🧼 KATE ASSARAF // DIP SUSTAINABLE HAIR CARE FOUNDER & CEO

0:00I'm Sam Rose, and you're tuning in to Commerce is Chaos, the podcast for consumer brand founders who know that building a business is messier than the highlight reel shows. Your supplier just missed their deadline, your top product is out of stock, and your competitors somehow launched the same thing at half the price. Sound familiar? Every week, we dive into the real problems that keep founders up at night, from inventory disasters to supply chain nightmares, because surviving the chaos is what separates brands that fail from brands that scale. Kate Osaroff bootstrapped DIP hair care into a seven-figure plastic-free brand sold exclusively through independent zero-waste stores, surf shops, and eco salons with no outside investors and no paid ads.

0:40She's also turned down Amazon more than 100 times and counting. Okay, let's drop into the beginning of it all. Tell me how and why. I can think of how and why, but I want to hear them in your words. Tell me all about DIP and just the beginning and where you're at.

0:58Kate Assaraf:Sure. So for me, I've been trying to reduce my plastic since I first found out that it was, one, not recycled, and two, wreaking havoc on endocrine systems and disrupting aquatic life and animal life. It was just everything at once kind of hit me with plastic in 2014. And so I spent, you know, from 2014 until 2021, when we launched, I was looking for the perfect solution for my hair. and I could make all the other swaps, the kitchen, the bathroom. Like I was like an avid refiller, but it really got under my skin that hair care, because I've been in the beauty industry for 20 years, that the hair care that was made for, that was plastic free, seemed to pay attention to only this one type of avatar of a customer, like the very crunchy granola, all natural consumer.

1:50Kate Assaraf:And that is not what I am. I am a very big, you know, champion of chemistry and hair science and all of the things that make your hair look wonderful and all of the improvements we've made since shampoo was first invented. So my beef is with the plastic. It's not with the formulas and it's not with the chemistry and it's not the hair science. So I wanted something that just performed like an orbeic hair stas, you know, a purology. But I just wanted to get rid of the plastic. And I thought if I'm getting rid of the plastic, I might as well make it last so long that it becomes something someone buys regardless of whether it's plastic free or not, because it saves them a lot of money.

2:32Kate Assaraf:Because I don't know how often you were buying. I don't know if you're a hair care junkie, but I was buying Oribe Goldless Conditioner. It's like a small tube of it, not recyclable every three to five weeks. And so that is a lot of money just in conditioners. So my dip bar lasts a year on my hair and saves me over$500. Which is stunning, by the way. Thank you. It's a little hot. It's like a little hot here. So I feel like I look like it's hot here. But yeah, it's... You got the glow. Yeah, the glow with the lights, the anti-aging lights on my face. But yeah, I wanted it to be like... I know sustainability isn't the draw for most people when they buy luxury hair care.

3:19Kate Assaraf:It's the performance. So I wanted to make sure that this saved someone money and performed the same way. And such an interesting distinction that you're making between, you know, who you're selling to and then like what's inside the box for them. Because so often those two things kind of get conflated together. And then if you want to be sustainable, you sort of have, you have, there's a lot of stereotypes that follow, you know, product and positioning. And some of those stereotypes, particularly in product positioning, are really helpful, right? Like they help us understand what's for us intuitively from the way that it looks and presents.

3:59And you're right, like having that influence what's inside the package as well isn't necessarily always the right outcome for the way that you want the product to be in the world.

4:10Kate Assaraf:And I've been so because I've been in beauty so long, you kind of see how how there becomes like a market leader and then a bunch of followers in every category. So like there was a long a long time where every time I was in a someone would call me into a marketing meeting, the person would be like, I want to be the glossier of this category. I want to be the glossier of this category. I want to be the glossier of this. And it's like not just if you were I just want to be glossier. Like that was the other one, too. Is that so much? Same colors, same components, same story, same everything. We similar font.

4:45Kate Assaraf:Like I was in many meetings where that was kind of how conversations went. And you can see how in sustainability, the same avatar of a marketer is in every stupid meeting, right? Like they're like, I want to be the next high bar. I want to be the next high bar. I want to be the next high bar. It's just, it's a little tragic that with these beautiful brains we've been handed as a human species, people go in and just want to be like everyone else. I find it almost comical. But I've seen it so many times. And so when I looked at all of the bar hair care that existed before dip, and still, I don't know anyone else that has been able to replicate our story, but everyone is doing it really the same way for the same person.

5:31Kate Assaraf:And I don't know any people like that really in real life that exist. I don't know the person that is so crunchy that they want to look eco-friendly, not just be eco-friendly. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. I feel like I know some of those people. Well, you're in the Bay Area, right? No, now I'm in SoCal, but there's where they really, they're at the beach. Yes. But yeah, I mean, honestly, in New Jersey, I mean, like, first of all, I'm Persian and I'm also from New Jersey. These two these two cultures are very serious about hair. So it's, I want the high standards hair care, which I, but you know, just, I have two children.

6:11Kate Assaraf:I want, I want the world like from here on out to be better and to have less plastic. And I also know that making bar hair care exactly in the same path as my competitors means you're just taking people, you're just swapping bar hair care people to and fro. My goal is to take people that would never ever in their own kind of path touch bar hair care and switch over. So if I take someone away from one of those fast to consume, high end bottled, pricey bottled brands, that is where I'm making the impact. Like I don't want to take someone away from an eco brand already. They're doing it right. Like it's whether you want to make a difference or you don't.

6:55Kate Assaraf:And I don't want to steal from people, from brands that are already have a customer base that works for them. Oh, I love that. I love that perspective. And that like, if you're already doing the work and the product is working for you, great. But if what you're really addressing is like an unchampioned customer, someone who wants this luxurious experience, but in a more eco-friendly package. Because marketers take like a bird's eye view or data points of who the customer is, right? They're like, oh, it's this person that only shops at farmer's markets and only refills and only does it. And you're like, yeah, okay.

7:31Kate Assaraf:But then there's this whole other population that would be very happy to switch to bars if they knew it left their hair beautiful and also saved them money. Like the plastic free part is like the tertiary reason, but like, and that makes them happy. That's like the icing for them. And so, you know it's it wasn't like I think you have to really live the lifestyle to appreciate um because I do refill I do I am I am with all kind of to to marketer looking at me they'd be like oh this person is also crunchy and I am except for my hair back off yeah I because you know you often say like character is like what you do when no one's looking like I was I was often brushing your hair yeah i when when no one's looking i was using bottled hair care because it's like the thing that i really loved in the and the you know the slip of the the slip of a luxury conditioner is like you know i don't know some people like pedicures and so i really love the slip of a luxury conditioner like it makes my whole day right and so that's you know i wanted to keep that for someone else i know i'm not alone in that and um and that was how dip came about it came out out of pure frustration and it came out of the pure love for really the women that I know that also think like me.

8:54Yeah. And I have to imagine, you know, you're describing this sort of luxe experience that we've all been anchored to with the feeling of the conditioner and then also just these like these motions, almost these muscle memories for like how we're going to dispense it and how we're going to apply it and all that. Has there been an education component of this that you know you've really kind of born in terms of communicating how luxurious the bar is inside the box and if so how help the rest of us tell a story in a similar way

9:27Kate Assaraf:so i so i've been in marketing for for so long i wanted to see if i could kind of turn marketing on its head and okay and see if i could create a word of mouth kind of analog brand that was that I was with with dip. It was like this other piece that I was like, well, how old school can I make it? You know how like I just wanted to be amazing hair care that works like I that's that was my my number one thing. And then I was like, how cool would it be if we, you know, said no to influencers? We said no to, you know, giving meta more money, like just no ads, no influencers, no bombarding people with a ton of emails.

10:04Kate Assaraf:Like, do you think that people would be so excited about it that they would tell others organically and like they did and so that has been we've we've never had to do any of that kind of advertising or anything or like fake ugc and and it people are so surprised they come to dip with their expectations so low and then they're so surprised that like i'll see one person has bought it for themselves i'll then see that person sometimes buy like three or four more sets and ship them to other people. And so that has happened so many times. And then, you know, because I'm in like this refill community, I've been refilling since I first discovered that was a kind of way to shop.

10:46Kate Assaraf:Dip is, I do a lot to get dip into refill stores and also to champion them back. Because for me, it's bigger than shampoo and conditioner. I want people to buy dip from their local store. so that by accident, like, you don't have to finger waggle someone into buying dip, right? Like, they go there and then they see, like, oh, there's a replacement. Like, I can get stasher bags instead of Ziploc. I can get, like, I can refill my spices or my laundry detergent. So I built this universe that existed in real life that was offline. Oh, man, that is so fascinating and so disruptive, honestly, like, and brave.

11:26Like, it's hard, right? We all want to be Glossier. Like, it's easy. Pattern match that. it's the suspect it's you know success speaks for itself um it's only brave now because it worked

11:35Kate Assaraf:if it if it if it didn't work i'd be called stupid it's like it's only in hindsight that it's that it's considered brave are there other choices that you made where you just like very narrowly sidestepped feeling stupid but they worked yeah so we don't we don't do not put our products on Amazon. And what you see is like all of our competitors are like vultures on our keywords on Amazon. And that's fine. They can like duke it out and pay each other to try and take our customers away. But the joke is, is that our customers are not, it's not that they don't shop on Amazon, but they don't want to.

12:13Kate Assaraf:Do you know what I mean? They want to support locally. They want, it's worth the extra step to that one, the one or two friction points we put in place that marketers say you should get rid of, we put them back in. So like go to store or buy from our actual website. And those are things that are really important to the success of DIP. Like we've kept our customers close and we love them. And we also treat them with like a lot of respect. They're not just another cog in the wheel of the Amazon data machine. I think the other thing that brings up for me is this idea of like really foundational, durable patient marketing where you are like hitting customers in their relationships and like in their heartstrings and not going not taking the easy path but for the purpose of building something that is really like generational or long-lasting or yeah well yeah well i i don't know why more founders don't say this i literally be nothing without the customers so you have to treat them with white glove service, you know?

13:22Kate Assaraf:Like, I don't understand not rolling the red carpet out for your customers. There's been like a kind of a weird shift away from treating your customers well. You've probably noticed it as a consumer. Like, I've noticed it as a consumer. There's so many companies that, like, they take your money and they never make anything right. And I find that foundationally scary and sad. And I studied economics and math. So I have always known about the dismal science and how commerce is made to protect the company and it's very dehumanizing. However, I don't really necessarily think that that has to be that way.

14:05Kate Assaraf:Just because it's become conventional knowledge that companies will take squeeze every penny out of a consumer. You don't have to do it that way. And we've proven that you don't have to do it that way. We've proven that the best way to make an impact is to just treat your customers well. and it's not like it's impossible for someone else to mimic. In fact, I invite every entrepreneur to treat their customers better. It would actually be way, way easier to be a consumer in this world. Oh, man. I hope people take you up on that invitation. Please do. It's so expensive, I think, to treat customers poorly.

14:43Kate Assaraf:Like, I don't. Yes, that is that right there. because as so many of us know, the cost of acquiring a new customer is like five to ten times the cost of maintaining an existing customer. And I think where it gets really tricky and honestly emotional is that some things about our current economy and the speed with which we can consume mean that customers aren't treating us that nicely or us, you know, our customer support employees. And it was always one of those things where I was like, you know, you really just, you have to not dehumanize, but suspend, suspend your disbelief almost like transport yourself into, I have all sorts of like customer service names that I would like, I would become a different person in a conversation just so that I didn't feel like Sam was getting yelled at because Sam got yelled at so many times that day and she couldn't take it anymore.

15:42And, and so that doesn't mean dehumanizing it, but it does mean like a little bit of a dissociation from like the, you know, the, the attack that you feel when a customer is like abusing it.

15:55Kate Assaraf:Yeah. Well, customers, they go to extremes first because of other businesses treating them poorly. Right. So that it's like, I already know when someone says to me, they're like, I tried dip once and all my hair fell out and I have an itchy rationale. So it does not, First of all, it's not really scientifically possible because it's a rinse-off product that's on your head for usually 10 seconds and then it goes away. It just doesn't work that way. And your skin is like a very good barrier. And it's so gentle. But I know that that person is saying that to us because they think they have to go to extremes for us to treat them well.

16:31Kate Assaraf:And we'll treat them well whether you just tell us the truth. If you're like, I don't really like it, we'll always treat you well. and so you see that a lot that that kind of consumer behavior is learned it's a byproduct of other companies being crappy and once you do that once you kind of put that together that takes the sting out it's not personal it's just they don't know how else to get things to be made right it's almost like it would be a rising tide we need some sort of brand pledge for customers And then like a support group. Consumer behavior is weird, right? Like I actually, I'll tell a story.

17:10Kate Assaraf:This is like a legendary customer that was so horrible. He was so horrible. So the legend goes, he buys a whole bunch, he buys a whole fleet of stuff from us. And he writes to us the day after he gets it and is like, I love your product so much. I want to be an ambassador for you. and I said, and I say this to everyone who wants to be an ambassador of dip, I was like, hey, that's amazing. I'm so excited. You have to use the products a full way through because I can't have you be an ambassador on the first wash. It's not the same as someone who knows the struggle of having the few pieces left of your bar and having to marry it on another bar.

17:53Kate Assaraf:I want the ambassador program is very, we do have gates up and one of them is just, you have to be a customer and you have to use the product through one cycle. Otherwise, it's kind of like everyone loves a new bar. And I want so anyway, so that's I was kind of like, said something very similar in that a little bit more professionally. Well, he got very upset that I wouldn't let him in the ambassador program right away. He's like, you don't know who I am. And you don't know, like, and I was like, you're right. But there's this one requirement I have is that I don't know who you are. Yeah. I was like, you have to use it longer than one day.

18:31Kate Assaraf:And so what he did then out of spite was he wanted to return things one by one. So I had to pay shipping. And there's a 30-day return policy. One by one, he returned everything out of spite. And he returned it disgusting, covered in hair. And like one by one. So this purchase he made cost me, you know, 10 times the amount after shipping it one by one back to me. And he was getting nastier and nastier. He called me a loser. He called my staff members losers. He was really nasty to my right hand, Joanne. And it was just a disaster. Okay. We're like, okay, great. Here's all your money back, but you can't keep the products.

19:13Kate Assaraf:You have to send them back. So he sent them back in the grossest way ever. this is a year ago i remember because it was around my birthday last year so my birthday this year oh what happened we like blocked him you can't shop from us anymore because he was very very um abusive in his emails like and so we're like hey we're we'll do whatever we want to make you happy but this relationship's like over like thank you like go find another shampoo we don't care and so this year on my birthday i see his name come in under a different email address and he bought a whole bunch of stuff again so i was excited because i was just like cancel so i canceled his order because he's not allowed to interact with me or my staff anymore that's how bad he was and then he started getting like crazy he was like asking my staff why was my order canceled all this stuff and we were like you're just not allowed we're i'm sorry like you can shop in store that was what we said and um but it's these kind of things when when people are like really bad customers the companies remember like we remember who you are like there's that is a he was the worst customer we've ever had it was funny to have him back but it was also like it's i think it's funny too it's the one time we've really ever done that to someone yeah it did feel good it did feel good i mean so you know the the tough thing is the the the crossroads i I always found myself at was that on the one hand, I really wanted to honor my obligation and sort of commitment to the customer.

20:49Yeah. And then I would have to balance that with my commitment to my employees. And I'm like, my employees can first, right? Like I have two, literally two people that somebody's asking me to choose between right now. And like, if I have to choose a person, like I I got to protect my employee. I never had the right answer for that. It was always like such a sucker punch.

21:13Kate Assaraf:No, my employees are so incredible. Some of them have been with me since the very beginning. As soon as I could hire them, they're here and they've been here. And I know that their character is great. I know, but you know, you have a customer like that. I already know that person's character is questionable. and so I'm not going to bend over backwards to make a like for the whole team make the whole team miserable for a customer who is like so uncool like tragically uncool so used to like I hope that is the yeah that should be the response I'm we're sorry you are tragically uncool and we we don't want you as a customer but like you have to you have to be really bad for us to us.

21:57Kate Assaraf:Yeah, we'll take a lot. We will take a lot. But you gotta be a good human being, you know? Yeah. And what I think is so funny is that he likes the product so much. He wanted to be an ambassador, but he felt he needed to abuse the team to get what he wanted. Even though he didn't, we were agreeable the whole way through. We're like, here you go. Sure, return it. We'll pay for it. We paid all our shipping and yeah. Yeah. But then when he came back and like tried to pretend you was someone else. It was even funnier. It's like, we still don't want you, dude. Please go away. It's still over. We are never getting back together ever, like ever.

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23:12Teams like Great Jones, Food52, and Pattern Brands already made the switch. Ready to ditch the chaos? Visit endlesscommerce.com. Mention commerce as chaos when you reach out and get three months free because your op stack should be your competitive advantage, not your biggest headache. How does AI infiltrate any of this for you? Do you have like a hard line on it? Are you using to make some of this job a little bit easier or at least take out maybe some of the sting of interactions like that? Or is it a complete no-fly zone? I'm so curious.

23:47Kate Assaraf:No, it's not a no-fly zone. So because I'm from New Jersey, not everyone responds to New Jersey people with the same kind of flexibility, elasticity. So sometimes if I'm really angry, I have to soften it. It's so rare that I can't get my head right enough to write an email, But that's probably the thing I use it for the most if I have to, is softening an email that I know won't land if I'm being myself. That makes sense. I mean, it's so interesting. In that way, it humanizes you. If you're like in a disordered self-interaction where you're like, I'm not myself right now, right? I've lost it. Well, I always like bring you back.

24:34Kate Assaraf:The prompt is, is like, this is what I this is how I feel. This is what I want to say. Please, like, make it nicer and more professional. And also, this is the desired outcome. Like I want at the outcome for like, you know, there'll be peace in the land between myself and this other person. So like that's the skill slash peace in the land. It's the peace in the land, because sometimes I do. I'm just kind of like, oh, this person stinks. Like, I don't know how to handle it. And I don't know whether that's like a cultural thing of like where I'm from, where you're just like, or maybe it's because I'm a cancer.

25:08Kate Assaraf:Like, we cut people off left and right. But I have to navigate this world being friendly with some people. And some people are really put on this earth to challenge you. And so, you know, it's the other stuff. Why am I like this? Peace in the land. Why am I like this? All I want is peace, but I also want to cut people's heads off. Be a founder, they said. It'll be fun, they said. It's so tricky because you go through life being kind of like a normal person. Suddenly, you create a job for yourself and that job suddenly becomes a company and that company suddenly becomes a thing. And then you end up on podcasts and you're still the ridiculous person you were before the company started.

25:50Kate Assaraf:So it's very hard to navigate sometimes when you're, you know. I don't think everything's that serious. So when people say very serious or like very angry, like I don't know how to how to respond. It's tragically uncool. You're being tragically uncool at email, like especially when someone starts slipping in capital letters all over the place in the email. Like I just don't I don't know how to respond to that. Like if it was in person, I'd know exactly how to respond. But in writing, it's really difficult. So that's what I use it for when I am at a crossroads of should I send this thing back or not?

26:29Do you use it in other ways that, uh, I've loved to talk about product board too. Um, do you use it in other ways, either like in, in product? I know you run your own manufacturing, like is it helping you find efficiencies there or let's start with AI and then we'll dig, dig deep into manufacturing. You know what it is?