Drybar founder Alli Webb’s messy truths

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1:17I don't really know where to start. But what I do know is how to run a salon. I've worked in salons a big part of my 20s. and knew hair really well. Allie Webb wanted to open her own salon called Dry Bar, one that would focus on a specific service, the blowout. No haircuts, no hair dye, just the perfect blow dry and styling. Her business savvy brother realized she was onto something, and he made her an offer. He said to me, I'll put up all the money, I'll own 50%, and you'll own 50%, yours will be sweat equity, And I was like, what's what equity? Like, I didn't know what that meant. And when he explained it to me, I was like, wow, great.

2:03So we felt like this was a really beautiful, like, chocolate peanut butter moment of, like, him being able to handle the things that I didn't know how to do. Within just a few years of opening the first dry bar in Los Angeles, the business grew to include dozens of locations across the country. Allie also launched a successful hair care product line. she transformed her side hustle into a business of impressive scale.

2:52in nut balls 10 years later. We're like, well, that's just how you do it. We haven't made it just how you do it. This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Berman, your host. Allie Webb's story of scaling Drybar from scratch is packed with important lessons for anyone starting a business. We'll hear about how she took Drybar to unexpected heights, why she decided to sell, and what she's cooking up next. First, I wanted to hear how it all started. Allie, welcome to Masters of Scale. Thanks for having me. Great to have you. For our audience who may not yet be familiar with it, where did the dry bar idea come from?

3:37I'd spent my 20s working in hair salons and doing blowouts. So I just had like Malcolm Gladwell's 10 ,000 hours in spades. by the time I decided to start what was a mobile blowout business, which eventually led to Drybar. My initial pitch was on like a mommy group on Yahoo that was like, hey, I'm a stay-at-home mom, longtime hairstylist. I'm thinking about starting a mobile blowout business where I come over and blow out your hair like while your baby is sleeping because that was my network was moms at the time. That's all I knew in LA because I'd just moved to LA. And sure enough, I got tons of clients and I was pretty good at doing blowouts.

4:14And so, you know, the word of mouth grew very quickly. And that's kind of when the light bulb went off for me of like, maybe instead of me going to them, they come to me. And that's when I went to my brother, Michael Landau, who's been my best friend my whole life. And he also happens to be bald. And he was like, what? Like, what do you want to do? I'm like, well, I'm having so much success charging$40 in this mobile business and I can't keep up with the demand. So I feel like maybe I should start a brick and mortar instead of, you know, them coming, me going to them. And, you know, again, he was a little like perplexed, like, why don't, why can't women blow out their own hair?

4:52And his wife at the time had naturally straight hair. And I was like, you did grow up with me, but he, you know, was like, really kind of saw the success that my mobile business was having and was like willing to kind to help me get this off the ground financially. And he has such a brilliant business mind. And so we were like, let's give it a shot. And my then husband, Cameron, was the advertising creative guy. And he, you know, was going to help us create the brand. And it was like three of us joining forces. What is the blowout experience? So a blowout is basically at Drybar anyways. You know, you come in, you have a consultation.

5:32In Drybar, you pick from a menu of hairstyles. And then your stylist washes your hair and then basically blows out your hair into the style that you want. And that's all it is. So no cuts, no color, just blowouts. And, you know, you walk out the door with amazing confidence, which is the other probably important thing to mention is that while we are initially, you know, just selling blowouts, we very quickly learned that we weren't just selling blowouts. We were selling the happiness and confidence that women get from having great hair. Well, I have to imagine also, I mean, the color scheme, the music.

6:04I mean, when you walk into a dry bar, it's uplifting even before. Yeah, I mean, well, that was the thing. It was like, for me, it was like, how do I create this thing that I really want? I was creating dry bar from the positioning of a stylist because I was a stylist and also the consumer. And what did I want on both sides of that? And were you at all concerned that this wasn't a full service salon, that this didn't exist before, right? Like come in, quote unquote, just for a blowout. I wasn't concerned, but everybody else was. You know, I mean, that was the common question was like, how do you make this business's concept work?

6:37The name of the game was volume. Ironically, there's so many puns in this world of mine. And at the time, I thought if we could do 30 to 40 blowouts a day, that that would get us to a good point. Not even really making that much money. That was more like breaking even. But it would work. And, you know, I didn't have big lofty dreams at that point. I was just like, I wanted to open one shop for myself, like something for me to go and do that I loved. And, you know, and I loved the environment of the salons that I'd worked in. And so I was really excited about it and not thinking I was going to turn it into this massive multimillion dollar empire, blowout empire.

7:15What I thought was going to be 30 to 40 blowouts a day turned out to be like between 60 and 80 blowouts a day, which we were completely unprepared for, by the way. Like we didn't have enough stylists. Like it was a total disaster in the beginning, even though it was so popular. It was like we were completely unprepared for what was coming. So how do you go from one store in Brentwood to literally within a few years, you're at like 40 locations around the country. Like what happened that you were able to accelerate so quickly? Well, you know, we realized very quickly, very quickly, like within the first few days, like we had captured lightning in a bottle.

7:46It was like, holy shit. Like women were coming in and quite literally droves. I mean, we were turning people away left and right. The first couple of stores were really clunky, like getting those open and figuring out how to get people into those stores. And then we eventually like started hiring people who were smarter than us, who had like knew how to do this. And we eventually took angel investment from some friends and family and customers. And then we realized that we needed to really, if we were going to really expand this, because I think we got to like 10 or 11 stores like bootstrapping it ourselves.

8:18And then we raised about$26 million was our first big tranche from Castaneda with the intention of opening a lot more stores and starting a product line. And that was about, I don't know, two-ish years in. So, Allie, I imagine when you opened your first brick-and-mortar dry bar location, people came in and said, great, I need to cut, color the whole shebang. And you're like, no, no, no, no, we just do the blowout. So what was that customer education experience like? Yeah, I mean, there was definitely a subset of women who knew what a blowout was, were getting blowouts and figuring it out, which me included.

8:54But then there was, you know, that was a big thing early on, like educating people and women on like what this was. And a lot of women were like, what's a blowout? I mean, a lot of people were like, what's a blowout? And I would always explain, like, you know, when you go and get your hair cut and colored or cut or colored and they blow out your hair after and your hair kind of never looks better than when it looks. And they're like, yeah, I love how my hair looks after I get a haircut. Like, yeah, because somebody professionally blew it out. So we're taking with Drybar that one piece of the puzzle of going to a salon, the whole experience.

9:26And we're just taking the blowout. We're blow drying your hair, washing the hair. That was also a big thing people would ask, like, do you wash the hair too? I'm like, yeah, yeah, we wash it. So it's clean and you can make it last for as long as humanly possible, which women loved. But yeah, I mean, it was an interesting time because even as we were opening more and more locations, there were a lot of questions, especially investors. That's a whole other story. Like men in suits were like, what? You know, so many like sexual jokes and whatever. I'm like, yeah, yeah, you know. And now blowouts are like such a common thing.

9:59And, you know, there's so many other places that are doing them. And we made this an affordable luxury, you know, for women everywhere. And joke on the investors who are making those jokes. Yes, yes. There are two different threads I'd love to pull on. And one is this is a point at which a lot of companies would say we're going franchise, right? This is the fastest way for us to scale. We were in that conversation too. So talk about what was that conversation? Well, it was a lot of back and forth. I mean, Michael wanted to franchise like right away. And I was very anti-franchise because of, you know, this was my baby.

10:30Like it felt like a third child to me, you know. And I was like, I don't want to put this in other people's hands, you know. And that was really how I felt about it. But Michael was like, we just got to open more stores. And he was right. We did need to open more stores. And we, you know, as you know, like we had so much competition. We had tons of people starting to knock us off. So we felt very strongly that we needed to open more. You know, the thing about franchising is a double-edged sword because you are, you know, it's a great way to expand quickly. But it's also like these are entrepreneurs themselves and they want to do things the way they want to do them.

11:00And I was, you know, one of the most profound things, I think it was my brother who said It was like, there's a lot of ways to do things right, but there's one way that we do things and I want all the franchisees to do that. And you only have so much control over them. And so I wouldn't recommend it the way we did it because what we did was like we were basically now running two different organizations. One was like franchise and one was company owned. And so the needs of those two stores were quite different. And managing the franchisees and those owners, our partners, was very just time consuming.

11:29I mean, it sounds time consuming. It also sounds like maybe the optimal approach because you're able to keep control of the ones that you're operating. You're able to evolve the brand and the experience, but you're also able to scale more quickly. You got, but we're so, we had to hire a lot more people. We were, we were, you know, this is a completely different operation, which is interesting now. Fast forward to, you know, years later, we started a new concept called Squeeze, which is our massage concept, which is on fire. And we've sold over a hundred locations and it will start popping up all over the country.

11:58But we decided to do that completely franchise because we got the opportunity to see what it's like to run a franchise organization and what it's like to run a company owned organization. And, you know, at the end of the day, it's harder to run a company-owned operation because you have, you know, of the 150, there's 180 actually now, but when we sold, it was 150 and probably 70 or so were company-owned and the rest were franchise. But, you know, you have a manager and you have 70 managers and assistant managers and regional managers and stylists. And, you know, it was so much staff. We had, you know, 5 ,000 employees.

12:36And it was crazy. It was so much to manage that the systems and the people you have to put in place to manage that kind of overhead of people is a lot. And it is easier, we found, when there was a franchisee because you have an owner-operator that's managing their own stores. And they have a lot of skin in the game, you know. So it's an arguably easier way to do it, which is why we did it that way with Squeeze. And so, but looking back on the Drybar experience, if you had it to do over again, going back in time, but knowing what you know now, would you have gone full franchise from the beginning?

13:07Or do you think it was essential to be in control to really develop that experience in the brand? I hate that question. I'm sorry. It's okay. Yeah. Because I don't think I would. I mean, I don't think I would do it. I don't think I would have done it differently. But that said, we used the learning and applied it to Squeeze. So I'm glad that we had the learning and I liked that we owned the stores, but it was still really challenging. But I don't, yeah, I don't think I would change it, even though I wouldn't recommend it. I know that's like a weird answer. No, it's not. I mean, we also, we learn from our mistakes, right?

13:39Yeah. Had we not gone through that, I never would have learned all of that. Yeah. So before we get to Squeeze, the other thread to pull on is the expansion to products. Yes. So was that part of the original vision? Did that come in later? Where did that originate and how? because that's a whole other business you've got to figure out. Yeah, and really, I mean, I don't know if you know this, but like we sold the product division for$255 million. We didn't sell the whole enchilada, which is an important distinction because the product was like a little bit of an afterthought for everybody else, not for me.

14:10You know, I knew very early on I wanted to do product because what I was finding, because I was in the store every day and I was touching hair and I was doing blowouts, the assortment we had, which was a bunch of my favorite product lines, weren't all working well together. And so I felt like we really needed a product line that really, you know, supported a perfect blowout, like what we were doing, making the blood last as long as humanly possible. So every product was developed through the lens of like crafted for the perfect blowout. That's really what it was for. So, you know, when we raised the money with Castaneda, I think we earmarked like a million dollars, which is like more or less what you need to start a product of that scale and size.

14:49Right. You're not just slapping a dry bar label on some existing product. You're actually doing product development, right? Because, I mean, listen, the way, you know, it's not really anybody who works in this industry knows that, like, there's a couple labs that really make all the stuff. So you don't have a ton of room for creativity. But what you do have is, like, you know, you use benchmarks. And it's like, oh, I love this product by X company, but I don't like the way it smells. It's a little too strong. It's a little too heavy. So you can go in and tweak and say, I want to or you're coming at it and saying to a lab, I want a product that is this, this, this and this.

15:22and they will put something together for you and then you tweak it to get it to where you want it. So for me, it was like I knew products couldn't be too heavy because women always wanted their blood to last as long as possible. I obviously knew creating a really great dry shampoo was paramount to what we were doing. The very first product we ever came out with was a shower cap that was like a larger than normal shower cap. And it was like terry cleft lined and nobody else was doing that. And, you know, so everything I developed was, again, thinking about the customer and what she wanted after she had a blowout.

15:53But it was like everybody was much more focused on the stores and the growth of the stores, which was right. You know, it was like we were growing at leaps and bounds and there was so much excitement about the stores and everybody wanted a dry bar. But, you know, the product was really personally important to me. And the team supported me on that, but nobody knew the longevity and the legs that it would have, which it did. It's also more marketing. I mean, you've got like a virtuous cycle of marketing. Yeah, I mean, so, you know, we had the stores, obviously, but then we also, you know, went to Sephora and said, hey, we want to do this.

16:22And really, it was like, we want to give the products that we're using in Drybar, including the blow dryers and the curling irons and all this stuff. If you don't have a Drybar near you, here's what our stylists are using so you can get this great look at home. I launched my first book, which was like a total hair tutorial to do it. I went on QVC and selling the products. And it was really fun and great. It was such a great, like, natural extension. And mind you, our investors and even clients, everybody was like, oh, you could sell so many other things here. You could sell makeup. You could offer lashes.

16:49You could do all this stuff. I'm like, no, no. You know, I felt very strongly of like we do this one thing and we're the best at it and we're not going to like create this environment where women come in and they feel like they're being like hard sold to about buying this or buying that. Like I just wanted to do the one thing we were doing and the one thing we were trying to do really well. One night at a business dinner, Allie got some frank advice about the inevitable future of her budding empire. Her business was part salons, part product line. An exec from a major player in her industry told her this.

17:22You're never going to be able to sell this whole thing to one person. L 'Oreal or S.E. Lauder, they're not inheriting 5 ,000 employees. And I was like, oh man, you're right. Because, you know, Unilever, L 'Oreal, like Helen of Troy, who did end up buying us. Like those are huge product companies. They don't want a service company. It's a very different buyer that wants to service business. And so, you know, all the like smart investment bankers that were around us were like, we're going to have to break these two companies off. But yeah, that's what we ultimately did. So in 2019, we really started to do a formal process, realizing we were going to be selling this to two different people and had, you know, tons of interest, as you would imagine.

18:04And, you know, ultimately, it's a long story, but ultimately sold it to Helen of Troy. Right. And the plan was we were going to then sell off the market. So if you wanted to buy the L.A. market, you could buy 25 stores and whatever multiple and that would be that. And then COVID hits and the stores go to zero. But yeah, I mean, the store, we basically kind of gave them away because we had we were they weren't making any money. We were selling to pay rent. It was a total show that the stores. But luckily, we sold the product division like truly what felt like moments. It was actually weeks before the whole world shut down and everything collapsed.

18:40But we got that sale done under the wire. Thank God. Still ahead, Allie explains why after making her name as someone who makes you look super polished, she decided to get messy.

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20:38So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash MOS and get up to three months free. Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on the Masters of Scale YouTube channel. In 2023, Allie published a memoir called The Messy Truth. It's an intensely honest look at all the things that were falling apart in her life behind the scenes while her business was publicly booming. One of the extraordinarily compelling parts of following your journey over these last several years is how open you've been about your own challenges, journey, the things, the curveballs that have come your way and how you've handled them.

21:25Many of them. Yeah. And I mean, I can deeply relate. Thank you for being open about it. And why be open about it? going back to my first divorce from my co-founder, which, you know, I myself wasn't super public persona at that point. But for the sake of the business and our employees, you know, I remember like the first we posted like Instagram, you know, where you get all your information that we were divorcing, but that it was really more for our employees. Cause like I said, We had thousands at that point. And we kind of felt like we needed to make a statement, but it's not like we're making a statement in like, you know, the New York Post.

22:09And like, we posted a picture of we actually were on a family vacation in Jamaica, even though we weren't together anymore. And this really sweet picture of us in the ocean together and said, you know, we've decided to end our marriage, but we are still friends and we're still co-parenting and whatever. And it really resonated with people. And I think that was one of the first moments that I was like, oh, it's interesting to put something really personal like that out there and to feel a lot of love and support from it. And so fast forward to the next like, you know, six months to a year when my life really fell apart because my son, who's now 19 and now doing great, you know, kind of spiraled.

22:45We all kind of spiraled after the divorce. I mean, you know what that's like. And I was struggling. He was struggling. My ex was struggling. It was a lot of struggle. We were all on a struggle bus. But Grant, My older son, you know, ended up going into rehab because he was really struggling with drugs, which just took us all down. And I just felt like I couldn't be, I didn't want to be inauthentic with what I was publicly doing. Because mind you, while that was happening, Drybar was like on fire. Like we were expanding. We were in all these things. I was on the cover of magazines. Like it was, you know, I was asked to do Shark Tank.

23:22I was a guest shark. I mean, it was just like all this cool stuff was happening alongside our lives falling apart. And it was like, how do I manage this? Like, I didn't want to be inauthentic publicly, just as I wasn't being inauthentic privately. And so I felt like I'm going to talk about this stuff because I felt like it was showing the real side of anybody's life, right? Even like you can be having this tremendous success over here, but over here, you're really struggling. And as somebody who was starting to be somewhat public in the success that I had had, I wanted to show like the polarity of our lives, you know, and, and the more I did it, the more support I got, the more, you know, messages I got from lots of other women who were going through it and were like, you know, admired me.