Inside Jonah Kaner’s Bid to Make Hair Care ‘Funner’
Jonah Kaner, son of Oribe cofounder Daniel Kaner and namesake beauty founder Sonia Kashuk, is launching a beauty brand of his own.
Called Funner, the line debuts with 21 products priced from $38 to $52, the majority of which are hair care offerings — including five shampoos; three conditioners and 12 styling and treatment products — plus an exfoliating hand wash, for good measure.
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More than five years in the making, Funner is Kaner's vision for salon-quality hair care that sits at the intersection of performance and play.
"Hair, for me — growing up around great hairdressers, great makeup artists, great photographers — was a joyous thing," said Kaner, who is debuting Funner after years of working as a consultant for consumer brands, including Oribe. "Taking hair care and making it as intuitive and approachable as possible, but still with products that really work, is how we got to the idea of Funner."
Kaner is cofounder and chief executive officer of the brand, while Kashuk and Daniel Kaner are cofounders. Kao, the Japanese beauty giant that acquired Oribe in 2017, is a minority investor.
Funner
Things get more power-packed from there: creative agency and graphic designers M/M Paris, whom Kaner got in touch with via Instagram DM, helped develop the visual identity of the brand, while hairstylist and longtime family friend Christiaan styled Funner's debut campaign shot by British photographer Jamie Hawkesworth. All models for the campaign, though, were scouted out in the wild.
"Sonia, Daniel and myself — we love art , we love design, and so from Day One we knew that, thinking about the brand overall, design was going to be very important," Kaner said. "Funner is not just a word to us; it's an emotion, it's a feeling — it's all of those things, but to shape and define that, we needed great collaborators."
Funner
Each product is designated by a different Funner logo color combination — for instance, a yellow-and-blue logo adorns the $48 Better Butter curl texturizer, while the Drench Coat hydrating mask features a pink-and-green logo, and for the Silk Screen hair oil, a purple-orange combo. Other products include a heat protectant spray, a wave and curl definer, shampoos of different molecular weights, a texturizing spray and more.
The brand is launching direct-to-consumer to start, as well as in a few top salon doors including Sine Qua Non in Chicago, plus two independent beauty retailers: C.O Bigelow in New York and soon, The Cosmetic Market in Nashville.
"The reason we're in C.O. Bigelow and some of these salons is because they have a great pride for selling and for relationship building," said Kaner, adding that the aim is for Funner to be in 50 salon doors by the end of the first year. "Salons bring an amazing relationship between stylists and customers.…We want to physically be in every salon we launch into, introduce the brand to the team, get to know them and see what works in their culture and how we can weave Funner into it in collaborative ways."
Kaner anticipates specialty beauty retail could eventually be part of the brand's footprint, as well.
"We're being mindful of curating the experience, and even in theory growing a little bit slower as long as we can truly invest in our touchpoints and relationships," he said.
Funner shampoos.
From a product point of view, Kaner said that he's thinking of Funner as something of a "software company" in that he will be eyeing potential improvements that can be made to the brand's existing, robust lineup, potentially more than ideating net-new products to bring to the market.
"We're always going to be looking at what's new to market and how we can think about reformulating, not to change, but more so to improve the overall experience for the consumer," he said. "We always want the line to be accessible in terms of how wide it gets. Never say never, but if we were to get to 100-plus skus, we probably aren't doing what we set out to do.
"Performance-powered play is how we think about product development. We think products should have not just one benefit, but maybe two or three or four, depending on how you're using them," he continued. "We don't want to overly prescribe hair, we just want to make it feel, you know, funner."
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