Texture, opulence, and everything gold
Yes, the holiday season is one for twinkling lights, warm beverages, and heartfelt gatherings with family and friends. But what do we most look forward to every year at Cole’s? Holiday gift sets. Particularly Oribe’s holiday gift sets, which feature stunning limited edition packaging designed each year by a different artist of a different medium.
“The holiday sets are a wonderful part of the Oribe culture, and everyone gets involved,” Daniel Kaner, president of Oribe and a longtime friend of Cole’s Salon, shared with us. Cole’s and Oribe have been working together for decades, a relationship built on a mutual dedication to artistry and education. One of our own stylists, Liz, is currently part of Oribe’s prestigious Journey to Mastery program. “Everyone has a stake in them: the storytellers, the fragrance people, the engineers … it mixes things up instead of constantly doing the same packaging.”
Jennifer Lacy Smith, vice president of product creation at Oribe, agreed. “It brings together all of our teams to work collaboratively but in a way that’s very joyful. They’re learning something that’s outside of their sphere of expertise. People clamor to do it every year. It has found its way into our leadership training and how we work with our teams and get them to interact in a really constructive and collaborative way.”
Past holiday set collections have highlighted the work of hand-drawn, watercolor, pottery, digital, and textile artists. For this year’s collection (which is quickly becoming our new all-time favorite), the team partnered with Finnish multidisciplinary artist Kustaa Saksi, whose work is deeply inspired by his Nordic background. The Oribe team discovered his art through a series of window dressings Saksi previously executed for luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman.
“Our sets are truly a collaboration with the artists,” Smith said. “We’ll seek out an artist who is interesting in terms of their dedication to their craft, the technique, the material, and the storytelling they do. Not only have they mastered what they do in terms of artwork, they have a very signature aesthetic. We share with them who Oribe Canales, our founder, was as a man. We talk about hairdressing. And then we come to an agreement on how we’re going to approach the designs.”
The prevailing themes of this year’s holiday sets are gold, texture, and opulence — a combination that elevates the brand’s packaging from a simple, functional box into an artistic canvas.
“Gold was a really big theme in Oribe Canales’ life,” Smith said of the late founder, a world-renowned celebrity hair stylist who worked with clients like Jennifer Lopez and Sarah Jessica Parker before partnering with Kaner in 2008 to create a namesake line of haircare products. “If we were doing packaging design in the old days, we’d say, ‘Okay Oribe, what should the packaging look like?’ And he’d always say, ‘Gold. Everything should be dripping in gold!’ So Saksi used golden threads throughout his designs.”
The result: packaging adorned in layered gold foils and intricate embossing, with artwork inspired by the Norse goddess Sif’s golden flowing hair. Saksi’s artwork also took inspiration from the black and cream ombre design of Oribe’s Gold Lust collection, one of the company’s bestsellers, as well as the bright blue of Oribe’s Supershine collection.
To further celebrate the beauty of Saksi’s work, Oribe also commissioned the artist to bring his designs to life in the form of a one-of-a-kind tapestry. It’s more than 10 feet long and took the artist six months to create.
“We’ve never done anything as abstract as this,” Smith told us. “What’s really interesting is that, with these sets, there’s this exchange between the artist’s archives and Oribe’s archives. And a lot of times there’s something that an artist will pick up on that is really intriguing to them about Oribe Canales. A past artist was inspired by his tattoos. For Kustaa, the weaving he does in his tapestries, we gravitated to it because it felt a lot like what a stylist does behind the chair with someone’s hair.”
“Oribe saw hairdressing as a fine form of artistry,” Kaner added. “He didn’t see it any other way. And hairdressers — people who work at Cole’s, people who work in some of the salons that we work with — are designers and artists.”
When we asked Kaner and Smith which of the four holiday sets they were most eager to get out into the world, the two were in agreement.
“It’s the liters,” Kaner said, referring both to the Gold Lust Liter Set and Oribe’s liter design more generally. “In the old days, in perfumeries, they used to have this thing called a factice, which was a big, oversized bottle of perfume — a giant version of whatever fine perfume was being sold. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could take our small bottle and make it a large bottle?’ It would look like a factice, totally different from all of our competitors’ stuff.”
“The liter size was one of the first assignments Daniel gave me when I joined the company,” Smith added. “It was so fun to make them, and such a challenge with the manufacturers. It had to be perfection. And when we decided we wanted to do a liter set, I was like, ‘You can’t get two bottles of liters and put them in a shopping bag and send somebody out. It has to be more fabulous than that.’ We built this book-like style packaging with a handle, so it doesn’t need a shopping bag. You just walk out of the salon with that. It’s so glamorous. And what a better calling card for the brand to see someone carrying that? It’s just really extraordinary and hefty, and it’s the greatest gift to give.”
Kaner has shared countless times with us the importance of being a life-long learner — something that has been part of the development and execution of the Oribe holiday collaborations over the last eight years. By engaging artists from different disciplines, Oribe has created an annual moment for the haircare community to learn and appreciate the nuances of artistry, craftsmanship, materials, technique, and culture in an engaging and joyful way.
Oribe’s 2025 holiday sets are available now, both online and at all Cole’s Salon locations. In addition to the Gold Lust Liter Set and Gold Lust Collection Set, we also carry the Hair Alchemy Heatless Styling Set and Côte d’Azur Hand Wash and Crème Set.
“Cole’s guests have always supported Oribe — they’re one of our original visionary partnerships,” Kaner shared. “It makes sense. I’m from Minnesota, and they’re from Minnesota too. But they also really saw what Oribe could be in the earliest days. Most people don’t have that level of vision. I think it really speaks to their guests. We really thank the Cole’s guests for making Oribe so famous in Minnesota. We couldn’t have done it without them.”
