How to Choose a Hero Product: Start With the Product That Gives Your Brand a Reason to Matter

A great product line doesn’t necessarily start with a lot of products. It starts with the right product.

For beauty entrepreneurs, the temptation to launch a complete collection can be strong. Shampoo, conditioner, treatment, moisturizer, styling cream, gel, oil—the list can grow quickly.

But during a recent ANHC PRO Makers Club LIVE conversation on choosing a hero product, four beauty industry experts made a compelling case for a more focused approach: identify the product—or small system—that best represents what your brand does differently, then build from there.

The discussion brought together Margaret Haven, Robin D. Groover, Akuba Torvikey, and Dior Metcalf, who approached the question from product development, education, research, business growth, and investment perspectives. While their perspectives differed, a common theme emerged:

Your hero product should earn the right to receive more of your brand’s attention, resources, and marketing support.

First, What Is a Hero Product?

A hero product is more than your favorite product or even necessarily your current bestseller.

It is the product that can become closely associated with your brand—the product that gives customers a clear reason to choose you, creates a strong story for your marketing, and has the potential to drive customers toward the rest of your collection.

And a hero does not always have to be a single SKU. In some cases, two or three products that work together as a system can serve as the hero.

Margaret Haven offered one of the simplest tests:

“It should stand alone.”

That means the product needs a clear purpose and enough value to make sense without requiring customers to purchase a long list of additional products just to experience the benefit.

For an emerging brand, that focus also has a financial advantage. Instead of dividing limited resources among 10 or 15 products, the business can concentrate development, inventory, education and marketing around the product with the greatest potential.

1. Start With the Problem, Not the Product

Before deciding which product should be your hero, ask a more fundamental question:

Why does this product need to exist?

Akuba Torvikey, who brought a product-development perspective to the conversation, challenged founders to begin there.

“If you're not solving a problem, you probably shouldn't be launching a product.”

But in beauty, a “problem” doesn't have to mean a traditional pain point.

Beauty products can solve physical problems—dryness, breakage, tangling or difficulty achieving a desired style. But they can also address vanity, emotional, sensory or even spiritual needs. A customer may want to feel more attractive, confident, polished, relaxed, expressive or connected to a ritual of self-care. Sometimes the “problem” is simply the gap between how someone feels now and how they want to look, feel or experience themselves.

The discussion around body butter illustrated this well. Body butter is hardly a new product category, but fragrance, sensory experience and the way a product makes someone feel can create a compelling reason to buy. A hero product doesn't have to invent a new problem. It needs to offer something customers want enough to choose, purchase and come back for.

So ask: What need, desire or experience does your product address? Who wants that outcome? What alternatives do they already have? And is your solution compelling enough for them to choose yours?

For a salon professional developing a product primarily for existing clients, the opportunity may be relatively narrow—and that can be perfectly appropriate. For a founder hoping to build a national beauty brand, however, the potential market needs to be significantly larger.

The right hero product depends on the customer need or desire you are addressing—and the business you are actually trying to build.

2. Look for Your Competitive Advantage

Once you've identified the problem, ask what makes your solution meaningfully different.

From an investment perspective, Dior Metcalf described this as looking for a competitive moat—something that gives the product a defensible position in the marketplace.

“What products give you a good competitive position in the marketplace? Meaning, what makes you different from the other products?”

That distinction matters because your hero product will receive a disproportionate amount of your attention and resources.

A product that customers can easily replace with dozens of comparable options may be more difficult to build a brand around. A distinctive formula, experience, application, result, format or positioning can give you more to own.

This doesn't mean your idea must be something the world has never seen before. It means customers need a compelling reason to choose your version.

3. Performance Has to Come First

A great story can get someone to try a product.

Performance helps get them to buy it again.

Robin D. Groover pointed to It's a 10 Miracle Leave-In as an example of a hero product built around clear performance. Rather than trying to make the brand itself the initial attraction, the product offered multiple recognizable benefits in one leave-in conditioner.

Her takeaway was simple:

“It's not about the brand first, it's about performance first.”

For founders, that means asking hard questions about the actual customer experience.

Does the product consistently deliver? Are the results noticeable? Will customers talk about those results? Does the product solve the problem well enough to generate repeat purchases?

Your branding can amplify a strong product. It cannot permanently compensate for a weak one.

4. Make Sure the Numbers Work

Being special isn't enough.

Your hero product also needs to make financial sense.

Dior encouraged founders to consider unit economics: what it costs to manufacture, package and sell each product compared with what the market will reasonably pay for it.

“Is it gonna make good financial sense to produce that product?”

Consider manufacturing complexity, ingredient sourcing, packaging, lead times, margins and the amount of inventory you will need to carry.

This is particularly important for small brands.

Launching more products means more ingredients, more packaging, more inventory and more money tied up before you know what customers actually want.

As Dior explained during the discussion, “scaling comes through simplicity.”

Instead of using your available capital to support a sprawling collection, consider what could happen if those resources were concentrated behind the product with the strongest opportunity.

5. Don't Confuse a Lower Unit Cost With Saving Money

One of the most useful moments of the conversation came when an attendee asked about purchasing larger quantities of packaging to reduce the cost per unit.

Margaret Haven challenged the assumption that buying more automatically means saving more.

If buying 2,000 containers gives you a lower unit price but leaves hundreds of dollars sitting on a shelf, did you really save money?

Inventory is cash.

That matters even more when you are still learning what customers want. You may discover that the package needs to change, the product size is wrong or customers use the product at a different rate than expected.

Robin recommended allowing demand to guide those early investments:

“Let the demand tell you how much to invest and where to invest it.”

Smaller production runs may cost more per unit initially, but they can give an emerging brand something equally valuable: room to learn without locking up its cash.

6. Your Hero Product Needs a Story You Can Keep Telling

Performance and profitability are critical, but Akuba added another important filter: narrative.

“What story can you tell with these products or this product? What is the narrative? Is it sticky? Is it authentic to the brand? Is it authentic to the founder?”

That story becomes especially important for small businesses without enormous advertising budgets.

Your hero product gives you something specific to talk about repeatedly—why you created it, what problem it solves, what makes it different, who it helps and what results customers are experiencing.

And that narrative needs room to grow.

Akuba cautioned against expanding a portfolio so quickly that a brand “SKU[s] yourself out.” When everything launches at once, you have fewer opportunities to introduce meaningful innovation later—and your marketing dollars and customer attention are spread across too many messages.

A strong hero product allows you to go deeper before you go wider.

7. Look for a Gateway Product

For an established brand, choosing a hero product may require looking backward rather than developing something new.

One of the most valuable questions from the discussion was:

What product brings people into your brand?

Akuba shared an example from her work with a popular commercial brand, where the leave-in conditioner emerged as a standout after launch. The company could look at sales, repeat purchases and the products that served as gateways into additional purchases.

That creates an important distinction.

Your bestselling product and your best gateway product may not always be the same.

Ask:

• What do first-time customers purchase?

• What do they purchase next?

• Which products have the strongest repeat purchase behavior?

• Which product encourages customers to explore the rest of the line?

• Which product attracts customers beyond your existing core audience?

If you already have a product line, your sales history may be telling you what your hero is.

8. Reevaluate Your Existing Product Line

Founders can become emotionally attached to products because they remember the work, money and creativity that went into developing them.

Your customers don't have that history.

They simply know what they want to buy.

Robin recommended regularly reassessing the portfolio to identify top sellers, bottom sellers and products that may be unnecessarily repetitive.

Akuba gave the corporate term for the process: SKU rationalization.

The purpose isn't simply to eliminate products. It is to understand where your resources are producing the strongest return.

If you have 18 products but four generate most of your demand, those four deserve closer examination. If one of those products attracts new customers, produces repeat purchases, has strong margins and opens the door to the rest of the collection, you may have found your hero.

9. Choose for Where You're Going, Not Just Where You Are

Sometimes several products perform well.

That's a good problem—but it still leaves a strategic decision.

Dior suggested looking beyond today's sales and considering the future vision for the company:

“Which product can take you to the next level?”

Perhaps one product resonates strongly with your existing customers while another can appeal to a much broader audience.

Perhaps one works well in your salon but another has stronger e-commerce potential.

Perhaps one is a dependable seller while another is truly difficult for competitors to duplicate.

Your current bestseller tells you something about where you've been. Your hero product should also make sense for where you want the brand to go.

10. Don't Ignore the Founder

After discussing research, margins, market size, performance and growth potential, Akuba added one more criterion that numbers alone can't measure:

Do you believe in it?

“Make sure the product strongly checks enough boxes, and that you're also passionate about it, because the passion's gonna come through as you're talking about it.”

For an emerging entrepreneur, that matters.

You may be the salesperson, educator, marketer and spokesperson for this product. You'll explain it on social media. You'll demonstrate it. You'll pitch it to buyers. You'll answer customer questions. You'll keep talking about it long after the excitement of launch day has passed.

Choose something strong enough financially to build a business around—and meaningful enough personally that you will still want to talk about it when building the business gets difficult.

Your Hero Product Checklist

Before declaring a product your hero, ask:

Problem: What meaningful problem does it solve?

Demand: Do you have evidence that enough customers want the solution?

Performance: Does it deliver results people will notice and purchase again?

Differentiation: Why should someone choose it instead of the alternatives?

Profitability: Can you produce and sell it with healthy unit economics?

Simplicity: Can you manufacture, source and scale it without unnecessary complexity?

Brand Fit: Does it authentically represent what your brand stands for?

Story: Can you build a compelling, repeatable narrative around it?

Gateway Potential: Can it introduce customers to the rest of your brand?

Growth: Does it have room to reach a larger market or evolve over time?

Passion: Do you believe in it enough to keep selling, teaching and talking about it?

Your hero doesn't necessarily need a perfect score in every category. But as Akuba emphasized, it should strongly check enough boxes to justify putting your resources behind it.

One Hero Doesn't Mean One Product Forever

Choosing a hero product is not about limiting your vision.

It's about giving that vision a strong place to start.

A successful hero can eventually support complementary products, variations, systems, limited editions and entirely new categories. But instead of asking customers to understand everything your brand can possibly do at once, you're giving them one clear reason to pay attention.

Start with the problem. Prove the performance. Follow the data. Know your numbers. Build the story. Then give your strongest product the resources it needs to become the hero.

Continue the Conversation With ANHC PRO

This conversation was part of ANHC PRO Makers Club LIVE, where beauty makers, product developers, entrepreneurs and industry experts come together to discuss the real decisions behind building successful beauty brands.

And choosing the hero is only the beginning.

In Part 2 of our Hero Products conversation, we'll explore how to use your hero product to build your brand, expand its reach, and create the recognition that helps your brand grow.