Emi Jay Expands Hair Accessories Offerings With New Collection

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Emi Jay isn’t slowing down its dominance in the hair accessories category.

The accessories brand best known for its claw clips is expanding its hair accessories offerings with a new collection called “Be Ready in 5,” releasing Wednesday. The collection offers four new hair accessories — paddle hairbrushes, makeup clips, headbands and scrunchies — that come in an array of new and best-selling textures and colors. Prices range from $16 to $48.

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“This category expansion just felt like a natural direction for us,” said Emi Jay founder Julianne Goldmark. “A lot of our customers and followers have been asking for hairbrushes for some time and I really just wanted to create simple, everyday routine accessories, but obviously with a little bit of a twist.”

This twist is seen in the collection’s colors and textures. Instead of going with the traditional black or tortoise-shell, the brand leveraged the colors used in its best-selling claw clips and brought them over to the new collection. Customers can find bamboo hairbrushes in Emi Jay’s best-selling pink marble Bellini, green shimmer Virgo and buttercream marble Leche styles.

For Goldmark, it was important to create the brand’s hairbrushes with bamboo for several reasons, one being for sustainability and the other to pay homage to her Korean roots.

“I’m half Korean, so my grandma would always come from Korea with these really beautiful wooden brushes made of bamboo and at the time they were harder to find,” she explained. “The Korean culture takes their hair very seriously. We all have very thick, silky hair, so finding a brush that can tame that can be really difficult sometimes. So, it’s kind of playing on these brushes that I grew up using from Korea was definitely a source of inspiration and making it our own. We’re taking something that’s been around for many, many years and adding this fun, feminine and bold twist to it.”

Courtesy of Emi Jay

The collection also includes makeup clips — which are used to pull hair away for skin care and makeup application — in graphic prints like hearts, confetti and marble. Goldmark said she’s only seen solid colored makeup clips on the market, so she wanted to offer a more fun option.

While Emi Jay launched in 2009, the brand has experienced rising interest in recent years thanks to the resurgence of Y2K-inspired trends, particularly the claw clip, which the brand offers in an array of styles and has collaborated on with brands like Frankies Bikinis, Summer Fridays and Juicy Couture for a recent holiday collection. This interest has continued into 2022 with the brand estimating a year-over-year increase of 250 percent in sales based on first-quarter revenue.

“Everyone loves simplicity and girls are finding that they feel really great with their hair up,” Goldmark said of the popularity of hair accessories. “When we were all stuck in quarantine we were on these Zoom calls and social distancing and I think at that time girls just really gravitated toward easy and cute ways to put up their hair. I feel like Emi Jay did really revolutionize a way of making hair clips very high quality and very unique.”

In addition to the new hair accessories collection, Emi Jay has two new partnerships coming up in June. The brand is teaming with Sephora for a limited-edition clip that will be an in-store exclusive, and with influencer and fashion designer Matilda Djerf for a pop-up shop in Los Angeles, where the brand will sell a limited-edition collection of hair accessories and apparel, as well as some of its best sellers.

Goldmark also said she plans to grow the brand into hair care and is looking to create one-off hair care solutions.

Overall, she doesn’t see hair accessories as a trend that will fade, rather, one that will see more experimentation among customers.

“Hair accessory trends are here to stay,” Goldmark said. “People are getting more daring because it’s not like you’re putting on an entire outfit that’s super funky and risk-taking. It’s something that goes into your hair and keeps your hair out of your face.”

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