805 Dr. Julie Chung: Co-Founder of T3

0:00I am unwilling to give up, but I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be.

0:09Kara Goldin:You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don't get knocked out. So your only choice should be, go focus on what you can control. Hi everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world's greatest leaders. We'll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can't wait to get started. Let's go. Scaling a business means knowing when to bring in the right expertise and when not to do it all yourself. One of the smartest moves growing teams make is delegating specialized work so they can stay focused on what actually moves the business forward.

0:56Kara Goldin:That's exactly why I like Upwork. Upwork is a one-stop platform to find, hire, and pay expert freelancers across web and software development, data and analytics, marketing, business operations, and more. It gives you fast access to specialized talent across 125 plus categories, making it easier to fill skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale support up or down without the commitment of full-time headcount. You can browse profiles, review past work, and even get help scoping the role so you can hire with confidence and get started quickly. With Business Plus, you can access the top 1 % of talent on Upwork.

1:41Kara Goldin:And with AI-powered shortlisting, you'll get matched to the right freelancer in under six hours. No endless searching required. Upwork also takes the operational hassle off your plate by handling contracts and payments in one place, bringing you up to focus on running and growing your business. And it's no surprise that thousands of growing companies already trust Upwork for everything from one-off projects to ongoing support. It's free to sign up and posting a job is easy. Visit Upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That is Upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow.

2:27Kara Goldin:That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com, Upwork.com. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to The Kara Golden Show. I am so excited for our next guest, Dr. Julie Chung, who is the co-founder of an incredible brand called T3, the prestige hair tool brand that pioneered an entirely new category when it launched the original T3 featherweight hairdryer in 2004, but started as a simple but such a powerful insight that premium beauty routines deserve equally high-performing hair tools, ultimately transformed the way millions of people style their hair. And Dr. Chung has spent more than two decades balancing an extraordinary dual career while helping conceptualize T3's breakthrough innovation and shaping the brand's earliest identity.

3:25Kara Goldin:She is also an eye surgeon specializing in glaucoma and in 2023 actually returned back to T3 to help lead its next phase of growth and bringing with her a rare perspective that blends medical precision with deep consumer empathy. I'm obsessed with T3 and I was so excited when Dr. Julie Chang's team reached out to me about the products because it's just so great beyond the hair dryer, the rollers, the curling irons, all of the different tools, the hairbrushes. I mean, you name it. So, so good. So, without further ado, Julie, you have a huge fan over here, and I'm so excited to get more out about the backstory of T3.

4:17Kara Goldin:So, welcome. Thank you so much for taking the time. I'm excited to have this conversation.

4:48Kara Goldin:data and analytics, marketing, business operations, and more. It gives you fast access to specialized talent across 125 plus categories, making it easier to fill skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale support up or down without the commitment of full-time headcount. You can browse profiles, review past work, and even get help scoping the role so you can hire with confidence and get started quickly. With Business Plus, you can access the top 1 % of talent on Upwork. And with AI-powered shortlisting, you'll get matched to the right freelancer in under six hours. No endless searching required.

5:31Kara Goldin:Upwork also takes the operational hassle off your plate by handling contracts and payments in one place, freeing you up to focus on running and growing your business. And it's no surprise that thousands of growing companies already trust Upwork for everything from one-off projects to ongoing support. It's free to sign up and posting a job is easy. Visit Upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That is Upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's U-P-W-O-R-K dot com, Upwork dot com. I'm very, very excited. So for listeners who are just discovering T3, maybe they've seen T3 in their local stores or in advertisements out there.

6:29Kara Goldin:How do you describe the brand? What really makes it unique? T3 is a technologically advanced hair tools line that has women and stylists at the core, meaning that we innovate and make tools that are luxurious and beautiful, aesthetically pleasing, but with women, true needs of real life women at the core and what stylists are asking for. I think that's a very different proposition from, for example, being technological for the sake of impressing you with technology. As a physician, I am geared to bring results to a patient that they're asking for. And that same ethos runs in the veins of T3. It's what are modern day women's pain points with their hair routine and how can we solve them?

7:22Kara Goldin:So especially when you launched in 2004, you had a very robust practice as a surgeon, an eye surgeon. What gave you the idea that you not only needed to launch T3, but also that you could do both? Yeah, so, you know, I was a medical student at the time at the University of California, San Francisco, and I had met my boyfriend and he and I both realized that I was very, very busy with my medical school and my medical practice, but enjoyed beauty. I enjoyed cosmetics and skincare and fashion, and I had all that figured out and was spending gobs of money with the skincare and the cosmetics and fashion.

8:15But my hair was always extremely frustrating, a battleground of sorts, if you will. Hair that wouldn't dry quickly, hair that was frizzy, regardless of the amount of oil and bio silk and all the, these are the products that I used long ago. the things that I put in my hair just wouldn't control it. And he grew up in a hairdresser household. And we put our heads together and realized there was a huge white space in the hair tools category in that you could either buy a$20 drugstore dryer or a$100 professional dryer from a beauty supply store. But there was nothing in between for the woman who was very discerning, used to buying beautiful things that worked well, but they couldn't find those things in the hair tools category because it was a stagnant category with zero to no technology, with tools that look like they belong in a garage, yet women everywhere were expected to use them.

9:08And it was no wonder women were hiding them in drawers or frustrated with their hair. And, you know, the psychology of hair, as you know, it can be a frustrating thing. So we built the first super lightweight, very fast drying dryer that kept hair moisturized and frizz free, called it the featherweight and decided to price it at a whopping$200, which is 10x what normal people spend on a dryer. And then the key was to make it extremely beautiful because I am a woman after all and I want this thing to sit beautifully next to all the other creams and perfumes and things on my vanity. Make it very lightweight.

9:49Make it auditory-wise pleasant, so not a screeching sound. and then I want to package it beautifully and I want it to feel like a beauty product and put it in traditional beauty retailers. This was unheard of at the time. Hair tools sat next to blenders and microwaves and vacuums down in the basement of Sears or in the electrical appliance section of a drugstore, but they did not sit next to colored cosmetics and beauty. And it became clear to us we needed to speak to women in a way they were already familiar when it came to beauty and cosmetics. So not talking about voltage and wattage and, you know, speed, but talking about promise, results, your best optimal self, which is how lipstick is sold, right?

10:34It's not how much oil does it have in it? How much, you know, it's really a promise that you're selling. Of course, the product is and was amazing, but it was just putting it on its head and realizing that there's a huge opportunity here. Now going backwards, I never wanted to go into medicine. I was obsessed with fashion and beauty with a mother who was a nurse who herself was obsessed with fashion and beauty. But she told me I could go to FIDM, the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandise after medical school. And so I always had this itch, this creative itch to beautify things. How do I, I loved making over my friends.

11:16I paid a lot of attention to my hair, makeup, and clothes. And to have this opportunity to innovate and create in a space that was stagnant was just sort of an aha moment. Maybe some of it was luck. I don't think I ever thought to myself, I could handle this and this medical career and a company. If you ever think that far in advance, you'd be paralyzed with fear. There's no way. It's always one step at a time, right? Like one One day at a time. One day at a time, we'll order 5 ,000 dryers. And if we sell them, great. If we don't, then I fall back on my medical career. You know, it's just one step at a time.

11:51So I didn't know that I could handle both. It's just what we just did it.

11:56Kara Goldin:I love it. Did you always think, I mean, you've talked about being in beauty and design, but did you always think, I'm going to be a founder, right? Did you, I'm going to go and develop my own company? or was it more about, I have this idea that isn't on the market that I need to bring to the market? It was the latter. 20 years ago, there was no founder language. There was no founder story. I don't think the word founder was really, it was just the person, entrepreneur started a business. This whole idea of building a story around the mission of a founder and why they brought something to market and the storytelling around it really didn't exist.

12:43So for us, it was a practical thing. There's a need for this. The dryer dried my hair incredibly fast, made it frizz free. And we put it into the hands of stylists and editors. and we sold$4 million in the first year and people laughed at us and said, you're never gonna sell a$200 dryer. Our parents told us like, get ready for failure. It's not gonna happen. But the product worked extremely well. And no, I didn't go into it thinking, oh, I'm gonna be a founder of this company. It was, there's a need and we're gonna fulfill that need. And of course it then expanded into a whole range of tools. But it wasn't calculated.

13:27It was really solving a problem, which is, like I said, at the center of our company.

13:34Kara Goldin:So the price point for your first product, the T3 Featherweight Hair Dryer, you mentioned it was$200. Was any other product at that time that expensive or was you were really setting that bar, right? And so how did you speak to that when people, I mean, did you just let them try the dryer and see the comparison? Because it truly was unique, but sometimes people, especially I can imagine in 2004, you know, a price point might be something that, you know, that's enough, right? And especially when everybody else is, like you said, drugstore dryers, which obviously the T3 products are so different.

14:34Kara Goldin:But until you could actually try them, I bet it was incredibly hard. How did you get over that, Mark? It was very hard because we were using a completely different language when it came to hair tools. we were talking about you know like I said the benefits and and sort of speed the speed and frizz free and the way we were approaching it was this is a luxury product and there was a lot of pushback in the beginning that because they couldn't imagine this category being luxury so it was extremely hard. I mean, we would go to editors at Allure, Vogue. You know, we hired traditional beauty PR. That was something we decided to do and they didn't want to talk to us.

15:24They're like, it's technologically advanced. Like, you know, what does that mean? This is too expensive. So we did exactly what you were sort of alluding to is we left it in people's hands. We said, okay, like no matter what I'm going to say to you, it sounds new and weird and different. But I'd say, you know, let me just leave this with you. And this product worked so well that we would get calls back. And finally, Vogue had written an article, is the$200 hairdryer worth it? V$200 hairdryer. This just shows you that there was only one$200 hairdryer. Is it worth it? And it was a rave review about the efficacy.

16:07And so we really needed the experts, stylists and editors to speak on our behalf because no amount of marketing on our end, it was so new, the concept of spending that much money that we really relied on the product. I mean, product has to be king. You know, no amount of incredible marketing will help you if the product does not deliver. And thankfully, our product was outstanding and the word of mouth was huge. And we started having celebrity stylists speak out and saying this T3 dryer. And that's when Sephora reached out because they started seeing editorials in beauty magazines about a dryer.

16:49It's just unheard of. And they needed to know what was going on. So we got our first call from Sephora a year later.

16:57Kara Goldin:So at what point, and maybe it was at that point, where you knew that you were going to make it, right? that this was going to be more than just the featherweight dryer and a much bigger concept? I think after a year, when we hit that number in sales, I mean, we were ourselves shocked that it was resonating so much, which only confirmed, though, that there were many women out there like me that were really looking for a better solution and were willing to pay for it. At the time, I was spending$90 on an ounce of La Mer. So for two bottles of La Mer, I'm going to have this dryer that's going to last me for years, get me out of the bathroom in a third of the time and leave me with hair that's moisturized and frizz-free and healthy.

17:49And the idea of healthy hair, we didn't really talk about that, preserving hair health. It was all about styling and maintaining a style at any cost. You could fry it and color it and just kill it. And now we're all about health, health, health, even extending onto the scalp. But back then, it wasn't. But when people would use the product and see the difference and the way that traditional dryers would strip their hair of moisture and how our dryer over time maintained that moisture, it was huge. It was revolutionary, really. And so we knew that we were onto something, that women were lacking something, and we somehow tapped into that.

18:34Kara Goldin:So at what point did you branch out beyond the hairdryer? um pretty soon after because we were getting requests from the stylist like what when are you what else is happening so you know i think the cool thing was is is to have a hero product that works really well and to build that trust um we at the time used a semi-precious stone called tourmaline that when heated would release ions back then there weren't really like the high-tech ion generators that we have now. And that tourmaline story became very important. So then we used tourmaline and crushed it and used it in ceramic, which is the perfect conductor of heat in the most even, gentle way, and decided we're going to make hot tools with this.

19:24With the same concept of tourmaline, where you're still releasing that ions, which is important for the smoothness and glossy look of hair, and put it into flat irons and curling errands. And at the time we were, you know, distributing through salon as well, and really working closely with stylists who were more than eager to talk to us about what their thoughts were, how we could innovate on this product, how we can make it better. And, and it was also the first time that a company came to stylists and asked them what their thoughts were. This idea of sort of making a product based on community feedback, which we, you hear founders talk about all the time.

20:05But back then, nobody asked stylists their opinion. They were given a tool and said, use it and, you know, enjoy. But we were going back and saying, well, how could we innovate on this, Marcel? How could we innovate on what are some frustrations you're having? Well, the plates cool off so fast. Like, so then I have to wait for it to heat back up. Well, it turns out ceramic gives you continuous heat and we can make it technologically advanced in a way that we can apply even heat so it's not damaging, it doesn't cool off, and you have consistent performance. This is all in response to what people were telling us.

20:41And so that was also very, I think, at the forefront, at least for Hair Tools, was to have a community approach in evolving our products, which we continue to do to this day.

20:52Kara Goldin:I love it. So T3 has thrived against major competitors that have come into the marketing but still remaining founder-led. You have your self-funded companies based in Santa Monica. How have you stayed competitive along the way? because T3 launched in 2004, but is still one of the top companies in the space. How have you stayed competitive? The key to being competitive is to being very, very close to the consumer, really understanding the consumer mindset and the consumer's expectations. If we build, pardon the pun, in a vacuum, meaning ivory tower approach, We're going to come out with this great tech.

21:47It's going to drive faster. But to what end? And what is the actual result in the end? For us, that result and knowing what the consumer wants is intricately tied with how we make products, which is why our products at the end of the day are hands down superior because we are so, so close. We can be so close because I don't have investors or a board to tell me what to do. I've scrapped products You know, we came out with a product and i'm like this isn't solving anything and it's a gimmick I my team's actually really pissed off at me now because we've been working on this product for two years and I Just came out of a meeting and I was like guys We're not going to talk about this product anymore and we're killing it.

22:30Well, we already spent 150 000 developing it. I was like, yes, but I cannot speak sincerely and passionately to this product and know that I'm solving a problem for someone. And it's just another gimmick landfill thing that some woman's going to buy and stick in her drawer of tools. We can't do it. And so being privately held has also, I think, given us our competitive edge because we can pivot. We can pivot. We can see what the overall mood and trend is in hair, meaning like, is it more towards health? Is it scalp? Is it this? Like, we're very agile. And I think that does help us. It helped give us a competitive edge.

23:15I think it helps to be women founded too.

23:17Kara Goldin:I'm curious about that. So why do you think that? It's not to say men can't make women's products. Of course they can. Some of the most successful companies are led by CEOs who are men. And our product developer, our head product developer is a man, although he has a giant head of gorgeous curls. So he has, you know, long, gorgeous curls. So like he's very hair centric. I know what I want a tool to feel like in my hand. Now there's a lot of tools and I won't name them that are extremely heavy and feel like a workout or are ergonomically unsound. It's just to try to maneuver a big, heavy tool in the air near your face.

24:02I know that it needs to be lightweight and it needs to fit in this palm, not in a giant manhound, but like in my palm. I want it to sound a certain way because I have kids in the other room sleeping. We have sound engineers that see what is the perfect pitch that sounds more harmonious and less screechy. and then I needed to look beautiful. It's for me, aesthetics is very much a part of wellness, not just physical aesthetics, but your surroundings, the things that you engage with in your day-to-day, beautiful products. It's part of your wellbeing. I wanted that, my beauty ritual in the morning to be beautiful even in my tools.

24:46And so you can see that. There's a feminine touch. When you put our tools against anyone else, you can tell there's a female founder and a largely female group of women who will go on and on about the different shades of pink. Look at our satin blush. It's a grown up pink. That was not an accident. That was hours and hours and hours of looking at different Pantone colors. A group of women have an incredible creative team that decides on the color. And these are the little attention to detail that I think women appreciate.

25:16Kara Goldin:Oh, I absolutely, absolutely agree. What is your favorite product? You've launched a lot of different products. Actually, you also turned me on to the showerhead as well, which is unbelievable. So you've even gone outside of the kind of salon products into the home much more, not to say that the hair products that you had developed before aren't used in the home too. But what is your favorite product that you think is kind of, maybe it's a sleeper product that not a lot of people know about, but is really your favorite? We have a device called the Air360. It's a multi-attachment device that dries, smooths hair, and curls it.

26:08I use that device every single day. It's our number one product, our most viral product. But the smoothing brush attachment on that device is my most favorite attachment in the entire line. It's something I use every day. And if I don't use it, my hair will become frizzy by end of day. I can use less products because it's made out of ceramic and it smooths my hair. It's a device that I have in a UK plug as well because we go back and forth to Europe a lot, especially to London. I have it in the UK plug. I cannot live without it. And women who do not know how to do a two-handed blowout, this is the device to use.