Crown Affair is the quiet luxury queen of clean haircare. Like a Celine Classique Triomphe bag or a pair of loose tailored trousers by The Row, its minimalist black and white packaging, frosted glass bottles, and tortoise shell combs (handcrafted in Switzerland from 100% plant-based cellulose acetate) seductively whisper from the top of the vanity table or bathroom countertop. But where its visual language may be subtle, what’s on the inside speaks volumes.
Described as “a love letter to your hair,” Crown Affair has brought a fervent following to the concept of the hair ritual and haircare as self-care. Rather than a rushed pursuit under the shower head or an aggressive scrunch of alcohol-laden styling product into hastily brushed locks, Crown Affair elevates the experience to a sensorial, effective, and elegant accent in everyday lives, proposing one slow down for those few minutes to savor the moment. Products are developed for all hair types with vegan, cruelty-, sulfate-, and paraben-free formulas, using ingredients like yuzu extract, tsubaki seed oil, persimmon powder, and coconut surfactants.
Intentionality is perhaps the biggest word that comes to mind when describing Crown Affair’s products. Rather than creating an overload of SKUs, the brand has approached its product launch strategy with precision. For haircare, there is one version each of a shampoo, conditioner, scalp scrub, hair mask, scalp serum, leave-in conditioner, and hair oil. For styling, there is a dry shampoo (formulated as a powder to avoid a tacky hair feeling and avoid an aerosol component), hair perfume, and finishing gel. In terms of tools, there is a microfiber waffle knit towel made in a patented design to accommodate all hair lengths, hair clips that are handmade in France with an extra set of teeth for optimal grip without damaging strands, three different sizes of 100% silk scrunchies, three brushes (all handmade in Italy; one for detangling with natural beech wood, one for fine hair, and one for medium-thick strands, all with ethically sourced boar bristles), and one brush cleanser tool to help prolong the item’s life span. Every creation serves its own unique function, with no detail left unnoticed.
After all, hair is more than just a mixture of keratin, lipids, minerals, and pigments that sprout out of our heads. It can be a political statement by going natural as opposed to conforming to straightening or wigs, an act of female defiance by being shaved off, or an anti anti-aging manifesto when silver locks are embraced instead of covered. Hair is beauty, identity, creativity. With Crown Affair, founder Dianna Cohen is hoping to give these follicles the recognition they deserve.
Consumers and industry alike agree. In January 2020, the brand raised $1.7 million in seed funding, led by Brand Foundry to fund its launch, debuting with four products: The Oil, The Comb, The Brush, and The Towel (the brand’s minimalist aesthetic even extends to its product names). This was followed by a $5 million Series A round in May 2022. Led by True Beauty Ventures, investors in the round included Gwyneth Paltrow and co-founder of Tatcha, Brad Murray. With the prestige haircare category growing by 11% in 2023, and Crown Affair occupying an attractive segment of clean, luxury haircare with a wellness mindset, those numbers are only expected to rise. In its first year, estimated revenues clocked in at $80,000 to $90,000; in its second year, $2 million in revenue; its third year, $4.6 million; and an estimated $8-$10 million for 2023.
A partnership with Sephora came in March 2022, both for the retailer’s online presence but also across 56 stores in Canada and the US. “Crown Affair first launched with end caps in Sephora US where they have been able to beautifully tell the brand story and share the Crown Affair POV on elevating the importance of thoughtful care for your hair,” True Beauty Ventures co-founders Cristina Nuñez and Rich Gersten tell BeautyMatter. “The opportunity the brand has for further growth and expansion with Sephora is huge; they are just grazing the surface today. Going deeper with Sephora as a partner is the number one priority. There are some interesting international opportunities with strong specialty beauty partners that the brand will start to explore in the future as well. However, we believe in narrow and productive distribution and will only pursue opportunities with the right key retail partners that believe in and reinforce the Crown Affair brand story and mission.”
The brand has also found a home on the shelves of Goop, Moda Operandi, Gee Beauty, and Violet Grey. As for its own direct-to-consumer (DTC) business, Crown Affair will be opening its selection up to Canadian consumers and also expanding into Australia over the next year.
Prior to founding the company, Cohen created brand strategy and marketing consultancy Levitate in 2019, the same year she was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 class. Paired with her experience as founding member of e-commerce mobile app Spring, acting as Head of Partnerships at travel company Away, relaunching former Jimmy Choo founder Tamara Mellon’s namesake brand in 2016, and working in editorial production for Into the Gloss, creating Crown Affair has been the perfect amalgamation of her expertise.
Together with President Elaine Choi, Cohen has executed a masterclass in brand building and customer loyalty, creating in four short years a brand that has been coined “beauty royalty” by Forbes. Sho Shibuya, a Japanese, Brooklyn-based artist is responsible for the brand’s visual identity, which sits in a soothing oasis of calm elegance. Scroll through Crown Affair’s tagged Instagrams and you’ll find individuals of all hair types—some dashing to get ready for their morning gym-coffee-office run with a slicked back ponytail using The Finishing Gel (which currently has more than 3 million impressions on TikTok and Instagram), others relaxing under a red light mask at home while drenching their hair in The Renewal Mask. The Crown Affair customer, whatever coast they may live on, appreciates meditative moments and values clean formulations but not at the cost of product performance or shelf appeal. They want to look great but not spend hours getting ready.
It’s that magical combination of a desirable lifestyle that still feels attainable, underpinned by products that deliver exceptional performance, that is fueling Crown Affair’s success. Interested in giving back to its community, the company recently opened the sixth round of its Seedling professional development program—an eight-week virtual initiative for female mentors and mentees across a wide range of industries.
BeautyMatter sat down with Cohen to discuss the decadence of haircare rituals, her Star Wars meets Chanel approach to visual branding, and creating a universe beyond the product.
What white space do you see Crown Affair filling?
When we launched almost four years ago now, most of the category, especially from a higher quality ingredient perspective, was very salon-driven: the Oribe’s, the Christophe Robin’s. From a content standpoint, it would be an amazing stylist with a model in the chair. To me, having worked in consumer brands for over a decade prior to launching Crown Affair, it always felt so disconnected. How am I supposed to buy the product and then figure out how to put it on myself at home? It felt like such a massive disconnect with how I personally moved to the world and my philosophy of care.
The converse was very much the Whole Foods route. If you wanted to take care of your hair, you had to put in straight-up oil for a couple hours on a Sunday. I will totally indulge [in a treatment like that], but I need my hair to look good while I’m living my life. From a formula philosophy perspective, I could not find anything that was clean and better for you but also performed and felt at the same level as these beautiful brands that you found at Violet Grey. The thing that is tricky about clean haircare is that clean and efficacy can be very easily misconstrued. Categories like skincare and color cosmetics have a little bit more leeway, but if you switch to a clean haircare product and your hair does not look good, you will go back to the thing that works at any level, whether it’s drugstore or salon.
When I launched the brand, it has always been about performance and product excellence. We’re the only contemporary brand that has every single formula product approved by Violet Code, which speaks to the quality. But the whole brand is anchored around time being the core luxury. That could be taking your time and perceiving haircare as a ritual. I do this with journaling, nutrition, and physical activity. I am at a season of my life where I know that consistency is what makes the impact, so that’s a huge foundation of the brand. That is the entire philosophy around minimalist beauty: I still want to look great, but I want to do the least to get the most.
We’ve seen it with our customers. I’ve seen it. I was never able to air dry my hair before, and it’s entirely because of the quality of the formulas and the simplicity. Also, the products we make are for 60 to 90 days beyond the chair. It’s not just this one moment of achievement, but when you leave your salon, what are you doing over the next period of time to get your hair to be the best version of itself?
I wanted to create products that were made for women like us, like The Dry Shampoo or The Finishing Gel; something you could brush out or go to a workout class with, factoring in how we actually think about our lives, which isn’t in wash days. How does every little product move through the world with me based on how I like to live?
The visual style and identity of the brand reflect a lot of those values that you talked about. To me, what the brand does is bring a certain cool factor to high-end haircare, which isn’t to say that one is better than the other, but there’s a certain approachability in the brand.
Exactly. I love all brands, I love beauty. It’s not a one-player-takes-all [scenario], but the opportunity is exactly what you just said, creating brands and ultimately products where people feel more included. From a visual literacy perspective, I studied art history in college and am so deeply influenced by Ed Ruscha, in terms of our color story, and our logo is based off of Brancusi shapes. Our Creative Director Sho Shibuya is an amazing Japanese artist who paints on The New York Times every day; we worked together at Away. To me, it’s about making it thoughtful with a Japanese minimalism [aspect], with a bit of whimsy, because the other thing I’m so deeply obsessed with is Jim Henson. I love The Dark Crystal, and the joke is that the puppet character Kira, a Gelfling, is the muse of Crown Affair.
Even when we worked on our signature scent, which we just won an Allure Best of Beauty award for, I wanted it to smell like Japan in the 1970s, but Kate Moss is there. This sexy, cool, effortless feeling but also a reality to it that isn’t so perfect. I’m a woman in the world who’s creating my own life, and as more time goes on, that is something that has become really important to me. Years ago, I used to joke that my visual literacy was Star Wars meet Chanel: there’s some intersection of playfulness, but I don’t want this to feel all luxury because that can be alienating. But I love thoughtful design. Taking the time to create something that presents people with the most elegant solution is amazing. I want there to be fun and relatability. It’s interesting because I came from these millennial lands, and when Crown Affair launched, timing-wise the conversation was around a lot of Gen Z brands. I love Gen Z brands, but I still lean more towards the vibes of Chloe Sevigny, Sofia Coppola, Kirsten Dunst. I do think there is a person who still loves the Easter eggs of art history and whimsy; it’s not just cool for cool’s sake. There is genuine intention behind every design decision and ad campaign. It’s just me is the answer. Whenever people ask how do you build a brand, I reply asking, what are the things that make you feel like you?
The influencer and social media marketing of the brand feels very precise in terms of the type of people you see using the product and how they’re presented. Could you talk a little more about your strategy?
I’ve been doing some form of influencer community for over a decade, whether it was at Into The Gloss, Away, or Outdoor Voices. It’s crazy how much it’s evolved over the years. I have learned that transactional relationships do not give you the same value, and they’re not something I’m personally interested in. I am all about community building, digitally and IRL.
Our entire community, it’s women who are interesting, compelling, doing cool things. I have a rule where I will not work with anyone who doesn’t genuinely love the product and doesn’t understand what we’re doing. There needs to be a real connection. That’s really important to me. In-person has always been so critical. Obviously launching the company and only having six weeks in the world [before COVID lockdowns] was tough because we had to figure out how to spread that surface area of word of mouth, especially digitally, but I’m a huge believer in the IRL. Whether that’s community gatherings and things that are focused more on hair, or people figuring out who they are in the world. That to me is the essence of the brand.
We have a mentorship program called Seedling; we launched it in April 2020. Elaine [Choi], who is my President and has been with me since before launch, we both are really passionate about mentorship. Mentors and the people who believed in me early on have changed my life, and I love mentoring people as well. It very much goes both ways. We were getting a lot of emails from college seniors asking if we were hiring or doing internships and also women like us, so we created this eight-week mentorship program. You apply and share what you’re looking for, how you want to grow, or what you’re going through, and we go through all the applications and pair people up. It has straight up changed people’s lives from moving to new cities to finding roommates and jobs.
It’s not an external thing at all. We have Seedlings who have never bought Crown Affair. We’ve had over 500 women be a part of the program; this last application round, over 600 people applied. We’ll do cohorts of 50 to 100 depending on the matches. To me, it is the most genuine way to build community, giving people back something that has nothing to do with the product. My whole thing is how can I make Crown Affair a brand universe beyond the product itself? I always want it to feel like more than a haircare brand. Building a great timeless brand, the brands that I look up to, whether it’s the Aesop’s or the Chanel’s, it’s more than just the product. That’s part of it, and the grassroots marketing is at the core; all the influencer activations and events, the return on that and how they share it with their audience is so much more powerful. At the end of the day, I don’t want you to buy something and not like it. I want people to get Crown Affair delivered and have it exceed their expectations. Experience-wise that is still so important to me and it helps, because at the end of the day, the only way to build a business is to have a good product and have people tell other people about that product.
“The most important value as a business in beauty is time and market.”
BY DIANNA COHEN, FOUNDER, CROWN AFFAIR
It’s interesting too, because those brands that have longevity, there’s almost a lifestyle attached to them—whether it’s core beliefs in terms of what they’re looking for around product formulas, or even just a certain aesthetic. There is an emotional component, especially to something like hair. Being able to tap into that is a very powerful thing. Obviously the product has to deliver on expectations as well because the stakes are so much higher nowadays.
I couldn’t agree more. Hair is so personal and so emotional. The reason that we make a beautiful comb in Switzerland that’s hand carved is because the things that you surround yourself with in your life hold energy.
Quite a few of your investors are brand founders. I’m wondering if that was a conscious strategy? How did you go about securing investment for the company?
I was very ambitious early on and did not want to raise capital. But the truth is, high-growth consumer brands are what I came from and knew. I love seeing investors as partners. My whole strategy with fundraising is raising enough to do something but not enough to do nothing. There is a fine line between over-raising and over-evaluation.
I’ve done two priced rounds. I did a seed round, which was prelaunch, and then I did the Series A. We raised a note of $3 million which was very explicitly for Sephora, because it’s not cheap to launch. Whenever I raise money, it’s specifically allocated; it’s not loose money. We already have a purchase order; we’re going to have these doors, let’s raise this much money. The people who sit around my cap table, the first thing I look for is philosophical alignment on growth. Now the landscape has shifted towards profitability, EBITA, but four years ago it was all about top-line revenue and fueling the fire with paid. It was very easy to acquire customers, but the lifetime value of that customer is not always proven, and it does depend on your product market fit. If you’re a bigger masstige or mass brand, you might be able to get a return, but to me, when you’re buying something that is in a more prestige category, you have to fall in love with it. You have to understand why you’re buying something. My first thing was getting investors who understood top-of-funnel customer acquisition and lifetime value and did not think that if you spend a million dollars you should make a million dollars.
Also, having experience as a founder is so valuable. One of my first investors was one of the co-founders of Tatcha, Brad Murray. He has single-handedly been one of the most helpful investors on my cap table, in the early days of getting set up with Sephora, being able to understand cost of goods around travel sizing, holiday sets, and animations. I’d never worked with Sephora before. He was the first investor I had that gave me the glossary of Sephora terms. There are investors like True Beauty Ventures’ Rich [Gersten] and Christina [Nuñez]. Christina is an operator, Rich is an investor—I do think it’s super helpful to have pure investors as well as a game plan, do projections, and look at the margins. But there’s something very valuable about working with people who have been in the shoes you’re in now that you can go to and talk to about everything from leadership to retail expansion strategy to product development to someone copying you. Gwyneth [Paltrow] has been super supportive. What she’s built with Goop is not a given. She’s built something very real that people look to as a resource, whether it’s around sexual wellness or haircare. She has really opened up the doors and having her support has been amazing. Even Bobbi Brown—when we first shipped our dry shampoo we were having fill issues and the amount of support she gave me, talking about components with her, I can’t believe I get to do that. She has so many stories and personal advice; that’s where you can learn the most from.
What is your upcoming growth and expansion strategy?
We have a lot of great products in the pipeline. The goal is to double growth again and keep growing the brand and business that way. I think it allows for a bit more of an even burn. That being said, you want to know where you’re aiming the rocket before you put the fuel in. Four years in, I see where we are aiming the rocket, and maybe two years from now we could go a little bit harder on that. The most important value as a business in beauty is time and market. People buy brands that have been in the market for 10, 15, 20 years; three-and-a-half years is very young in a brand’s lifecycle. In theory, if we could be everywhere all at once, I don’t even know if it’d be the healthy option for the business. It takes time for people to discover and try the brand, so maybe in two years, we’ll hit an inflection point where we go big and wide with this. For now, my goal is to march towards profitability and be EBITA positive; hit goals that were less sexy a few years ago but still while doubling year-over-year.
Especially when it comes to retail presence, there is too much of a good thing. Obviously, customers want access to the product, but if you’re in too many places, that can become this issue of over-saturation and backfire.
The other thing is the category at-large is still very driven by salons. It’s not new brand-driven. Our strategy for revenue growth will hopefully be in parallel with the consciousness of the category in general, which is what happened with skincare in the last decade. There’s not the education level with haircare that is there with skincare and color. As we expand and people can walk into these doors, there is more awareness for the care piece of hair.
When it comes to the intentionality of launching the product, it’s a very curated selection. Your dry shampoo is in powder form as opposed to an aerosol, and there is only one mask, shampoo, and conditioner instead of five different types of each. Also, when it comes to marrying product performance with a clean formula, if you take out certain ingredients from formulas, the performance can suffer. Can you give me a bit of insight into the challenges of the formulation process?
It’s so hard. It’s why we see fewer people enter the space, because it’s very challenging to make clean products that also work. At scale, the customer is trained by color coding or hair type; six different shampoos or eight different oils where it’s not very different. When I worked at Into The Gloss and was transcribing Top Shelf interviews, it was about the magic of “I mix this thing with that thing and this other thing and it gives me what I want.” For me, what we’re doing in haircare, it’s taking the best of some of my holy grail SKUs that were not clean and I was using for years and seeing how I can innovate on them, making them sulphate-free and color-safe.
With the dry shampoo, years ago when I was working at an office and about to go out, I had run out of dry shampoo, and so I grabbed my translucent powder and a kabuki brush and floofed it all over my hair. I remember going to drinks that night, and people were telling me my hair looked so good. It wasn’t a long-term solution, but I was looking for other non-aerosol dry shampoos but couldn’t find a nice, silky, voluminous, delicious formula that came in that application. Even when it came to the gel, we had to reimagine the whole thing. Forget clear, sticky, crunchy. How do we make a gel that is nourishing for your strands, is not going to clog your hair follicles, and that you can brush out? To me that is where the innovation lies.
Everything needs to be intentional, thoughtful, serve a purpose. I would love for the consciousness of customers to be “I’m going to invest in fewer, better products that do more for me” versus the more is more. It’s interesting because we have a customer who was having hair growth problems; she tried supplements and was looking at topical options. I asked her what dry shampoo she was using and I advised her to trade it out and talk to me in 30 days. Within three months, her hair was growing back again. So often we don’t look at the products that we’re using right now. Fewer better quality [products], taking time to listen to your hair, being intuitive about it; that to me, is the goal. Of course, go to a trichologist, go to a derm, get blood work done. This is a holistic endeavor. I would love for everyone to use Crown Affair; that’s the dream, but my mission is to get people to care about, take care of, be curious, and get excited about their hair. Then if you actively choose that you don’t want to care for it, that’s fine too, but I want them to feel connected to it versus what the category has been giving us, which is shame, disempowerment, confusion, taming, fixing, managing—all of that.
It feels like this is the perfect meeting point of all your professional experiences, whether it’s working on those transcripts at Into The Gloss, getting an insight into the psychology of top-shelf beauty products, but then also with your VC background, it’s all funneled into this perfect little baby that is the brand.
It is. It’s funny, I’ll have investors ask if they can connect me with another one of their portfolio companies to talk about community or all of the things that we just talked about. The truth is, there’s no silver bullet. It’s just doing the work and talking to people. It takes two years to make a great product from ideation to testing, testability to component. This all started from a Google Doc that I put out about how to brush your hair and why a hair towel means something. I’ve always loved that sharing and community, talking to people, and getting curious. I’m so grateful for my 10 years of working in all these companies, because that’s where you learn and understand consumer behavior.
You are trained and raised in these very masculine energy cultures of bulldozing, throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, or moving fast and breaking things. After a decade of that, plus the pandemic, I’ve fully shifted my mindset towards leading and creating through the lens of feminine energy.
I feel like I am in the third wave of founders: How do we create the culture? How do we have balance? I can’t tell people to take their time and take care of themselves if I’m not doing that. How do you lead with empathy? How do you create products with intention? I feel very grateful to be setting the tone within this wave. That doesn’t mean there aren’t challenges. Beauty is a very competitive industry; this is not easy, but I’m a very big believer that what you give is what you’re going to get back. Whether that’s product development, how you hire, things like Seedling—it all does come full circle. Unless you’re a massive celebrity or huge influencer, it’s near impossible to launch a brand now and cut corners on any of those things.
What are your plans for the future of the brand?
The immediate, the next two years, is deepening domestic distribution with our existing partners, and then international expansion so we can meet the customer where they are. I wish we were everywhere for that reason, but all in time. The bigger vision is that I would love to have our own spaces, potentially to do a head spa experience. I am very passionate about dry cutting. I’ve been going to my hairstylist for 13 years now, Teddi Cranford, and I’m a huge advocate for understanding your natural hair texture and type and how to optimize that. With the traditional salon system experience, you feel really good about the cut for a couple of days but then go home and it doesn’t look the same. At-large across the country, there’s so much opportunity for figuring out how to give people their best hair.
It’s interesting how a conversation starting with hair can tap into so many wider things like the post-pandemic reflective period.
I love that, and that’s the beauty of hair and the beauty of beauty. Like hair as a part of your identity. Your hair is self-expression. I was talking to a friend who is an animator at Pixar, and he was telling me about the technical innovation they had to do to tell stories about hair in the right way, like Violet from The Incredibles, her hair is a part of her journey as an individual and her character. To me, it’s crazy that that whole part of the conversation and category hasn’t been acknowledged. As we get bigger, I want to continue to have those conversations because they’re important.
To me, the Crown Affair approach to beauty feels very much about enhancing natural beauty, trying to bring out that character that’s already there.
One hundred percent. It’s the no-makeup makeup, which I love and has always been a part of my philosophy, versus the achieving. I’m excited for more people to adopt that. It’s about taking time to connect with people and hear what they’re doing, how they can feel better about themselves, enhance that relationship to it because nature is beautiful. I feel like the older you get, the more you realize that you can do less to even be more and find that within yourself. It’s the uncovering, that it’s always been within you versus trying to strive for it.
Carla Seipp 