At a Glance

privé creates high-quality haircare brand products including shampoo and conditioner, hair treatments, styling products and body care and more. Their products are made with the highest quality pure, natural ingredients, With no animal testing and no added gluten nor harsh chemicals resulting in the cleanest products, Privé creates products that are better for the client and better for the environment.

Who is Shay Hoelscher?

Meet Shay Hoelscher, Founder and CEO of Privé products, a beauty industry leader, entrepreneur, Porsche race car driver who believes business can-and should be a force for good. After more than 35 years in the professional beauty industry, Shay founded privé with a simple but powerful belief: Beauty is kindness. Under her leadership, privé has become a women-led, clean, high performance haircare brand built around exceptional products, meaningful customer experiences, and giving back

About privé hair

Shay is certainly no stranger to the beauty industry, with nearly four decades of experience under her belt, starting when she first finished college and started working for a distributor. From there, it was all about elevating her skills and continuing to grow within the field, working for companies from Unilever to Cody, Wella, Henkel, Whether it’s small brands or mega-companies, Shay has seen it all and has continued to learn and see so many things that made her into the powerhouse she is today.

Working in high-level leadership and executive roles within those companies gave her even more opportunities to understand the running of businesses, private equity, and so much more. But she also started to think about working for a company that matched her own personal values. That is where Privé products were born. She was able to use the things she’d seen throughout her tenure in the beauty industry to create a company that offered all the things she liked and skipped over all the things she didn’t.

At Privé, she’s been able to redefine what a beauty brand can be in a whole new way and do things in a completely different way. And that’s what makes her company unique.

Creating a good product means using high-quality ingredients. Making privé uses super fuel food grade ingredients and organic wherever possible and making sure that they’re using the best of the best to create the products they sell. In every single bottle, jar, or can that privé sells, Shay wants to know that her customers are getting exactly what they need and what they expect. It’s all about making sure that clients feel cared for and that they understand what the brand really means.

Shay’s Journey

What does it take to run a company like Privé? It actually takes a host of different agencies. Shay considers herself the visionary of the company, but that doesn’t mean she’s doing everything on her own. She’s got a marketing agency, a PR agency, a social media agency, and so much more. All of these agencies are guided by Shay’s vision to tell the privè story.together as one fine-tuned machine 

The way that businesses are built today is entirely different than it used to be and the opportunity to have a remote team is something completely new. Still, Shay likes being able to see people face-to-face, whether that’s actually in person or virtually, but being able to ‘meet up’ with them is important.

Creating a Vision

For Shay, privé is about more than just the brand as a whole. After all, a brand is made up of more than just the sum of its parts. It’s about creating purpose and giving back, supporting young girls and showing them that anything is possible. More than that, it’s about being a good role model for the future generations of females and making sure that they know there’s always a spot at the table for them.

Business Growth and Revenue Strategies

Ecommerce creates a unique opportunity for businesses like privé because it allows them to reach out directly to the consumer. But that wasn’t the case not so long ago. These types of companies didn’t have websites, and didn't sell to consumers. Didn’t even sell to salons. They sold through a distribution channel and everything was extremely siloed. And then came eCommerce, which made a huge difference in the way that customers tried new products and even purchased them in the first place.

Shay was poised for the future and was prepared  when the pandemic came and buying changed entirely, she knew she had to do something different. And that meant more than just making the products available in more channels . It also meant the traditional go to market strategy completely changed in how you would connect with a new customer 

Traditional marketing involved a few images and creating a brand brochure. But modern marketing means having a constantly updated website and plenty of content on social media. It’s about using as many platforms as possible to reach out and get your name out there. For Shay, it’s a challenge and learning new ways to utilize all the opportunities at her disposal is a lot of fun.

Adding Time to the Day

A little extra time can go a long way for an entrepreneur and for Shay it’s no exception. With just 10 extra hours she’d love the opportunity to get back to her purpose. It’s not just about making money and having profit margins of a certain number. Rather, it’s about investing in people, purpose, and possibilities and inspiring people to feel comfortable and confident. She wants not only products that help her customers, but an environment where her team feels supported and feels empowered to bring new ideas forward 

Innovation and Adaptability

She’s looking at launching new products and getting greater exposure on different platforms to share the privé story. Shay is committed to all the right activity to engage her customer, as purpose over profit always comes first . It’s about ‘playing the game’ and not being solely focused  on the outcome but rather playing the game. By focusing on activity vs profits will get the company to where it needs to go  Hoelscher has learned that the most valuable hours aren’t always the ones spent doing more. They’re the ones that give you space to think bigger, connect more deeply, and ask, “What’s possible from here?”

Hoelscher shares “Because for me, success isn’t about filling every hour. It’s about making the hours I have matter.”

Inspiring the Next Generation

Shay has a solid piece of advice for others who are looking to start their own businesses or those who have already started but are looking to scale: 

My biggest advice is: know your why, know your customer, and be willing to begin before you feel completely ready.

E-commerce makes it relatively easy to launch a business, but building a brand people care about is much harder. You need a great product, but you also need a clear point of view, a compelling story, and an experience that gives people a reason to come back.

Listen obsessively to your customers. Stay curious. Test, learn, adjust, and don’t be afraid to fail. Some of the greatest lessons in business come from the things that didn’t work.

And most importantly, don’t build only for the transaction. Build for the relationship. If you create something with purpose, deliver real value, and genuinely care about the people you serve, you have the foundation for something much bigger than an e-commerce business.

You have the opportunity to build a brand that matters.