ghd: How firm is strengthening its Yorkshire roots to give women worldwide a 'good hair day'

The first is that they didn’t know the brand hailed from Yorkshire, the second tends to be unsolicited enthusiastic praise about how much they love their products.

The latter part of those responses will be music to the ears of the company’s chief executive Jeroen Temmerman, who met The Yorkshire Post for an exclusive interview as he visited Leeds recently to open the company’s new offices in the city.

The firm has moved 120 staff into Wellington Place, in the same eco-friendly office building that will soon also be home to the likes of Lloyds Banking Group and Arup.

While that group of staff was already based in Leeds at the nearby Bridgewater Place building, Temmerman says the move into the major new office building which has been dubbed the most sustainable in Yorkshire represents a “symbolic moment” for the company.

Despite now having around 1,000 staff based all around the world, Temmerman says retaining a presence in Yorkshire is a case of good business sense rather than sentimentality.

He explains: “Roughly 20 years ago the business started here. Now we are becoming one of the leading beauty-tech businesses of the world; at least that is the ambition. We are in Europe already.

“We are expanding ourselves in the US, in Asia, we have just entered into China a couple of years ago. It is a very exciting story and once again it all started here.

“I’m very happy we are based here in Leeds, we have our finance officers here, our digital teams, our customer service teams. There is a very big talent pool that we have working in this office.

“The development of Leeds as a city in these last four years is impressive. For ghd we are extremely proud to be in the centre of Leeds. We think there is a big digital acceleration happening in Leeds and it is fantastic our digital teams are here.

“There are a lot of capabilities we can tap into in the infrastructure of Leeds.”

He says Leeds is “where we guide the global organisation” with the finance and digital teams serving the the company’s worldwide expansion plans.

The business - whose name stands for Good Hair Day - was founded in Yorkshire in 2001 by former hairdresser Robert Powls, along with his business partners Gary Douglas and Martin Penny.

They revolutionised the way UK women styled their locks with the launch of its first ceramic hair straightener.

It followed finding a company in South Korea which had invented a process of creating a hair straightener with a wafer-thin ceramic heater.

After initially selling to hairdressers to rave reviews, the products were introduced directly to consumers and soon GHDs - as they became known - were being used by stars like Victoria Beckham, Jennifer Aniston and Madonna.

Powls and Douglas left ghd in 2006 when Penny effectively bought them out in an MBO backed by Lloyds Development Capital for £55m. The firm was sold again 11 months later to Montagu Private Equity for £160m.

However, the story for the original founders was not a particularly happy one.

Last year, Gavin Rae, Powls’s stepson who is now involved with rival firm Cloud Nine that was set up with other family members, told The Yorkshire Post: “The sad story about ghd is that the three founders didn’t particularly get on after a while, which is often the story when there’s success and money on the table and it became a fractious environment.”

In 2018, tragically Mr Penny took his own life with an inquest the following year hearing he had been suffering with depression and anxiety after falling into financial difficulties.

The Montagu purchase of 2007 was far from the end of the business changing hands for increasingly vast sums.

In 2013, private equity firm Lion Capital purchased ghd for £300m and in 2016, it was then bought again by French beauty giant Coty for £420m. In 2020, Coty sold a majority stake in its hair products division - including ghd and the likes of Wella and Clariol - to US investment company KKR for $2.5bn (£1.97bn).

While the business’s ownership history is something of a complex story, on the ground its purpose has always been very simple.

Temmerman, who joined the firm in 2018 after 20 years at L’Oreal, says: “The story of ghd in the last 20 years is it is an iconic UK brand that is travelling the world and it is changing women’s lives with a good hair day.

“I think it is fantastic that the mission of the group is also embedded in the logo. Ghd stands for good hair day and that is our mission. We want everyone in the world to wake up in the morning and prepare a good hair day because when you have that you look better and you feel better.”

The company now has its headquarters in London, while in 2010 it opened a research lab in Cambridge to assist with the development of its product line. It now has well over 100 patents and its most recent launch in February was the ghd Duet Style, a two-in-one hot air styler which blends air and heated plate technologies to transform hair from wet to styled.

Temmerman says ongoing innovation has been key to the company’s success.

“We always say 185C is the perfect temperature to style your hair without damage. The labs in Cambridge have worked to perfect that technology. During that period we also developed our air platform, we have launched hair dryers in the last eight to 10 years.

“Now Duet is combining those two technologies with one tool. That is a breakthrough technology because we are the first in the world in that category.

“It is with no heat damage and as a consequence of that, the hair gets a softness, shine and perfect style. These kind of innovations are what you can really travel the world with.”

Temmerman says the company has weathered the multiple economic challenges of the past few years well to emerge in a stronger position.

“The last five years has been a super exciting journey for ghd, we have doubled our turnover and have accelerated the growth in our different categories enormously. We did a lot of innovation in the last five years.

“We have a business that is very nicely balanced with a very balanced distribution model meaning 50 per cent is offline and 50 per cent is online.

“That accelerated during Covid to 60 per cent online and 40 per cent offline. But today the offline business is bouncing back strongly which we obviously very happy about. The good news is we accelerated our online growth, maintained that base after Covid while the offline business of selling to industry and premium retail like Harrods and John Lewis where we have our beauty stands also came back very strongly.

“That is the model that has been accelerating very quickly. During the last four years we have grown extremely fast in Europe. The business has gone from a very UK-centric business to having a very European footprint, with a very strong base in the UK.

“That is very healthy because we have very sustainable growth in Europe and in a lot of countries we are now the market leader in the styling segment.

“At the same time we accelerated our growth in the US and we opened in China. We have an office in Hong Kong, where we serve the Hong Kong business, the Taiwan business, the Singapore business and the Vietnam business. We also have an office in China - the Chinese market is a very strategic market for us in future.”

He says that even during the current cost-of-living crisis, consumers are willing to pay premium prices for products they feel are worth the investment.

“I worked in the beauty industry for 20 years. One thing I learnt is that it is quite resilient to different crises across the world.

“If you really have good innovation that can change behaviour or is a gamechanger for a beauty routine, people tend to invest to look good and feel better. Even when times are tough, everybody wants to treat themselves and give themselves a good treat if the products are good. You need good products and that comes at a cost of research and development. The consequence is the product we bring to market has a certain price position and then it is up to the consumer to decide whether they think it is worth it or not. What we have found in the last four years where we’ve had different type of crises - come from Covid to a big supply chain crisis with a shortage of chips that hurt ghd heavily like every other industry. Then you come to the cost of living crisis.

“Ghd has proved to have a very resilient business model. I think good products that bring innovation to the market are one of the keys to success.

“The biggest thing that motivates me is that it is fantastic to see that the brand that started here 20 years ago is now travelling the world. This brand is capable of surprising consumers all across the world with a good hair day.

“The second thing is working with all employees around the world - there is no business model that is resilient without people standing up every single day, giving everything in their power and being committed to that purpose.”

“I’m extremely excited about the investment we are doing on R&D. We doubled our investment in Cambridge over the last five years and will double it again in the next five years. I think there is an extremely interesting pipeline of products in the coming five years we are going to launch.

“Creating a good hair day is valid for all women around the world and ghd is for all women around the world.”