10 Lessons from 20 Years at The Top of the Beauty Industry with Dr. Julie Chung, Co-Founder of T3 (Sephora's First Ever Luxury Hair Tool)

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0:58in case you missed it you're allowed to be hot smart and rich so let's get into it

1:09dr julie chung are you ready to get hot smart rich i am so ready born ready you were working out to get ready I saw. Yeah first time since COVID. I was like no but seriously though and I ate so much in London we were in Europe for six weeks and I was like I gotta do something. I feel the same. Yeah yeah. Okay we always start with consumption habits. What is the last thing that you bought and then the last most expensive thing that you bought? So the last thing I bought is a pair of Miu Miu X New Balance sneakers, white that I bought at Harrods. And those are really hard to find. So I was excited to find it in my size.

1:50But the price isn't bad until they make you add all the accessories in the shoelaces. So maybe that's my most expensive thing. But right before that, I had bought, I was in Paris with a friend and had bought a Miu Miu cardigan. I just, Miu Miu is like the only one growing right now, right? And I guess that's the reason, but those are my two purchases. You're a Miu Miu girl. I am. I'm like mostly Kate, Roe, Totem, more quiet luxury, but I love the quirk of Miu Miu and there's a sportiness to it. And I tend to dress a little bit tomboy, a little rocker, which might be weird for a doctor. So I feel like Miu Miu scratches that itch when I want to be a little sporty.

2:32So I was going to say, when you walked in, I feel like, you know, your color theory, because I actually recently just did mine. I'm obsessed with it. And I can tell just by the lipstick color, the earrings, and even like the style of jeans that you have, you know your color theory. Do you live by that? So what's cracking me up is I have been wearing these silver hoops ever since I did a color analysis. And this woman straight up told me that gold doesn't look good on me anymore. And I nearly fell out of my chair. I have foundry necklaces that are gold. I have Cartier bracelet stacks like everyone else in West LA in gold.

3:08And she was like, silver just looks better on you. And honestly, I haven't. It's true. And so when I was in London, I was buying silver jewelry. I had bought this right before I left. So I was kind of laughing to myself when I saw your earrings. I was like, I feel like silver is very modern. But since then, and my sister did an analysis as well. She's like, Julie, and we're very similar. We look similar. It's sharp colors, black. it's more blue toned that direction so it's kind of messing up my closet it's actually exactly what just happened to me so I finally did it and it is completely opposite from even I put all my makeup into chat GPT and I was like like tell me exactly what my color analysis is and then what makeup I should be wearing and then I've always been wearing gold jewelry and it said silver and I'm looking in the mirror and I'm like wait I actually do think silver looks better on me my whole like thing is messed up now.

4:01So my sister dipped all her gold jewelry, white gold. Oh, wow. I'm not even kidding. Like she was, she went all in, like she was told silver and she could see the difference in pictures with makeup as well. So I recommend it for everybody. It can be dangerous. It could lead you down a shopping rabbit hole, but I mean, it works. So, well, I'm excited for so many reasons, but you're also the first doctor that we're having on the show. Oh, really? And my grandfather, who I didn't actually get to meet that much was also an ophthalmologist. So I'm hoping that through this conversation, I actually get to understand him a little bit more too.

4:38How did you go from, how do you go even daily from being a doctor to founding one of the most successful and longest running brands at Sephora in the hair care space? So it was kind of accidental. I think as the daughter of immigrant parents. I was pretty much told I was going to be a doctor from day one. My mom was an intensive care unit nurse. And I was always a creative, like Korean women are extremely vain. And I've always played with makeup and hair and clothes. And so I really wanted to go into fashion, beauty, something, something that had to do with aesthetics. So that's always been a part of me and, and is a part of a lot of Korean women are like that.

5:22And then I go into medicine, and I meet this guy at a bar. I'm going to tell my kids I met him in Bible study, but I meet this guy at a friend's birthday party and we're dating and he grew up in the hair world. His parents are hairdressers. And he noticed that here's this med student who really is a repressed fashionista who has it all figured out except for her hair. I was constantly straightening it with Japanese straightening perms, you know, Brazilian treatments, getting like flat irons that were ancient and frying my hair, trying to get it under control. And he was like, why is she spending all this time and money on skincare, um, you know, pots of La Mer for a hundred bucks back then it was a hundred bucks and not spending money on tools.

6:09And he realized there was a huge white space in that tools were either$25 at CVS or a hundred dollars at Sally beauty, like a salon distributor. And there was no in between. And so it was clear that women who really wanted a beautiful high-tech tool didn't have that option. So he made me a dryer. He had engineers, had an idea. He's sort of a physics nerd and has product development history, came from the world of finance. I think he was born an entrepreneur and he just made me a super lightweight, beautiful dryer that dried my hair differently with a technology the world had never seen. And it It worked really, really well.

6:49And he said, let's start this company together because I had my own ideas. It needs to be beautiful. It has to sit on my vanity alongside my creams and blend right in seamlessly. And then we have to package it beautifully. And then the big kicker was we have to sell it in beauty retailers, traditional beauty retailers. And back then, you're probably too young to remember, but hair dryers were relegated to the basement where the toasters and dryers were the electronics department. or the electrical department. They really didn't sit next to skincare and cosmetics. And so we decided to change that by getting beauty PR and approaching the hair tools category in a completely different way, which was highly disruptive at the time.

7:33It was just unheard of. This is the perfect example of if he wanted to, he would. He literally made you a hairdryer as like a date. To woo me. Yes. Yes. Do you identify with one over the other? Being a doctor and an entrepreneur?

7:51You know, for me, in my mind, the story is very seamless. I think as a physician, it might seem like I just treat disease, you see patients, and that's it. As a physician, I do sales pitches every day. So what's that pitch? It's in three minutes, I have to tell a total stranger to trust me, to bring along or come alongside them and explaining their care, and then convince them to undergo a procedure that's scary. That's pitching. And I was doing that 200 patients a week, every day for years. And so for me, it already kind of came naturally. So when it came to pitching an idea, pitching a business, it was sort of already ingrained in me, strangely, through my medical practice and my medical training.

8:44so it's kind of an odd thing to think that that could train you to do that. Have you ever had a patient as a doctor that knows you're the founder of T3 and that has negatively impacted the work that they want you to do on them as a doctor? No. Has it helped? So I'll tell you why because nobody really knew I was the founder of T3 until probably about two years ago. Was that intentional? You know, 20 years ago, there was no founder story. There was no female founder API. Like, let me tell you what my mission is. And so I was very much behind the scenes for many, many years. And so it didn't come naturally for me to necessarily talk about what I do outside of medicine unless someone asked me.

9:35So once in a while, I'd have someone say, Dr. Chung, you seem like you really care about the way you look. because I was always the doctor who showed up in Prada heels, like dressed up, like done. You were an HSR doctor. Yeah, I just didn't look like a doctor. And they'd say like what some people would ask me, what would you have done if you weren't a doctor? I was like, actually, it's funny you ask. I, you know, I do own a company with my husband and we do work in the beauty world. And they're like, now it makes sense. Or I have patients who ask me for hair advice. I have the cutest 80, 90 year old patients who after I take out their cataracts, They can literally see.

10:11And now they're like, they want beauty advice. And they'll say to me, Dr. Chung, I can see now, but because of you, I can see my gray hair and my wrinkles on my face. Like, what can I do? Because they see the way I dress. They're like, what can I do to make my hair look good? What can I do to make, like, what's your skincare routine? And so you'd be surprised at the lengthy beauty conversations I have with my patients. And then it'll come out. Yeah, I also have this. And sometimes I'll give them stuff. I'll be like, you should try my dryer. You know, some of my patients that I really love and I've had a long-term relationship with, then it'll come out then.

10:45But it's been pretty separate for a long time. Is one harder than the other? Oh, being a business owner is a thousand times harder than being a physician. Hands down. What are some of the similarities between being an eye surgeon doctor and being an entrepreneur? Grit. I mean as a surgeon and as an entrepreneur a business owner you have to overcome a lot of obstacles you have to have a plan a b c d e f g um and yeah and f and it goes on and you have to know how to pivot so in the operating room if I come across a challenge you have to know how to pivot and you have to plan for that pivot and you have to expect that you need to pivot and have the grit and the stamina and the confidence to think that you can do something unexpected.

11:36So I think characteristic traits are similar, but at the same time, doctors are highly risk averse. So any physician, most physicians will tell you we don't make the best business people. And so thankfully I have my husband who is more, he's okay with risk and has more of a business mindset than I do. So it's been a nice sort of yin yang where I'm more the creative and the visionary. It's clear to me what we need to do for women and stylists. And he's the one who sort of pushes us to take the risk, but doctors are pretty risk averse. So that's different, but the grit and the stamina that you need for both roles is, I mean, they're very much aligned.

12:19Speaking of money, you've built one of the longest lasting beauty brands of the last 20 years without raising any money. How did you do that? Yeah, it's funny. It's such a long time ago. My husband and I were riding bikes yesterday and I was like, so babe, how did we do that? Let's talk about this. You're like prepping for the interview. Well, remind me. And he was like, well, you just spend as much as you have. so you know we had about thirty thousand dollars just in friendly loans from family and with the thirty thousand we only did as much as the thirty thousand would allow so we didn't have to plan out this whole thing figure out a sales team a concept a brand design team blah blah blah and then earn get the money raise the money to then do this we literally just did what our money would allow us to do, which you would do if you're not in a hurry.

13:17And I think back then the culture was a little bit different. It was more of a slow burn. We're going to figure this out. We don't have to make a big splash from the get. We're just going to spend what we have and figure it out as we go along. I think the pressure is different now where you kind of have to have a whole business plan, have to have this whole thing set and then raise money and then just, you know, immediately get accepted into Sephora. It was a slower burn that we, I don't think we knew to do that, but we didn't want to take on any monetary risk or burden without knowing what we were getting ourselves into.

13:54What year of the business did you guys start deciding to pull money out instead of just like constantly reinvesting it back into T3? Probably our second year because we had 4 million in sales in our first year and made a million dollars our first year. But we made money off the bat and it really comes down to product being king. I mean, we had a dryer that we didn't even have to say anything. We just had to put it into people's hands and have them use it. And it did all the talking for us. So we've been, we were profitable from pretty much from the get. You just talked about building the business with your husband who wasn't even your husband when you started.

14:36Often founders here don't go into business with your family. Don't start a business with your husband. You've done it successfully for 20 years. You guys are still married. Would you do it again if you were to start over? I would. He balances me out really well and he knows where to draw the boundaries. And I do think it helps that I have another life outside of the company. I think if I were 100 % wrapped up in the company the way he is, and I didn't have this other little piece of life to myself, maybe it would have been different. Not that I planned it like that, but to get away and have my own purpose and my own sort of identity outside of the company because, as you know, as a founder, you can really get wrapped up and the company can become your identity, and that can provide its own stresses and tension between founders.

15:29But for me, actually, I'm just realizing this as I'm saying it out loud. It could be that I did have a separate thing for myself that didn't involve him. So that's my guess. Every ambitious woman has a secret weapon. So let yours be the Hot Smart Rich Insights. It's how over 250 ,000 women are owning their worth in business, wealth, and life. Whether you're building a brand, making moves in your career, or wanting to get control over your finances, the HotSmart Rich newsletter delivers the cultural context and consumer intel to keep you ahead. With only six months left in the year, it's time to make consumer trends, financial hacks, and HSR Insights your best friend instead of mindlessly scrolling on social media.

16:14We've built one of the most powerful communities of women at the intersection of consumer, capital, and culture. So join us with the paid version of our newsletter free for three months with the link in the show notes to claim your free offer. Being in the beauty space for so long, I think you're the first person that has truly sat on this seat that has been in it for two decades. When you look at the space today, what is something that just pisses you off? I wouldn't say pisses me off, but I would say something that's interesting is how fast everyone is. I think the slow burn of really building a company slowly is lost on everyone because we're all dying for a billion dollar exit in what, three years?

16:53Did Hailey Bieber do it in three years? everyone's looking for that like that instant success story so I think there's a a flurry of activity and then kind of an anxiety of looking around and seeing what everyone else is doing and am I growing fast enough am I doing enough am I a good enough founder am I out there doing enough podcasts I think that rat race didn't it didn't really exist back 20 years ago I think it helped we didn't have social media. It could be that rat race was there. You just couldn't see it. So I think it's, I think it's a little bit frustrating to see these founders who feel this need to just push, push, push.

17:37It's more that I feel badly that we're in this position now to do that. Does that make sense? I agree wholeheartedly. And I always say this, like you never let your boyfriend stop you from finding your husband. So if you get an offer to sell your business, like entertain the conversation, take the term sheets, see what's there, but it doesn't mean you have to do it. And it doesn't mean that like, it's something that you need to do. Or if you see a competitor selling their business, that doesn't mean that that is what you have to do too. But I think one of the things with social media that we are all guilty of is like comparing ourselves and seeing what people are doing and just like thinking if they do that, that's what the market wants and that's what I should do.

18:16I think it also just stems from fear, right? Because there are so many beauty brands shutting down right now and they are running out of capital. You started the company 20 years ago, but you just said you only learned to be a founder recently. What does that mean? Yeah. So it's funny, you know, 20 years ago, like I said, there was no founder story. I never had to be forward facing. Um, no one really cared if it was a man or a woman, you know, who's behind Conair, who's behind Babeless. Like there was no, and we were alongside those brands and nobody really knew who they were. And so T3, It was the same thing.

18:50It was just marketed as this beauty tool, aspirational beauty tool. So for the last 18 years, I've been a practicing eye surgeon and really the creative muse of T3, still very much involved in product development. But in the face of these giant vacuum companies, it became clear to me and with the gentle push of our publicist, who's amazing. She had your back last night. Yeah, she did. It's just that we need to humanize the brand. You know, T3 is a people and a place. It's a team that's largely women, co-founded by a woman, an LA brand, which nobody knew. And it became clear that I needed to do this whole female founder thing, which I was aghast when two years ago the whole team decided, like, we need to get your story out there, Ken's story out there.

19:42My first podcast was the Second Life podcast. I just felt like such an imposter. like even though we've had this company for so long like here I am now trying to look like this female founder who has the perfect story and I'm going to tell you my vision and my mission but the irony is is I don't think I could have done this in my 20s like back then Julie Chung who is only in her 20s who started the company with her boyfriend there was no freaking way I would have gotten in front of anybody to talk about anything related to medicine or business. And the funny thing is, is I think it took 20 years of growing up as a woman with life experiences, with a framework of just being, you know, just living my life that has allowed me to be eloquent, insightful, and be able to be a founder now, a founder in that I'm the face of the brand.

20:42so it's not your expected sort of female founder. I see these young, fresh-faced female founders who are so eloquent and mature and incredible. I just wasn't that in my 20s. There's no way. So I feel like I was now primed for it now. Do you feel there's a pressure with this female founder that you're saying to not show all the hard things or like the things that do make you cry or the things that still question you? like to show up as a female founder and be eloquent do you think that requires you to only show a certain side of that story um yes and no I think a lot of female founders now are being more vulnerable and sharing all of the hardships that they have um so I think we're headed in the right direction and that we're being very real and talking about what our struggles and weaknesses are but I also find it strange that women need to do that.

21:38Why? None of my male colleagues, I'll talk about my male colleagues in medicine, they never talk about their weaknesses in order to draw in an audience or to gain your confidence or to make you like me. Whereas women, why do we always have to talk about our hardships to make other women feel comfortable? Do you think it's because it's disarming? Like for men, I think men are attracted to power, right? I think women as nurturers are attracted to like that soft power, that femininity and like the realness. And for me, I can say from my own experience, like when my platform started growing, it was when I took the mask off and was like, my life is actually falling apart.

22:16I'm like calling off an engagement. I have nowhere to live. Like I'm trying my best, but like things aren't going well. And actually I kind of felt like I was living a lie online, not talking about that because I was like, I am really struggling. And that is when the relatability came in. And so it's interesting when you, when you think about it, cause I don't think I have the answer. Like we've had female founders that come on and say, why do women have to talk about their beauty routines? You don't see the founder of chomps having to do that. That's a male, but I do think that there is, especially in the beauty space, when your consumer is females, that is what the female audience craves is that vulnerability and that relatability.

22:57Yeah. Do you resonate with that? Yeah, that's, it's a good point. I think the really good point you made is that it's disarming. I think if you, I kind of cringe when people are like, oh, you're a surgeon and a founder and you have this house, you've got three kids and you've got this marriage. I mean, you know, so then I, you're right. I, then I'll say something like, yeah, and I'm doing all of it. Like not that great. Like I'm like, you know, a jack of all trades, but I don't actually have any real superpower. I'm just all just trying to keep it all together. Um, but you're right. I think you do have to be vulnerable and share those things to disarm people and be like, Hey, I'm just like you, as long as you're not fabricating it.

23:39Um, which I don't think women do. I think women are pretty open and honest. You've talked about having a hard fertility journey. What did that change for you as a person? then? You know, when you're a high capacity, high performing person, which all female founders are, all entrepreneurs are, you're so used to getting things your way. So when you do this, the result is most of the time going to be this. So A plus B usually equals C. In the case of fertility, it's completely out of your hands. You may or may not have kids and there's nothing you can do about it. So I learned a lot about letting go, letting go.

24:22And there's just some things that you have zero control over and, and you can get angry about it and kick and scream and raise your fists up to the heavens in a very biblical way and say, why, why me? Um, and that's because people like you and I are used to getting what we want. You work hard and you're going to get a result. That doesn't necessarily happen in fertility, especially if you have trouble. So I think it was a lot of letting go and a lot of being able to accept that your life may not turn out the way you want. And so it was a struggle. I mean, I cried a lot. I cried day and night, my husband and I, he was like, thought maybe I would leave him.

25:04It was hard. Well, as a women, a lot of our identity is wrapped in childbearing and rearing. And I'd love to say that we're, as a modern society, have come forward and we don't have to just see women as bearers of children, but that undercurrent is still there. So when you can't have children, there's a sense of failure. And I wasn't used to that, a sense of failure and of lack of control. And so I learned a lot about myself. I wouldn't take away that journey that I had. I think it made me a stronger person. Um, it made me sympathetic to other women who have trouble, um, having kids and who have gone through that journey or who have either lost kids or, you know, whatever their journey was, I'm sympathetic to it.

25:48It's also made me less judgmental. Um, it's, it was a hard journey, but one that, you know, I, I had to undergo and I, I appreciate in the, in the long run. And I did end up having kids. I was gonna say now you have two kids? I have three kids. Three kids. Yes. You posted a photo of your daughter's beauty collection the other night, which was insane. If you had to guess, how much money do you think that is worth? Thousands of dollars. I mean, she, well, the thing is when these girls have birthday parties or any sort of holiday, they're given Sephora gift cards. And so she has hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of Sephora gift cards.

26:28And so these, I'm convinced 13 year olds, like When I was little, we collected figurines or Garbage Pail Kids. We collected things. Children tend to collect things. I'm convinced that lip glosses is just a way for a young girl to collect things, flavors, colors. The way she lined it up in that story that I showed you, it's her collection. And she loves it. And thankfully, though, I do have beauty friends. So they send me lots of lip gloss as well. So a lot of that was stuff that was sent to us, thankfully. But I think this is not like just with your daughter. This is a phenomenon that has been reported on by multiple outlets.

27:07And it's evident even if you go into a Sephora. 13-year-old girls love Sephora. Yes. You think this is just because of collecting these trinkets and being a part of it? Or is there something more to it being specifically with Sephora? I mean Sephora looks like a fun and friendly place yeah I mean all the options and the colors I mean it's really a playground for adult women but I think teenagers are really drawn to it because of social media but I really think like from psychologically it's this idea of collecting things I mean that's not a new concept I mean how many Barbie dolls did you have you probably had all the limited edition all the different ones did you need all 20 of those I think there's some like deep inner like genetic thing happening there where girls feel the need to have all of this stuff my daughter I rarely see her putting it on I mean she'll put it on maybe a couple times a week but she's not obsessively putting on lip gloss so is she really caring about moisturizing her lips or having them look shiny I wonder yeah or or is it also being able to tell her friends that she's got a hundred lip glosses versus the other girls.