Ouai, the hair-care brand built by celebrity stylist Jen Atkin into a quiet empire of shampoos, conditioners, and textured-fabric hair accessories, has appointed Susan Kim as its new chief executive officer — a move that signals maturation for a label that began as a salon-side conversation.
Kim arrives from Kopari, where she served as chief operating officer, bringing experience in scaling indie beauty brands into household names. Atkin will remain as chief creative officer, a title that more accurately describes her role as the brand’s sensorium-in-chief: the person who decides how a product should smell, what its bottle should feel like in the hand, which cultural moment it should occupy.
The leadership restructuring comes at a moment when the prestige hair-care market is undergoing its own seismic shift. Consumers who once bought whatever their stylist recommended now research ingredients, scrutinise supply chains, and rotate through brands with the restlessness of a TikTok feed. Ouai, with its clean-girl aesthetic and $30 price point, occupies a sweet spot — aspirational but not inaccessible, clinical in its efficacy but warm in its packaging.
Kim’s mandate, by all accounts, is to preserve the brand’s editorial DNA while professionalising its operational backbone. That means supply chain resilience — a live issue as tariffs roil the beauty industry — and retail expansion beyond Ouai’s direct-to-consumer stronghold. The label is already stocked at Sephora and Credo; the new CEO is expected to push deeper into international markets and potentially into adjacent categories.
The transition speaks to a broader pattern in indie beauty: the founders who built the brands from instinct are increasingly handing the operational reins to seasoned executives while retaining creative control. It is a divorce of taste from logistics, and if the marriage was the romance of the startup years, the separation may prove the wiser arrangement for the long haul.
