Eleni & Chris

Eleni & Chris is a Norwegian hair and skincare brand founded in 2015 by the mother-and-daughter team of Inger Ellen and Christinah Nicolaisen, whose nicknames "Eleni" and "Chris" give the company its name [1]. Built around cloudberry oil — an Arctic berry the founders frame as a Scandinavian signature ingredient — the brand markets professional-grade haircare developed in collaboration with hairdressers. Although it trades through a Swedish storefront and styles itself "Scandinavia's beauty brand," its identity is Norwegian: the founders are from North Norway, and Christinah Nicolaisen has described the products as built on "hand-picked Norwegian ingredients" [2].

The company sits within a larger Norwegian hair business. Inger Ellen Nicolaisen also founded the salon chain Nikita Hair in 1984 and owns its parent, Raise Gruppen Holding AS, under which Eleni & Chris operates [3].

According to the company, the brand grew out of a search for natural ingredients native to the founders' Scandinavian home. Inger Ellen Nicolaisen recalled that her grandfather had referred to the cloudberry — a berry that grows wild in Arctic regions — as "Scandinavian gold," and the pair settled on it as the basis for a product line [5]. After commissioning laboratory analysis, including work by a London ingredient lab that examined the berry's antioxidant properties, they spent roughly two years developing a haircare range before launch [6]. Eleni & Chris describes cloudberry as containing vitamins A, B, C, D and E along with Omega-3 and Omega-6, and states that a single berry holds four times as much vitamin C as an orange.

The founders are described as a mother-and-daughter duo from North Norway: Inger Ellen ("Eleni") Nicolaisen and her daughter Christinah ("Chris") Nicolaisen.

Eleni & Chris is owned by Raise Gruppen Holding AS, the Norwegian holding company founded by Inger Ellen Nicolaisen. The same group owns Nikita Hair, the salon chain she established in 1984 in Bodø, which Norwegian sources describe as one of Europe's larger hairdressing businesses [4]. That relationship also shapes distribution: from 2019 the brand was sold through Nikita Hair franchise salons, alongside its own direct-to-consumer stores and select international retailers [7].

The brand positions itself as professional-grade Scandinavian haircare, summarising its priorities as "quality, usability and good results" and emphasising formulas developed together with hairdressers. Cloudberry is central to this story; the company calls it "Scandinavia's best kept secret" and a "superberry," and traces a heritage for the ingredient back to historic Nordic use [5]. The brand uses the tagline "Skandinaviens skönhetsmärke" — Scandinavia's beauty brand.

The core of the range is a set of haircare series, each carrying a "-Min" suffix and targeting a specific need: SensiMin for sensitive scalps, KeraMin for damaged hair, ChroMin for coloured hair, CurliMin for curls, VoluMin for fine hair, ScandiMin for blonde tones, UltraMin for smoothing, DermaMin for dandruff and PuriMin as a detox line. On the styling side, the company has highlighted products including Fiber Foam, Texture Spray and Heat & Shine Spray; its own blog has described Fiber Foam as a product "taking social media by storm" [8]. In 2025 the brand extended beyond hair into skincare with cloudberry-infused products.

On ethics and sustainability, Eleni & Chris states that it is an approved partner in PETA's Beauty Without Bunnies cruelty-free programme [9]. The company describes most of its products as vegan, noting that some contain hydrolysed keratin from sheep's wool or beeswax and are therefore classified as vegetarian. It also reports using FSC-certified cardboard, hair-mask tubes made from 70% post-consumer recycled plastic, and membership of the recycling schemes Grønt Punkt Norge and Näringslivets Producentansvar.

The founder's philanthropy is connected to the wider business rather than the brand itself. Inger Ellen Nicolaisen co-founded a children's charity, A Hand to Children, which supports disadvantaged children in several countries. The brand's dedicated blog post dates the charity's founding to 1994 and names Inger Ellen and her daughter Linda as co-founders [10]; the company's sustainability page instead gives 2000 [9]. Christinah, the brand's co-founder, is not associated with the charity's founding.

Eleni & Chris drew early international attention as a Scandinavian indie label. In February 2018 the US publication Fashionista profiled it as "a (very) Scandinavian beauty brand to watch," and the brand took part in Indie Beauty Expo events in Los Angeles and London that year, where one of its styling products won a "Best in Show" award [6]. It has since been cited in outlets including Vogue Scandinavia, ELLE Norway and Scandinavian MIND, the last of which featured the brand among Nordic industry profiles for 2023.

The company has also built a presence in fashion-show styling. It served as the official hair partner of Oslo Runway across consecutive seasons from 2022, providing backstage hair teams for the Norwegian event [11].

Eleni & Chris is active. It trades through direct-to-consumer storefronts on Swedish, Norwegian and international domains and continues to launch products and editorial content. Its most recent reported milestone is its role as official hair-styling partner of Stockholm Fashion Week 2026, a step that extends its earlier fashion-week work in Norway into Sweden [12].