Boston Common - Niche Media - A side of Boston that's anything but common.
Issue link: http://digital.greengale.com/i/715599
well-traveled Carmen Tal (opposite page), cofounder of Moroccanoil, draws upon her travels around the world, including to the Beldi Country Club in Morocco (shown here), to fire her imagination for new products and ideas. The recently released fragrance Fleur de Rose was inspired by flowers Tal admired in France. It started wIth just a basIc need—Carmen Tal, today the cofounder of Moroccanoil , was visiting relatives in Israel when a bad color process damaged her hair. Disappointed, she accompa- nied a friend to a salon in Tel Aviv, where a hairstylist used an oil treatment to both condition and style Tal's hair. According to Tal, "The results were like, Wow!" Tal, a former salon owner herself who had also worked in the fashion industry, brought the product back home to Canada, where she started using it in her personal beauty regimen. She shared it with friends, colleagues, and her hairstylist. And as each reported the same impressive results—nourished, beautiful hair—she became convinced she had to distribute this oil on a larger stage. It took Tal six months to persuade her then husband, Ofer, a business execu- tive who spoke Hebrew, that they needed to make this treatment oil their next venture. Initially, the couple started by just securing North American dis- tribution rights, but when their success outpaced the company's level of production, Tal bought the company outright and launched what is today the multimillion-dollar brand Moroccanoil. Looking back, Tal admits it was no cake walk. "What we faced most was the negativity of people," she says of those early days. "The thing for me was mostly people saying, 'Don't bring some- thing with oil.' 'Don't bring anything with glass because it's going to break, it's going to make a mess.' Or, 'Why do you do something with hair—that's [a] saturated [category]?' That was the challenge. We just said, 'Okay, if we fail, we fail.' You don't always have a guar- antee that things are going to be successful. But we were lucky." "Lucky" might be the understatement of the century. The game- changing success of Moroccanoil in an industry notorious for fickleness and fads could well be attributed to some luck, but the stunning growth and longevity of the brand is directly proportional to Tal's tenacity, dedication, inspiration, and vision. Since the company launched less than a decade ago, Moroccanoil has ignited a passion (some would say obsession) in North America for argan oil, a rich elixir that's harvested from kernels inside the fruit of Moroccan argan trees. In a labor-intensive process, Berber women crack open the argan nut to obtain the kernels, which are ground to extract the pure, unfiltered oil, which is then left to settle so any impurities sink to the bottom and can be removed. The resulting oil can be used for food (much the same way olive oil is) as well as a moisturizer for the face and hair. Argan oil is one of the main efficacious ingredients in the company's cornerstone Moroccanoil Treatment and the signature ingredient across the entire product line, and spawned shelves of me-too merchandise. According to industry researcher Mintel, 29 products using argan oil launched in 2008; in 2012, it was 588. Meanwhile, researcher NPD Group has seen US department store sales of products featur- ing argan oil increase by more than 200 percent. "It actually doesn't bother me anymore," says Tal of the flood of argan oil products that fill shelves everywhere from high-end department stores to the local drugstore—even big-box stores like Costco. "Now I'm so confident that being the first, being the pioneer, and continuing to bring prod- ucts of the highest quality, nobody will ever take that place. No matter how many other products come out, we're still going to be