Jeroen Temmerman was working as managing director for L’Oreal in Sweden when he first heard of GHD. “In 2008, a very cool brand popped up on the market and it was so successful in Sweden that everybody was talking about it,” Temmerman recalls to Fortune . “The best hairdressers of Stockholm had it on the shelf.
” He’s talking about GHD—the hair tech brand that was born and bred in the U.K. before its straighteners, hairdryers, and tongs made their way across the Channel.
The buzz was so loud that he thought L’Oreal should acquire it. “I was on a team looking at the performance of GHD, to see if it could be a good asset for L’Oreal,” Temmerman says, adding that he gave his superiors his opinion on the brand— “it was very positive”—but didn’t hear back. It was above his pay grade.
The next time he heard about the company, was 10 years later when Coty (GHD’s parent company at the time) asked if he’d wanted to helm it: “For me, that was (full) circle.” It’s been nearly another decade since he took on the top job at GHD—or, Good Hair Day—and in that time, he has taken the brand across Europe’s borders to Asia and the U.S.
, doubled the budget for R&D investment and as a result, introduced new wet-to-dry stylers which have taken the beauty world by storm and outperformed the company’s own expectations by over 34%. Now, according to the company, over 3 million GHD hair styling tools are sold every year across 30 countries, nearly six p.