New opportunities: Singapore’s Herbal Pharm expanding personal care business with hair care range

Herbal Pharm is a health foods and supplements company that was founded 18 years ago. On top of health supplements, the company has ventured into personal care a decade ago with products like Syrian Aleppo soap.

Today, the company is aiming to expand its business in the personal care sector, where it believes there are tremendous opportunities for growth, especially in the natural sector.

“What’s trending in hair care now is really potent ingredients that are formulated with plant-based or botanical ingredients that can give great effects,” said ​Dr Ananthi Krunanathi, senior manager of medical affairs, Herbal Pharm.

“Hair care is the first personal care category we wanted to go into because as we know, hair is important to everybody. Men and women are all facing issues like early greying hair and hair loss because of our stress levels, not consuming enough nutrition, and all these things,”​ she told  CosmeticsDesign-Asia​ at the 11^th​ Society of Cosmetic Scientists Singapore (SCSS) Suppliers Day.

The company is set to launch its first hair care range sometime this year.

According to Krunanathi, the new range will focus on major hair concerns including hair loss and greying hair and was developed with Singapore Polytechnic’s Consumer Chemicals Technology Centre.

While the company is also interested in developing a skin care line, it felt that the category was already very saturated and there were more whitespaces in hair care.

“In the future, we definitely want to move into skin care, but we think now there are more opportunities in hair care. For instance, we especially wanted to create a good hair serum that can actually promote hair growth while reducing grey hair,”​ Krunanathi said.

The new hair care range will launch with a shampoo, conditioner, and serum. They were developed specifically for the consumer base in Singapore and will tackle common issues in the market such as humidity. Then, it may export the line out to other markets in the region.

“We will see how this market takes this product and gather feedback. Then, because our company is trying to expand into other South East Asian markets like Vietnam so we might try to expand there,” ​Krunanathi said.

Moving forward, Herbal Pharm is keen to develop more products such as hair masks and also develop formulations that can cater to a wide range of people.

For instance, Krunanathi highlighted that there were still not enough products in the market today for curly hair. “We might use the same products but upgrade it for curly hair because it needs more hydration and such to give it that look. Yes, so we may bring in a curly hair line the in the future.”​