace the amino acid arginine lost during colouring, to the launch of LumiShine Repair+ colour; the company’s timeline gives 2015 and Estetica gives 2016. In 2019 came Defy Damage, introduced with what the company calls SmartRelease Technology, a liposome delivery system carrying rose hip oil, arginine and keratin. Its website credits its general manager, Melisa Gill, with launches including Blonde Life, Defy Damage and LumiShine Youth Lock.

The verbal identity leans on the name. Joico calls the energy of healthy hair “Joi,” says “Joi is at the heart of everything we do,” and uses “The joi of healthy hair” as its stated promise; its vegan line is called Inner Joi and its consumer blog is called #HairJoi. The name is also written in capitals, as JOICO, including in Estetica’s anniversary feature.

Much of the brand’s communication is aimed at stylists rather than shoppers. Its professional website offers an events calendar, a virtual classroom, education on demand and a hair colour lookbook, and the company says its mission extends “beyond product to the global salon community.” Its general manager previously ran marketing for Piidea-Canada, which the company describes as the Canadian arm of Joico and Zotos Professional.

For the 50th anniversary in 2025 the brand introduced new graphics, including an Anniversary Collection, ran what it called a Heroes Campaign honouring artists, employees, distributors and products, and held celebrations in Milan, Estetica reported.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all hair-care names: Joico, UNITE, Kerasilk, ELEVEN Australia, Philip B, Hairstory and Innersense. Hair-care brands sit at many different points in the trade, from small companies still run by the hairdressers or founders who started them to lines that now belong to much larger beauty groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a salon backbar to a department store or a website.

Salon brands in particular are often built by people who came from behind the chair, and many were first sold to salons before they reached shops. Their identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a name, a bottle and a way of talking to stylists, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production to a contract manufacturer or grown far beyond the salon where it began.

That makes the plain questions behind each name worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made. Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its bottles and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Shiseido’s Zotos to Henkel.

Joico has belonged to two corporate owners. On 28 December 2001, Shiseido announced an agreement to acquire Joico Laboratories through its American subsidiary Zotos International, of Darien, Connecticut, which Shiseido had bought in 1988. Joico was to become wholly owned by Zotos and, Shiseido said, was its fourth American acquisition in the salon sector, after Zotos, Helene Curtis’s North American professional division in 1996 and the salon products division of Lamaur in 1998. Shiseido described the purchase as mutually agreed, citing a long relationship between the two companies.

Sixteen years later the whole business changed hands again. Henkel, the Düsseldorf consumer and industrial group, signed an agreement on 26 October 2017 to buy Zotos International, which it described as Shiseido’s North American hair professional business, and announced on 29 December 2017 that the deal had closed. Henkel named Joico and Zotos Professional as the leading brands in the purchase, and called it its third acquisition in the American hair professional business in recent years, after Sexy Hair, Alterna and Kenra in 2014 and Pravana in September 2017. Henkel described Zotos as based in Darien, Connecticut, focused mainly on the United States but also present in Europe and Asia. Henkel has owned Joico since that closing.

The brand says it is certified by PETA as “Animal Test-Free,” and that its Inner Joi line is certified vegan. In the company’s own words, it has supported the global salon community for more than four decades.

For a design guide, Joico shows how a salon brand can carry one technical idea — keratin — through fifty years and two changes of owner while keeping a playful word, “Joi,” at the front. Compare Kerasilk, another keratin-led haircare name, and UNITE Hair, a salon brand founded by a hairdresser. For this guide we use deep plum, magenta and blush with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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