Men’s grooming has traditionally had a fairly recognizable uniform. Dark packaging, barbershop cues, woody fragrances, and an aesthetic designed to leave consumers in little doubt that the product in front of them is, emphatically, for men.
Haircare brand Wavy looks very different.
Founded by brothers Eyal and Ariel Booker in 2023, the British textured haircare brand has built a visual identity that sits somewhere between beauty, fashion, and lifestyle. Its branding is clean and considered without being overtly masculine or feminine, and its social feeds sell a world around the product as much as the product itself.
At the center of it all is an equally specific consumer: young men with textured hair who the founders believe have historically been overlooked by traditional men’s grooming and the wider curl category. This gap in the market became apparent to Eyal after his time on Love Island UK.
That relatively narrow proposition is producing sizable results. Wavy was self-funded with £25,000 ($33,800) of the brothers' own money and, according to the company, generated a seven-figure revenue in its first year without raising external capital. The brand has since sold more than 200,000 units of its hero Everyday Curl Crème and recently launched on Amazon, where the founders say it has become the number-one men’s curl cream in the UK. The US, meanwhile, is currently Wavy’s fastest-growing market, having seen 290% growth from 2025 to 2026, selling direct-to-consumer and on Amazon.
Now targeting eight-figure run rate by the end of 2026, Wavy offers an interesting case study in what can happen when a beauty brand chooses to go deeper rather than wider, and understands the cultural codes of the consumer it is speaking to.
The idea for Wavy began with the Bookers’ own hair. Growing up with textured hair, both brothers felt poorly represented by the products available to them. For Eyal, that often meant cutting his hair short or straightening it rather than learning how to work with his natural texture. It wasn’t until he was around 18 or 19 that he began embracing his curls, only to encounter another problem: figuring out what to use on them. “There was never any brand speaking to me,” he told BeautyMatter.
Instead, his mother recommended products to him, most of which he felt had been branded and marketed predominantly toward women. After Booker appeared on Love Island UK and other reality television shows, he became known for his hair. While his public profile grew, so did the number of men messaging him about his curly locks.
Consumers wanted to know what he used and how he styled his curls, but Booker wasn’t particularly eager to tell them that his routine involved five or six products across leave-in conditioner, curl cream, gel, mousse, and other styling formats, none of which he felt particularly connected to. “Where are the brands for men?” he remembered asking himself.
Booker began working with a UK laboratory on what would eventually become Wavy’s Everyday Curl Crème, designed to condense that complicated routine into a single product. He simultaneously began documenting this development process on TikTok. Videos gained traction before Wavy had formally launched, giving the brothers an early indication that their personal frustration was shared by a much larger group of consumers. Ariel, who had previously co-founded a can water brand in 2015, subsequently joined his brother as co-founder, and Wavy officially launched in 2023.
The gap Wavy identified was partly a product problem, but its timing also reflects a much larger cultural change in how young men think about their hair, appearance, and identity. Eyal remembers growing up at a time when the dominant male hair aesthetic was largely straight, shaped in part by celebrities like Justin Bieber and Zac Efron. At the same time, men with curly hair had relatively few products, resources, or reference points designed specifically for their texture, which was often treated as something to tame or manage rather than style.
That has changed considerably. From broccoli cuts to perms and deliberately voluminous curls, textured hairstyles have become an increasingly visible part of the Gen Z male aesthetic. But the Bookers see the shift as bigger than another hair trend. Instead, they connect it to a generation increasingly comfortable embracing characteristics previous generations may have attempted to change.
“We live in a world now where people are a lot more authentic,” said Eyal. For hair, that has meant “embracing your natural texture and accepting that this is who you are and not fighting against it,” he added.
Wavy therefore isn’t attempting to convince young men that curls are desirable. It is about building products and brand identity around consumer behavior that is already occurring in culture. While its marketing remains deliberately male-focused, its actual customer base isn’t exclusively so. Women also buy Wavy products. "Women are more inclined to buy a product marketed towards men than men are inclined to buy a product marketed towards women," said Eyal.
For Wavy, the commercial opportunity lies in solving a specific consumer need rather than trying to serve everyone simultaneously. That philosophy becomes apparent when looking at Wavy’s branding, which hasn’t swung to the opposite extreme either.
Instead, its visual world is intentionally ambiguous when it comes to gender. Product photography, campaigns, and social content draw on the aesthetic language of contemporary fashion and lifestyle brands, allowing Wavy to appeal to a generation of men whose relationship with beauty looks and self-care may be less rigidly defined than that of previous generations. “Our intention has never been to tell anyone what masculinity is,” said Eyal. “There’s a whole spectrum of masculinity.”
It is a seemingly simple idea, but one that exposes a longstanding problem in marketing to men. In attempting to reassure consumers that skincare, haircare, or cosmetics are sufficiently “masculine,” brands can end up prescribing an identity alongside the product. Wavy deliberately tries not to. “Our branding isn’t meant to speak for you,” Booker said. “It’s meant to just look nice, feel nice, and allow you to be whatever man you choose to be.”
The approach reflects a potentially important lesson for brands trying to reach Gen Z men. The opportunity may not lie in developing another visual shorthand for modern masculinity, but in removing the need to define masculinity through the product altogether.
Social media has been central to Wavy’s business from its earliest stages. Eyal had already built an audience through television and content creation before launching the company, and TikTok became an early testing ground for Wavy while its hero product was still in development. That background has shaped the founders’ approach to marketing, but not necessarily in the most obvious way.
Rather than chasing the largest possible creators or treating follower counts as a proxy for influence, Wavy has become increasingly skeptical of conventional social metrics.
"Numbers on socials don't really mean that much anymore," said Eyal, pointing to inflated engagement and analytics as reasons brands need to look beyond surface-level numbers. Instead, the company prioritizes creators who already understand and use its products, and regularly features its real customers in social and campaign content. The aim is to make the lifestyle surrounding Wavy feel attainable, rather than to construct campaigns around faces disconnected from the community who actually buys the product.
"Wavy isn't about me," Eyal said. "I was the vehicle to get Wavy out there to a certain extent and have it discovered."
That distinction matters for a founder entering beauty with an existing profile. Celebrity and creator-founded brands can benefit enormously from an existing audience at launch, but longevity depends on whether the proposition can eventually exist independently of that individual. Wavy is attempting to make its community, not its founder, the recognizable face of the business.
Organic and paid social remain important acquisition channels, particularly while Wavy operates predominantly through DTC. However, the founders are increasingly combining those channels with user-generated content, influencer relationships, email, newsletters, and physical events including Wavy Open Days and Wavy Nights, where the brand brings consumers and influencers all connected by curly hair into one place. Previous events were hosted in collaboration with Barry’s, a worldwide fitness studio chain.
"There's no one metric, and I think it would be silly as a brand in this day and age to rely on it,” said Ariel. Instead, Wavy is trying to create consistency at every point consumers encounter the company. The founders aim to extend the Wavy identity through everything from its unboxing experience and post-purchase emails to consumer surveys and physical events. The intention is to make consumers feel recognized long before they turn up to a Wavy event, and to give them a reason to come back, according to the Bookers.
In that sense, Wavy’s aesthetic does more than make its Instagram grid look good. It acts as connective tissue between digital discovery, product experience, and physical community.
While beauty’s traditional route to growth has often involved expanding into new categories and adding SKUs, Wavy has spent much of its first three years building recognition around a tightly edited assortment of one hero proposition, a wash, and product and accessory bundles.
“At the moment, we are one product that solves the issue of frizzy curls, right? It doesn’t need a five-step routine,” said Eyal. The strategy is particularly relevant when selling to younger male consumers who may not have years of experience navigating complex grooming routines. Instead of requiring shoppers to understand the differences among multiple stylers, treatments, and finishing products, Wavy gives them an easily communicated entry point.
However, that doesn’t mean Wavy intends to remain reliant on one hero product. Three launches are planned before the end of the year, including products intended to serve additional areas of the textured hair community. But the founders are wary of expanding for expansion’s sake. They don’t want to launch “a million and one products” that leave customers confused about what to buy or why they need it.
Instead, new products are intended to address identifiable gaps within textured haircare, a strategy that could allow Wavy to increase basket size without diluting the specialty that helped establish it. The next phase will test exactly how far that specialty can travel.
Wavy is already looking beyond its DTC foundations. Its Amazon launch represents an early move into third-party distribution, while the founders say further retail expansion is on the horizon.
Yet the Bookers don’t appear eager to transform Wavy into a catch-all men’s grooming company. "Especially when building a brand, it's very important to stick within your lane and own that market and to build a deep connection with your audience and your customers," said Ariel.
There remains, they argue, considerable white space within textured hair alone. The ultimate ambition is for Wavy to become “the go-to men’s textured haircare brand across the world,” with the US and retail distribution being important parts of that next chapter.
For a company targeting eight-figure run rate less than three years after launch with £25,000 ($33,800) in founder capital, Wavy’s trajectory makes a compelling argument for the commercial power of specialty.
The beauty industry has spent years learning how to market to Gen Z women through aesthetics, community, creators, and lifestyle. Wavy suggests the same opportunity exists for men, too, but reaching young male consumers may require brands to stop selling them an idea of what masculinity is supposed to look like.
For Wavy, the opportunity isn’t to become everything to everyone. Wavy wants to be indispensable to a consumer who, until relatively recently, has had very little designed specifically for him.