Only about 30% of gray hair is genetic. The rest is influenced by nutrition, oxidative stress, and environmental factors—which means it’s not as inevitable as most people assume. That insight is the foundation of Arey, the brand Allison Conrad and her cofounder, Jay Small (her hair stylist of 10 years), launched to do something no one had done effectively: slow and reverse gray hair with science-backed supplements and topicals. The research and development started as a family project—Allison’s father is a clinical pharmacologist, her mother a dietician—and the clinical results backed it up: a 23% difference between their active group and the placebo over six months.
Here, Allison shares how she separated real science from junk ingredients, cracked the messaging for a product that asks consumers to think about hair the way they think about skin, and mapped a retail strategy designed around when customers are truly ready to understand her product.
On finding out most “gray hair” ingredients were useless:
There were supplements on Amazon when I was searching—gray hair supplements—and they were very strange looking, not trustworthy, and they all had this ingredient called Catalase. If you look into it, it does nothing. There was no scientific evidence. All these people were including it, and it was completely ineffective.
So we weren’t the first people to come up with a concept for a supplement or topical for gray hair, but we were the first to actually do it effectively with science-backed ingredients. My parents looked into every ingredient for what had scientific evidence for cell regeneration and recoloration. It wasn’t “In theory, this should be doing something"; it had to actually be doing something.
The big unlock was thinking about it as inside out and outside in. The best analogy is the skin care brand Proactiv: The nutrients you put into your body make a huge difference, and then topically you can get to the source as well, but the most effective thing is to attack it from both sides. We also blended Eastern and Western ingredients. Eastern medicine has been using fo-ti, black sesame extract—ingredients the West isn’t familiar with but other countries have relied on them for generations for anti-aging. That was us thinking outside the box, and we brought in a chemical engineer from MIT to help with that side.
On the clinical study that changed everything:
I’ve been using this product for six years now, and it’s interesting, because you don’t know how gray you would’ve been without it. I don’t really want to know.
But the clinical study gave us the real validation. Our placebo group had 10% more gray hair over six months. Our active group had 13% less gray hair. That’s a 23% delta between the two groups. Nobody had ever done a study on how fast you get gray hair. It had literally never been done. For me, that was the moment of, OK, this works, and I have the confidence to go out and tell people it works.
On selling prevention to people who only think about treatment:
It’s hard. It’s not impossible, and we’re definitely seeing the mindset shift—our customer is getting younger, which is encouraging. Skin care has trained consumers to think preventively. People do Botox before the wrinkles. They use retinol in their 20s. Hair care is still in this reactive, symptom-driven place: Your hair is gray, so you dye it.
The skin analogy has been our best way of breaking through. You do all these things for your skin. You start early for your skin. Why are you not also doing that for your hair? Your scalp ages six times faster than the skin on your face. The skin on your face regenerates every 28 days. Meanwhile, hair is the least essential part of your body; your body doesn’t prioritize it, so you need to.
Once people get that education, they get it. But we also can’t overpromise. We don’t say, “Reverse your gray hair in three months”—that’s not our brand. We’ve seen competitors position it that way, and we think it’s gross. Technically, it’s repigmentation, not reversal. So our hooks are more like: “See your first gray hair? Do something about it.” Or facts that make people stop: “30% of your gray is genetics; your scalp ages six times faster.” Those are the things we see people resonating with.
On why TikTok Shop comes before Target:
We launched direct to consumer (DTC) first, then went into Credo and Erewhon—small-footprint retailers with incredibly exacting standards. That was deliberate. Credo validated our clean credentials. Jay goes into those stores himself and talks to customers to understand what’s clicking and what’s confusing. We were still developing our packaging; a lot of our products didn’t even have boxes in the beginning because they were DTC only. Those retail partners taught us what people need to see on a box to understand how the product works.
The next step is a larger retailer, but the question is when. If we show up too early, people look at us on the shelf and think, “Is this a hair dye? What does it actually do?” So our focus for the next six to nine months is TikTok Shop—getting in front of as many people as possible, not just us explaining the product but affiliates, dermatologists, hair stylists, nurse practitioners. We’re building awareness so that when we do show up on a retail shelf, people recognize us. “Oh yeah, that’s that brand I saw on TikTok. I’m going to try that.”
On what years of advising other companies taught her about building her own:
I worked corporate jobs at Coach in marketing and merchandising. I ran someone else’s startup, called Blushington. I worked for Erin Condren, the lifestyle and stationary brand founder, and ran her business for a couple years. All of that gave me experience growing and scaling companies that were not mine—and then using those learnings for my own.
It really helped us build this company with profitability in mind. Unit economics from the beginning, margins that made sense for retailers eventually. I don’t think I would’ve understood any of that if this had been my first startup. I was so focused on these things that investors and other founders weren’t focused on. It was like, “Grow at all costs, just spend money, you’ll figure it out”—that never made logical sense to me. And now, full circle, people understand that.
The other thing I learned from advising is what to look for in a defensible business. We knew early on we needed a patent—that came from understanding the investor and venture capital perspective. It’s not cheap, so we had to be strategic about what was worth protecting. And we got it. We have another one pending. Surrounding yourself with the right legal guidance matters, but knowing you need to do it at all—that came from years of being on the other side of the table.
Hear more from Allison on Shopify Masters, including what it’s like working with her parents as medical advisers, the yoga headstand that turned into a competitive intelligence disaster, and why she chose Stanford Business School over becoming an interior designer.
