Three hairstylists, gathered by an incubator.

R+Co is a professional haircare brand created by a company that builds brands around hairdressers. The Italian trade magazine Estetica reported in March 2014 that Luxury Brand Partners, a Miami-based business it described as “an incubator for artist-driven beauty brands,” would launch R+Co as a new professional hair care line in May 2014. The same report named Tev Finger as president and chief executive of Luxury Brand Partners and said R+Co would be led by a collective of stylists: Howard McLaren, Thom Priano and Garren.

W magazine introduced the three in May 2014. It described Garren as a New York hairstylist with his own salon, McLaren as the stylist who built Bumble and bumble before opening Whitehouse, a pop-up salon in Los Angeles, and Priano as a men’s grooming specialist, and said Luxury Brand Partners had brought them together. W also explained the name: the “R” stands for “rogue.”

The business side was run by executives rather than the stylists. Estetica reported in 2014 that Reuben Carranza, who had spent 24 years at Procter & Gamble, including eight as chief executive of Wella in North America, had been named president of R+Co. Salon Today reported in May 2018 that Luxury Brand Partners had named Daniel Langer president of R+Co, responsible for brand strategy, global development, sales and education; Langer, previously the group’s president of e-commerce and chief marketing officer, described himself as one of the brand’s original founders. Modern Retail still identified him as president in November 2023, when he described the idea behind the brand as a “collective perspective.”

A bottle that tells you what it does.

R+Co presents itself as a group rather than a single name. Its own site calls the brand “a collective of some of the most forward-thinking, rule-bending hairstylists in the business” and “a think tank of top editorial and salon stylists and educators.” The site also explains how the packaging is meant to work: R+Co says the packaging and fragrances were designed to enhance the experience of using the products, and that “you’ll know just by looking at a bottle or tube what a product is meant to do.”

The first range was compact. W reported in May 2014 that the launch line held five shampoos and conditioners for different hair types and 13 styling products, among them Tinsel, a smoothing oil, and Dallas, a thickening spray, and that the formulas were made without parabens, sulfates, petroleum or gluten and were vegan and cruelty-free. Following a directive from Garren, the magazine said, the fragrance was kept minimal. The brand’s site today still describes its formulas as colour-safe, vegan, cruelty-free and gluten-free.

In 2020 the brand added a second, more elaborate line. Estetica reported in July 2020 that Luxury Brand Partners had opened pre-orders for salons on R+Co BLEU, a “couture collection” of 21 formulations inspired and designed by Garren as a celebration of his career. The packaging was described in detail: bottles and jars of 100 percent post-consumer recycled material, tubes of recyclable sugarcane bioresin, a mix of gloss and matte textures and vibrant tones inspired by 1970s Yves Saint Laurent, and a distinct shape and colour-coded cap for each product category. Each carton, the magazine said, held a seed-infused card that grows wildflowers.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all haircare names: Shu Uemura, Leonor Greyl, René Furterer, Klorane, HASK, R+Co and John Masters Organics. Haircare brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names that still carry a founder’s signature to labels that now belong to much larger beauty groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a pharmacy shelf to a salon backbar.

A haircare brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a bottle, a name and the story it tells about where it came from, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: 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 packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

R+Co sits in a portfolio that has sold one of its siblings.

R+Co is one of several brands Luxury Brand Partners has started around hairstylists and make-up artists. The group’s best-known earlier venture was Oribe. In a release dated 20 December 2017, Kao USA, a subsidiary of Japan’s Kao Corporation, announced an agreement to acquire Oribe Hair Care from its owners, including Luxury Brand Partners. The same release listed the brands that stayed with Luxury Brand Partners: R+Co, Smith & Cult, IGK, V76 by Vaughn and Pulp Riot.

R+Co itself stayed. Luxury Brand Partners’ own site, checked in October 2026, lists R+Co among its current brands, with Oribe, V76 by Vaughn, Becca Cosmetics and Pulp Riot under former brands, and R+Co’s site carries the line “A Luxury Brand Partners (LBP) Company.” In its interview of November 2023, Modern Retail reported that Luxury Brand Partners owns R+Co and that salons are the brand’s main channel; Langer called the business-to-business salon channel “a huge part of our marketing.” The brand has since grown into colour, which he said follows the same collective approach as the original line.

The stylists behind the brand connect it to other names in the category. McLaren’s years at Bumble and bumble, noted by W in 2014, link R+Co to the New York salon brand, and Garren’s name sits on the BLEU line as its designer.

For a design guide, R+Co shows how a brand can be built on a collective instead of a single founder, with a one-letter name, a plus sign and packaging meant to explain each product at a glance. Compare Oribe, the earlier Luxury Brand Partners brand now owned by Kao, and Bumble and bumble, the New York salon brand where McLaren worked. For this guide we use ink, bleu and chrome grey with a grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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