Making professional hair color feel possible at home.
Sally Beauty’s Ion at Home brand had deep expertise in salon-quality hair color. Madplum helped translate that authority into an at-home brand experience designed to give customers more confidence, better guidance, and easier ways to choose, use, and purchase.
Professional hair color offered choice and performance. For at-home customers, that same complexity was a barrier.
Ion needed to move beyond a professional product story and create a more useful relationship with people coloring their own hair. The opportunity was to make expertise feel accessible: helping customers understand their options, choose products with confidence, learn the process, and stay connected to trends and inspiration without losing the credibility behind the brand they trusted.
Madplum built a digital ecosystem that turned professional expertise into guidance customers could actually use.
Madplum developed the Ion at Home brand, from strategic positioning to full launch. We created a responsive digital experience combining content, commerce, digital tools, and social participation. At the center was the Ion Color Coder, a guided recommendation tool that acted like a virtual stylist, asking customers questions and helping direct them toward the right products. The broader experience included formulation guidance, step-by-step application tutorials, trend content, promotional offers, direct purchase pathways, and social storytelling through #ionathome. Together, the pieces were designed to make the journey from inspiration to selection to application feel more connected and less intimidating.
The experience helped Ion build a larger digital audience, stronger participation, and new pathways from interest to action.
Ion at Home reported substantial growth in site traffic, page views, social reach, and engagement. 300,000 completions of the custom web app resulted in over 96,000 purchases. The Color Coder became a major point of interaction, while content, coupons, commerce links, email signups, and social participation created multiple ways for customers to move from learning and inspiration toward purchase and continued engagement with the brand.
“Madplum has been instrumental in strengthening the Ion Color Brilliance brand. They were the first agency I worked with that took a vested interest in truly understanding the brand and the many different customers within our audience. I only wish our partnership had started years earlier.”
