“Life begins on the edge of your comfort zone.” – Shay Hoelscher
For Shay Hoelscher, Founder and CEO of privé products, launching a clean haircare line was a deeply personal and profound experience. Spending almost four decades in the beauty industry taught Hoelscher everything she needed to know about leadership, authenticity, and the immense value found in empowering women in the workforce.
With 37 years of experience with some of the industry’s top brands, including Sebastian, Nioxin, and TIGI, Hoelscher gained insight into a wide variety of the complex areas of the beauty business. She fostered an understanding of what it takes to increase brand growth, and what to avoid when maintaining brand identity.
Her mantra that “every day is a learning day” walked hand-in-hand with Hoelscher through decades of changes and challenges within the industry. Over time, she developed a strong desire to build a brand that was founded upon the value she had developed throughout her career: basing her business on purpose, rather than profit.
The leap from executive to founder was completely void of any sort of safety net, and thus was risky. Becoming the singular face and driving force behind a major undertaking was no easy feat. She discusses how being a founder requires you to be the logo and the ship.
An additional source of challenge came in tow with the pandemic, which came merely months after privé’s launch in December 2019. Hoelscher dove further into her mission, building the company brick by brick with the values she believed were most necessary in the current state of the industry: purpose, performance, and empowerment.
Privé is a brand heavily dedicated to its commitment to give back; a large portion of company sales goes to supporting Project Beauty Share, a nonprofit organization focused on helping women in need regain self-confidence and dignity through providing them with personal care products. For Hoelscher, beauty has always been so much bigger than appearance, instead “more about the confidence and strength and what that means,” she shares.
This same philosophy and self-drivenness extends into another aspect of Hoelscher’s story: motorsports. Outside of her career, Hoelscher is a competitive race car driver. Beginning as a personal interest and eventually extending into the Privé brand, race car driving inspired Hoelscher both personally and professionally.
Finding herself to often be the only woman on the racetrack and in the boardroom at work served as a parallel and thus further motivated Hoelscher to promote female empowerment through women-only track days and mentoring women both on and off the race track.
Privé has become a rallying cry for women to take risks and be bold and unapologetic in all aspects of life, while also providing formulas that offer salon-quality formulas with equally strong ingredients. These products are made with high-quality ingredients including bamboo, baobab, peptides, probiotics, and aloe vera; they are vegan, cruelty-free, and gluten-free.
Though these products offer premium ingredients and results, Hoelscher was determined to make price points accessible and make this luxury affordable for a wider range of consumers. She aims to keep maintainable price points while heightening education and community within the professional beauty space – which the industry was seeking post-pandemic.
Hoelscher believes success is about constantly seeking challenges and remaining closely aligned with the mission behind the brand. She is dedicated to empowering people to step into spaces they were never told they belonged in
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