Rick Cantu founded his eponymous textured hair brand in 2003. It has since become “the top brand contributing to growth [in the mass market retail space,] with an average retail price of about $5,” as category growth expert and President of Strategic Solutions International Romina Brown told Cosmetics Design at the start of the year.
Cantu has, since mid-2015, been owned by pdc brands (and that Connecticut-based wellness and personal care company itself is owned by private equity firms CVC and Leonard Green & Partners).
“Cantu Beauty has a heritage in conditioning products for your hair. Now, consumers can trust Cantu for all their conditioning needs – from curl to toe,” says Nikia Bowman, Brand Director of Cantu Beauty, in this week’s media release about the new category launch.
Cantu Skin Therapy launches with 4 body care products
“We are very pleased to have formulated and introduced a great range of skincare products that work to relieve dry skin, a common frustration for many people,” says Bowman, referring to the new line Cantu Skin Therapy.
The initial body care line from Cantu comprises a cocoa butter body cream, a coconut oil body lotion, a shea butter body cream, and a shea butter body lotion. “We pack in several well-known moisturizing ingredients into every bottle and tube,” says Bowman, “to ensure that consumers are finally getting the intense moisture they need to last all day.”
The Cantu Skin Therapy Nourishing Shea butter Body Lotion, for instance, is formulated with shea butter, cocoa butter, mango butter, coconut oil, jojoba oil, argan oil, and vitamin E. And the new product line is retailing online and in select doors with Walmart.
Growing the Cantu brand beyond its roots in hair
It’s not unusual for beauty and personal care brands to expand into categories beyond their core area of expertise. But it’s happening quite a lot recently. In fact, just this week Liz Flora published an item on the consumer beauty site Glossy.com, that ‘Body care is skin care’s next frontier.”
In that article, Flora looks at how popular skin care brands are bringing the benefits of skin care to body care products like body serums and oils.
What Cantu is doing with the new category is quite similar in that the brand is continuing to specialize in moisturizing and conditioning and simply taking those benefits—along with some of the same hero ingredients—into the body care category.
