Wella Professionals

Wella Professional target group

Wella AG is a German hair care company headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. Founded in 1880 by Franz Ströher, it specialises in hair care, styling and colorants sold to individuals as well as hairdressers and was controlled by Procter & Gamble from 2003 until it was sold to Coty Inc.

Wella Professional targets on professional users of the products, which are many hairdressers and stylists, and some beauty salons. This sales is organised separately from the consumer products.

The challenge of finding replacement distributors

In all countries where Alliance experts has been active for Wella Professional, there was already a distributor, mostly with limited sales. In some cases there were already talks about transferring the distributorship, but in other cases the search needed to be done in high confidentiality. In those cases Alliance experts only disclosed the name of Wella after a first assessment of a potential distributor and a clear interest of working with a new or additional supplier.

In South Korea the additional problem was that there were not many distributors for professional cosmetic products, who went door-to-door in their approach to the target group. Eventually here we have also included webshops and distributors of other types of cosmetics in our long-list.

Three successful searches

In Indonesia we could set up the Wella team with 5 potential distributors, in South Korea with three and also in Israel with three potential candidates. Wella has a very structured approach of selecting their distributors which starts with filling our a questionnaire. Before starting the first talks, Alliance experts helped to collect the answers so that the Wella team could go into the meetings focused and well-prepared.