This Founder’s Shower Idea Became a Viral Sensation

0:0010 years ago, you needed 20 people to start something because all the stuff didn't exist. And then along came Shopify and they just level the playing field. It's like, okay, you can actually do this yourself out of your bedroom and start an e-commerce site. Hello and welcome to Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and building a business. I'm Shuang Esther Shan. Founder Ryan Bebenzine set out to build a company that was optimized for direct-to-consumer. He was looking for a product that people use habitually, comes only in one size, and plays into people's vanity. So in December 2021, he started Jolie, a beauty company making showerheads that filter water for better hair and skin.

0:50In its only second year, Jolie made more than$28 million in net revenue with only three full-time staff. Ryan is joining us today to share how he positioned an existing product for direct-to-consumer success. Thank you so much for being here, Ryan. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Well, I'm very excited to have you here. I recently did a move to London, UK, and I feel like all of the inhabitants of London talk about water quality and the impact on their skin and hair. I think what is so fascinating is that for Jolie, you had this realization that the showerhead isn't just a plumbing device.

1:35It actually could be a beauty product. So tell us, how did you kind of come to this realization? It's a great, yeah, it's a great question. And historically, that's what a showerhead is, right? It was sort of just a plumbing product that pushed out water. and there wasn't a need for it to be a filtering shower or a beauty wellness tool because the water wasn't as damaging as it is today. Over time, I think our water supply, it's just gotten worse and worse and worse. There's a lot of harmful things put into water by design. So chlorine is used to disinfect water here in America. And that's a good thing because it kills really harmful bacteria.

2:22But at the same time, it's really damaging to your skin and your hair. And that's where the idea of Perjoli really came to be. After using a lot of lotion one winter here in New York, I just thought maybe there's something in the water that's causing my legs to just be more dry than they used to be. And in researching water, I realized that there's a lot of bad stuff in it that we can remove for better skin and hair. And that's what Jolie is. Jolie is a beauty wellness company that improves your skin, hair and overall well-being. Yeah, I think this is the realization that you were starting from ground zero, actually fixing the root problem.

3:05How did you go about validating this hypothesis and get the validation you need that, hey, there's a market out there for this product? Well, the first step was just understanding how big this problem really is. For better or for worse, it is a massive problem. It's domestically here in the U.S. It's everywhere and all over the world for that matter. But let's just focus on the U.S. The size of what we're talking about here is in every state, there is a water issue as it relates to harming your skin, hair, and sometimes even your health. there's 260 million residential showers in the U.S. And most of us shower daily.

3:50That doesn't include hospitality. That does not include gyms. That doesn't include universities. So it's a really big market. And that was all the proof we needed from there. And what I think is super fascinating is, obviously, you had to do specific design for the product to have the function of the filtering and making sure you're removing the harmful chemicals. But from just the aesthetic perspective, you also realized most people do not know what brand or what model their showerhead is. So you were really strategic in designing the look of the product as well. We spent a lot of time on the design ID of the Jolie itself.

4:37We wanted it to be iconic and classic and recognizable from across the room. If you go to your friend's house and you go into the restroom, we wanted a design that was striking enough where you would say, oh, you have a Jolie and you could just tell just by the way it looked. And, you know, that's what good design can do. We referenced Nest, the thermostat company, when we were thinking about what Jolie would look like, where Nest took the same approach in that historically a thermostat was a pretty boring, generic looking thing. It usually came in some shade of beige with a slider on it. And then they applied just beautiful design and style and utility to a thing that was just overlooked.

5:25We did that with Jolie and I think from the showerhead itself all the way down to the packaging. There's just design doesn't end with the product. It translates across the unboxing experience, the way you unbox it, the fact that there's no additional peanuts or air packets in there to create extra waste. Like this is all part of design. And we spent a lot of time thinking through that experience before we launched the business.

6:00Yeah, really thoughtful design. And it reminds me of a few of our previous guests, like Fellow, the iconic kettle that you can recognize from across the kitchen. And also you are a second time founder. You've had success in the direct to consumer space before. And when you're thinking about building a second company, you actually had a few pillars for success within D2C that you had in mind. So talk to us through what you were looking for when you're thinking about this new company. Yeah, a second time founder and second time Shopify user. So I've been in the Shopify ecosystem from the very beginning to when like, you know, the founders would call us and say, hey, what do you guys think we should build?

6:49It was like that early. It was crazy. My first company was a footwear brand. It was a sneaker company called Greats, which I wound up selling to Steve Madden in 2019. But it was building that company that I started to realize that e-commerce had some flaws around businesses with a lot of sizing. So the fashion industry is really challenged in e-commerce, not realizing it up front. And fit and size is a challenge for e-commerce only businesses. And I think we've learned this as an industry across the years. But in the beginning, nobody really thought that that would be an insurmountable hurdle.

7:33So while I was building greats and on vacation one year, I started to think about, is there a product that can eliminate this size issue? Because that's a big issue. Is there a product that could be used every single day habitually without thinking about it? Because changing customer behavior is really difficult. If you ask somebody to try something new that doesn't exist, that's hard. It's hard to do. And is there a product that is singular in size, right? Like this is sort of the magic framework. So one size fits all, used every day and focuses on vanity. That was a third part of it. Vanity just drives so much of our consumption and consideration of purchasing.

8:16And from there, I started thinking about what product would fit inside that framework. and ultimately my journey through water and researching water and understanding that it was harmful to us. I literally had a shower thought that I could create a beauty wellness company that purifies your water for better skin, hair and health. And that's how Jolie came to be.

8:44a shower thought about showers i think what's awesome about one of the pillars is the habitual aspect which leads to really high lifetime value for a customer they have to come back they have to get new filters to continue on the joly journey and i think this is kind of like something that's so important for direct-to-consumer brands. Tell us a little bit about making a subscription model that works for your product and your company and something that your customers want to come back for. Well, you know, subscription in e-commerce is not new, right? And frankly, I think it's overdone. There are just things in your life you don't need subscriptions for.

9:31Many of them are fashion-oriented. I don't need a subscription T-shirt company. But there are subscription T-shirts out there. I think those were more about convenience for the brand and not actually the consumer. And there's a reason that most of them don't really amount to that much for the consumer, meaning they churn out. They just decide, I don't need this anymore. And that's common for many, many, many subscription businesses. What's unique about Jolie is in our almost two and a half years in existence, our churn profile of our customer looks dramatically different than anything else you've ever seen in any sort of hardware or physical good.

10:13It sort of looks like a SaaS company. If I showed you two slides of churn, us and pick a SaaS company, ours is usually better, right? We have people leaving us less. and the reason is really simple. You do this thing every day and we provide tremendous value to your daily experience. And when people understand that this is a beauty wellness tool, they're spending thousands of dollars per year on average as a consumer on other beauty items and hair items. This becomes like the most common sense investment they can possibly make and a relatively inexpensive one because to get the filters every year is$143.

10:59They're spending that on, you know, two different new lotions a quarter, right? So, and they're likely churning and changing them all the time anyway. Beauty was sort of built on newness and trend. We like to say Jolie is the anchor and the constant in your beauty and wellness journey. You're going to change all these other products all the time. That's just the way people behave. But the one thing that you're going to do every day and the one thing you won't change is once you install Jolie, it'll be there for a long time. Yeah. And I think this is like, in a way, you're also changing the category, right?

11:38You're also not only changing the plumbing showerhead industry, but you're also changing the beauty industry where there's notable magazines that are saying Jolie is the number one beauty product. How did you tackle kind of changing the conversation within those two different industries at the same time? It is interesting that we're disrupting two industries at the same time and beauty being one and showers being the other. Yeah. Our goal wasn't to just go, OK, we're going to go disrupt these two industries. That was not our goal. Our goal was to create a product that added value to your life every day from the time you start using it.

12:25The journey continues, right? We are a relatively young company, although we have well over 200 ,000 customers. So that's a lot of customers in a short amount of time. But we're really just starting. As I mentioned, the size of the market, and we haven't even talked about international, in the U.S. is so big that we are really just focused on that market. That's where we're spending our energy. And I think what we've seen is the customer has become the advocate, right? The great power of marketing is if you can get a consumer to then start talking about that product that they are now a loyalist to, you're going to see outside success in your marketing spend and your growth.

13:10We have over 25 ,000 pieces now of user-generated content from consumers who are talking about Jolie, how it's improved their hair, how it's improved their acne, how it's improved their eczema, dry skin, itchy scalp, and so on. that that's how we are disrupting right because the voice is so loud that the incumbent brands in the hardware space have nothing like that they you know in our in our post-purchase surveys most people have no idea what brand of shower they're replacing and and there's some really big shower companies you know the the dominant players are in the billions of dollars of revenue but people don't really, they have no idea what it is.

13:55So there's no brand equity in the space before Jolie. So that's a big disruptor in and of itself.

14:10Because we get to play in different channels, because we're not pure beauty, like we can play in Ulta, but we can also play in a home store, for example, like Glow's. That's really unique, as well as the professional channel, like high-end hair salons. There's not a lot of products that get to cross over those spaces. And again, that helps us disrupt these two different traditional markets. So fascinating how you're changing the different industries. and I think we're going to dig into how you're running the company, which is even more fascinating. But first, I'd like to take a moment to thank you for tuning into the show.

14:56If you haven't already, please subscribe to Shopify Masters and leave us a review with feedback for the show. Thank you so much. so for jolie you actually do not use institutional capital to start up the company what was your decision process for making this call and why was that the right strategy for you as a second time founder i had sort of been through that journey before so my last company i raised institutional capital both venture and private equity and i think there are some businesses that that's a necessity. There are super capital intensive businesses where ultimately you need a lot of cash to get something off the ground.

15:44For us, we had the luxury, one, to self-fund it for some period of time, and then two, not have to go to a institutional investor because we were able to get profitable very quickly. And there's a host of things that allowed us to do that. I'd be lying to you if I didn't say luck has something to do with that, right? We, out of the box, this company has grown at a velocity that most brands never, ever, ever experience. That part, there's some luck to that. But we made the best product we could. We were pretty good at marketing. We have a really unique business model. So we operate the business very lean.

16:26We are just hiring our fourth full-time employee after two and a half years. And I think I've shared this publicly before, happy to say it again. Our first year of business, we did a little over 4 million. Our second year, we did 28 million. And this year, we'll do somewhere north of 45 million. To operate a business of that scale with the full-time employee count that we have is rare. But having built a business before, I knew what was really necessary and what wasn't. And I think a lot of first-time founders who particularly raise institutional capital, they think the first thing they're supposed to do is go out and hire a bunch of people.

17:10And the goal is to grow into the size of the headcount. Our approach was to get profitable profitable first. That was our approach, whether that was at$5 or$5 million. We just said, I don't know what the number is, but let's go get that, be profitable. Then we can grow the head count. But our goal should really be running the business as profitably as we can with the least amount of people. We're not in the hire the most people business. We're in the build the best company business. And I think our approach is proving to show that. Yeah. Well, let's dig into that further because for a company to be profitable, to be operating in the eight-figure range, it sounds crazy.

17:57It sounds unachievable to do with just three full-time employees. We're about to be four. Four, still all within one hand that you can count the team. So how do you even make that happen? It It sounds way too efficient and way too effective at the same time. Well, we did it. So it's possible, right? I'm not saying it's easy and I'm not saying it's most people that could do it. I think we had enough education on what was important and what wasn't. We're not chasing every new shiny tech tool in the world, which I think a lot of people spend a lot of time hoping for these magic bullet solutions in tech.

18:40and in my experience, they don't really exist. But the beauty of technology, and I think Shopify is an example of this, where 10 years ago, you needed 20 people to start something because all the stuff didn't exist. You had to build all this stuff and then along came Shopify and they just level the playing field. It's like, okay, you can actually do this yourself out of your bedroom and start an e-commerce site. the whole ecosystem has been built around that. So it's a really great time to actually be an e-commerce founder because there's so many tools available that you don't need the 10 people or 15 people or 20 people.

19:22I'm not sure the mindset has shifted yet. I think we're shifting, but I don't think it's been fully executed where somebody can go, hey, Native had five employees. Jolie had three employees. They both got to a level of revenue. There's now like precedence here. We should be thinking differently and leverage these amazing tools that we have at our disposal, as opposed to thinking about how many headcount we need. So that's our approach. That's how we think about it. So for founders who want to do the same, they want to keep a lean, efficient, effective team, what's your advice to them? How did you separate responsibilities?

20:06How did you organize the three individuals to make sure the team is running smoothly? We do have a really great team, I have to be honest. My co-founder, Arjun, and Charlotte, who was our first full-time hire, these are exceptional people who do things at a much, much higher level than I would say your average person. So it comes back to the old saying, like, hire the best talent you can. I think they're out there. I think there are people that want to build things and do it at a heightened level and be the best in their category. And I would suggest look for the best talent you can. That will make for a better early stage company if you just fill the company with people that are okay.

20:58And this is a really hard thing to learn, by the way. I would say I wasn't really great at it in my first company. I think I hired decent people, but I didn't really know what I was hiring. I didn't know what to look for. Once you go through it, then it sort of makes it easier. Like, oh, I know exactly what I need here now because I've experienced it. So there is an advantage to having some history there, but do your best at hiring the right people is what I would say. Yeah. I guess outside of the core team of three about to be four now, how do you complement the full-time team with additional freelance staff or consultancy to make sure that the team is also being supported externally?

21:40Yeah. And this is really important. We're not three people doing all the work. There is outsourced teams on marketing, customer service, legal work, accounting. Those are all sort of independent contractors. And again, I think as e-commerce has grown, there's been more of those sort of companies set up where instead of bringing on a full-time accounts payable or receivable person, there's probably a really good firm out there that specializes in that and you can fractionalize it, right? So there's all this fractional help from top to bottom, all the way up to the C-suite. You don't need a full-time CMO for a$10 million company.

22:25You don't. So another reason why people might think Jolie is run by a huge team is your presence on TikTok. Talk to us about the advice you have for founders to be effective on that platform? TikTok, I think, is the great equalizer at the moment in terms of marketing reach. Our approach is to get users generated content more than our own created content. We create plenty of content ourselves, but most of the stuff you see on TikTok is from users or creators. So we have a very, very robust and active creator seeding program. where if we think you're an interesting voice, it doesn't mean you need a big following.

23:12That is not a qualifier for us. Our belief is if you have 200 followers and you make a piece of content that is compelling and true to what you are, that one of your 200 followers is likely to go research that product, whether it's Jolie or something else. And we found that to be true. And the challenge is scaling that operation is really manual. You physically have to mail something to somebody. So you have to communicate with that somebody, get their address, find out what color they want, and then actually mail it. And that's what we do. But we do it at a level that is very scaled at this point.

23:55And when most people think about user-generated content, they're probably thinking in the terms of 10 or 20 pieces a month, we're getting 600 to 700 pieces a month. and in doing that we have built this incredible presence on tiktok and instagram where future consumers see us through somebody they follow first and then potentially a paid ad that's very different than how people did it 10 years ago they spent all the money on paid and none of money on content from from creators and this is where tiktok has really really disrupted the space there's so much great content out there and their algorithm is really, really dialed where you're going to see things.

24:39So if you're into beauty, Jolie's showing up in your life. And most people are into beauty. And I use beauty broadly, but men, women, you know, 35 % of our audience is men, customers. And we don't call it influencer. I think there's very, very few people in the world that actually are real influencers. There's people that call themselves influencers. I'm not sure have had that influential. We just call them creators and they're super valuable. I was going to pick up on that because you mentioned user-generated content and creators, and you didn't use the word influencers, I guess. That kind of showcases your philosophy on that.

25:19But what is your advice for those who are trying to start seeding, trying to get their products to the right people? What should they keep in mind when they're starting that journey? Well, I think every brand is different and has its own brand message and position that they want to take. But once that's defined, my advice would be, if you have a budget for seating, you should probably make it bigger. because ultimately what will happen is your paid strategy, it's been forced to try to do too much of the heavy lifting and it's usually unsuccessful. Like the sad truth is there's just that, there's not that many profitable e-commerce focused businesses who spend 80 % of their marketing mix on paid.

26:06We don't. We have a big marketing budget. It's a pretty healthy budget. We just don't spend the majority of it on the channels that most people do, but mostly meta, right? Our meta spend is below 20%. And most people, it's closer to 80%. In New York, we have these billboards on delivery trucks driving around Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens all day long, seven days a week. We can't really measure that. I can't tell you, like, you saw this truck and then became a customer. That's okay. We know people are talking about it. We know people photograph it and film it and put it on social. and there are some things that are unmeasurable that we believe are adding value to our total marketing presence.

27:00And I think we need to get back to more of that. The measurement of paid has not yielded the results that it was promised to be. And to simplify that, if measurement was the great end-all be-all, you'd have a lot more profitable e-commerce companies.

27:23Yeah. And recently, the team hosted a contest with TikTok for its creator class. So yeah, talk to us more about that. Well, it's underway. So I have no results to share, but it's the first of its kind. And we work directly with TikTok where creators could essentially register. Registration was, hey, I wanted Jolie to make some content for you. In 48 hours, we got 1 ,800 applicants. We wound up accepting 1 ,000 because it was sort of capped at the first 1 ,000. And they are all getting jolies and creating content and telling their personal story. This has nothing, there's no script, there's no, here's what you should do.

28:08It's tell us whatever you want. So we're excited about that contest. And those creators get an opportunity to win$5 ,000. So the winner, which we will select will win$5 ,000. They also get affiliate fee of every Jolie they sell. So it's all through TikTok shop. And it's pretty exciting. I think the results, which will be an indication of how big TikTok commerce business can become, which is super interesting to us. So we talked about how the Jolie business model was built for success for direct-to-consumer, where it's habitual, there's that repeat process, low SKU numbers, and the fact that it plays into people's vanity.