Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
Alli Webb, founder of Drybar.
- Alli Webb cofounded the blowout salon Drybar in 2008, and it is now a thriving business with more than 100 locations across North America.
- She built the business with her brother on the financial side and her husband on the design side, an arrangement that was ultimately successful but initially brought unique challenges.
- Webb explained how she learned that founders need to adapt their responsibilities and refine their focus as their business scales.
Alli Webb is the cofounder and visionary behind Drybar, the popular blowout salon that took a regional trend mainstream. At Drybar women can get their hair blow-dried into a signature style, without a haircut or color.
"I feel like I'm so grateful and proud for what we have built. So I think the fact that we've brought Drybar to so many women, I know it sounds hokey, and probably maybe a little silly, but the fact that we kind of enhance women's lives," Webb told us in an episode of Business Insider's podcast "This Is Success."
Webb started styling hair when she was a kid, and worked in the industry for 20 years before settling down in Los Angeles. She thought she wanted to be a full-time stay-at-home mom, but after a while she started to get a little stir crazy. So she started the small business that turned into Drybar, going home to home and delivering affordable, professional-grade blowouts.
Drybar is now a multimillion-dollar business with more than 100 locations across North America. Webb founded Drybar with the help of her brother, Michael Landau, and they've become a resource to fellow entrepreneurs on a podcast of their own, "Raising the Bar."
Listen to the full episode here:
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- Comedy icon Caroline Hirsch
- Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman
- "Million Dollar Listing" star Ryan Serhant
- Business coach Marie Forleo
Transcript edited for clarity.
Alli Webb: I basically threw a blow-dryer and all my tools in a duffel bag, and my husband made me this one-page website; it was called Straight At Home, which is the name of my little mobile business. And I started posting it all over town and saying: "Hey, I'm a stay-at-home mom. I'm a longtime hairstylist. I'll come over and blow out your hair while your baby's sleeping and charge $40." The way I came up with that was two twenties seemed really easy for everybody.
So I started this mobile business, and it was during that time - I'd say I operated that business for about a year - and I would always ask my clients, "When I can't come to your home, what do you do?" Because $40 to go to someone's home is very inexpensive for blowouts - now it is, back then it was, that was 10 years ago. So what I was learning from operating this business is that I was getting very busy very fast. I was only charging $40. I was running around town like a crazy person, blow-drying all my mommy friends, and I realized when I couldn't go to their house and I'd say, "What do you do when I say, 'No, I can't come'?" They're, like, "Well, I either skip it altogether or go to the discount chain down the street where the experience isn't great. " Or they go to their cut-and-color salon, where they're overpaying for a blowout and they're getting pressured to get cut and color and whatever else happens.
So that's when I realized, "Wow, there's no option for women at an affordable, nice place, where there's no pressure and it doesn't smell like perm." That just didn't exist. Nowhere - that wasn't a thing. If you went to the Fantastic Sam's or if you're in New York City, the Jean Louis David, there's those in-and-out places that are cheap and fast, but the experience isn't great. You're sitting next to a kid getting your hair cut, and it's just like, blah. I felt like I needed to turn my mobile business into this brick-and-mortar.
Feloni: Would that have been a crazy idea at the time, a place just for getting blowouts?
Webb: Totally, because this was in 2008 and it didn't exist. Now they're popping up everywhere; we have 100 locations. The category has grown tremendously. We basically created a category, on accident. I didn't mean to do that; I just really wanted a place like I had dreamt of as a kid. A place where women could go for a blowout. It was a very simple, not-thought-out idea. It was something that totally didn't exist back then.
The benefits - and trials - of a family business
Drybar
Webb cofounded Drybar with her brother Michael Landau, left, and her husband Cameron.
Feloni: Had you ever done anything entrepreneurial before?
Webb: Yeah, for sure. I mean, my brother, Michael Landau, who's my business partner, we've always been super close. He's three years older than me, I should mention, and before I actually took the plunge and went to beauty school, I was still trying to figure out my life mode. I lived in New York City. I was working in fashion. We were both working for Nicole Miller, who was a big designer; this was like 20 years ago. We decide to move back to South Florida, where we grew up, and open Nicole Miller boutiques. I was like 21, 22 at that point; my brother was like 25. It was so not the right thing, and even though my parents had clothing stores, so that also seemed like the natural thing for us. But I knew we almost killed each other. We were fighting like cats and dogs, we were both so young and inexperienced and stupid.
Feloni: Why were you fighting so much?
Webb: We were just so young and inexperienced. We were in the wrong thing, and so we were kind of driving each other crazy, because there was all this underlying tension of we're both not happy in our lives. Which is one of our biggest mantras at Drybar. Life is too short to work someplace lame. I kind of joked that Michael was always playing golf and I was running the stores. So I was probably a little bitter about that. He might differ. But honestly, I was the manager of the stores. I was running the stores. It was a women-focused kind of business, and he felt a little uncomfortable in the stores, too. He did all the buying and the back end, which is similar to how our partnership is now with Drybar. But it just wasn't a good fit for either one of us.
Feloni: It's interesting. If you had, before Drybar, this one entrepreneurial experience, and it was with your brother, and it went terribly, why did you -
Webb: Do it again?
Feloni: Yeah.
Webb: Well, my parents asked the same question. When we told them we were going back into business together, there had been a lot of time, obviously, between that, we'd both grown a lot. I'd gotten married, I had kids, and Michael was also, by the way, such a big supporter of me going to beauty school when I decided to leave Nicole Miller and do that. Which, by the way, my parents were not, my parent were like, "What? You want to go to cosmetology school?" Of course, I couldn't foresee Drybar happening, but I felt like I'd go back to New York, and I'd do runway, and editorial, and I'd find this really glamorous life around hair. And my brother saw that vision too, but my parents didn't, and Michael was a really big supporter of that. And there were a lot of really intense conversations about it. When I went to get Michael on board, and I remember saying to my brother, "It can't be like it was." He knew that and felt that too. Once we had those conversations about this being very different, and it couldn't be like it was, and a lot of the things we did to push each other's buttons, we vowed to not do again.
Feloni: Can you give me example of maybe one of those conversations where you were, as you were saying, figuring out how to not push each other's buttons? Because I feel like that could apply to any cofounders working together.
Webb: Everyone probably has different buttons. It's learning how to talk to each other in a respectful manner. More than anything, though, it is the sense of respect that we have for each other. You can just feel that when somebody respects you and somebody doesn't. When someone really wants to hear your opinion and wants your thoughts, versus somebody who's just kind of dialing it in and you feel like it's not genuine. They're feeling like they're asking you because they have to ask you, versus wanting to really, genuinely have your opinion. There's so much back-and-forth, it's such a two-way street with Michael and I on that because I know he really values my opinion and he knows I really value his opinion. That's why the partnership works. It also goes to Cam, my husband, you know. We defer to everything creatively to him, and have such massive respect for what he does. And vice versa; he's not trying to get into the business side of stuff, and neither one of them are trying to get in and control the hair piece of the business.
And the beauty of it, and the part that's the most personally satisfying to me, is that my brother had always been kind of the overachiever of the family. He always landed on his feet and was always going to be successful. I was a little, like, the late bloomer, as my parents called me. "What the Hell is Alli going to do with her life?" So to be able to find this kind of success that we have found together is obviously very rewarding for me. The fact that I had the expertise in this business that I was going to do with my brother gave me that - not leg up - but I would say level of respect from my brother because he knew that I knew this business, the hair-salon business, like the back of my hand, and he knew nothing about it. Him and Cameron are both bald - no business being in hair.
Feloni: I was going to say that. Two of your cofounders, bald men. I don't know if it would better if they had '80s Iron Maiden hair, but still.
Webb: Well, my husband's really envious of guys with really good hair, because he doesn't have any, and neither does my brother. I mean, my brother took some time to come to terms with losing his hair, but then they started shaving and it looks cool, and it's like a big guy trend, so it's all good.
Feloni: Did that ever become a problem if they can't experience the product that they're helping build?
Webb: Well, that's funny that you say that, because it is. I don't know if you've ever personally walked into a Drybar, but it's definitely like - it feels a little bit like a woman's boudoir. Guys, I think, feel uncomfortable if they're in there for too long, because it's like a bunch of women getting their hair done. That's how my brother and husband feel. Cameron has had to be in the shop a lot more because we shoot a lot of videos and stuff.
Feloni: Even though they helped design it?
Webb: Yeah, because it's crawling with women, and they feel really uncomfortable. Most guys that I talk to tell me that. Not all, but a lot of guys feel that way. So, yeah, no. They really can't experience the product. But they watch it. If you sat in Drybar for long enough, you would see over and over and over and over again, the way a woman comes in with her hair in a bun, and her hat, and she's very serious, and focused. Then the way she is when she's walking out, there's this pep in her step, and this confidence, and she's looking at every mirror. You watch that, and you see that, and you're like, "Wow, we really captured something here." And they can feel that, too.
Feloni: Were you ever afraid, or are you ever afraid, of when you're working with family, especially your husband and your brother, if there's a business disagreement, that it could seep into your personal lives?
Webb: Oh, yes. That has happened. When you run and operate your own business, it's really hard to draw that line between personal and business. We're always all talking about the business. It's just the fabric of our lives, really. There's definitely been fights and disagreements, but it goes back to that level of respect we have for each other, that we trust, and that there's an innate trust that's there. I think you don't always have to be just with your family, and a partnership with your family to have that, but having somebody you really trust that feels like family is crucial.
Feloni: Is there a moment that you could point to, either in the early days or even as it was scaling, where one of those were maybe threatening a personal relationship but you figured it out?
Webb: Yeah, I mean in the very early days I was kind of the conduit between Cameron, and Michael I would be sending - this is very early days - I would send Michael something that Cameron had designed and been like, "Hey, what do you think of this?" Then Michael would be like, "Well, I don't really like blah, blah, blah, blah." I'd say, "Well, Michael doesn't like this." And Cameron would be like, "What the f---. Why doesn't he like that? It's so stupid." And I would be like, "I don't know, I'm just the in-between here." It was a bad place to be. Finally, it sounds so simple in retrospect, but finally I was like, "You guys just talk to each other I don't want to be in the middle of this anymore." Then, once they did that ... And they were like my brother-in-law, they were already family and friends. But it forced them to stop using me as this go-between of this back-and-forth, because that's never a good idea. For them to talk directly, there was a much greater level, they're not technically related, so there was a little more respect, I guess, between them, versus just saying whatever they wanted to me, because I was the sister and the wife. So, that was a lesson we learned really early. Then what happened, it was kind of magical, because Cameron's such a great designer, and marketer, and my brother is such an amazing marketer. So, when the two of them would get together and talk about things, it would get even better. It was like a blessing to actually get them to talk to one another versus talking through me, which was not a good idea. Which we learned the hard way. That's why the partnership works so well.
Feloni: Staying in different lanes.
Webb: Yeah. Having strengths, and knowing your strengths, and your weaknesses. What you're good at, and what you're not, I think, is incredibly important for any business, no matter what it is. I feel like just how Drybar is built on this premise of doing one thing and doing it really well. I think that I have a lot of different skill sets, but my main skill, and best, and highest use with this brand, is making sure the hair looks and feels a certain way in the training of the hair stylists, the customer service, how the shop's run. That's all my stuff. That's the stuff I know and understand. Michael is dealing with finding leases, and negotiating terms and all the sh-- I hate. And Cameron, I didn't really understand branding until we started building Drybar, and Cameron was so adamant about everything being yellow. I always tell the story our first Valentine's day, the shop was open, I wanted to bring in pink flowers, because it's Valentine's Day. Valentine's Day, it's pink and red. He was like, "No the flowers have to be yellow."
Feloni: Go against branding.
Webb: Yeah. Everything has to be yellow, and gray and white. I slowly, but surely, learned that from him. And I learned so much from my brother about figuring out spaces, and learning how to raise money, and all those things. So, we've all taught each other so much about each other's areas, but there is still that level of respect of like, "This is what you do. This is what I do." So, we divide and conquer.
Turning a salon into a chain
Drybar There are now more than 100 Drybar locations across North America.
Feloni: Then, at what point did you realize that you didn't want to just have one location that could serve your community, but this could actually be something that you could turn into a business that just could scale?
Webb: It was such a roll of the dice. It was in 2010 that we first opened the doors, it was in the middle of a recession, and that means everybody thought we were crazy. I remember we were opening in this space in Brentwood Gardens, which we're still in today. The shopping center was dead, and I remember my brother and I going there during construction, there was nobody in the center, and my brother was like, "How is this going to work? There's nobody here. Who's going to come?" I was like, "No, I think it's going to work." And I'd had the support from the women from my mobile blow-dry business, who I felt like were going to come, and we would figure that out. That's what I was kind of hoping. But it was scary, and I had people telling me that every business that had been in the location we were opening had failed and closed. So it was a little scary in the beginning. That really just made us feel like we really had to bring the marketing and figure out how to get the word out, and make sure people knew about this, and hope they ... The goal of the business then, which is still the goal of the business today, is doing enough women, volume. Having enough women come in. Back then, we thought it was only going to be 30 to 40 blowouts a day, which would be an awful day now. We do more like 100 women, give or take, a day. We very quickly realized once we opened Brentwood, and it was so mob from the get-go, It was like being the cool club that nobody can get into. Which isn't great for business. We wanted to get as many women in as we could because we wanted to do the business.
Feloni: But at least there was hype.
Webb: There was so much hype, and there was so much demand. I remember women coming in since we were in Brentwood, women would come in from Beverly Hills, and the Brentwood women would be like, "Why are these Beverly Hills women here? Get them their own shop." I remember calling my brother, who was at the time in the very early days still running his business, and I was like, "Mike, you've got to find us more locations." I couldn't even come up for air. I was literally in the store for the first six months, seven days week. I didn't leave. I could not do anything else but focus on getting more stylists, because we didn't have enough stylists, because we totally underestimated the demand. Making sure the blowouts were good, the customer service was good. I was doing blowouts all day long; it was crazy. And I still had two little kids at home, and a husband, and all that. It was so nuts in the beginning. I was like, "Mike you have to find us more locations. We cannot meet the demand." In the early days we used to have walk-ins or pop-ins welcome on the front window. We were like, "We got to take that down."
Feloni: No more, yeah.
Webb: Women would come in and they're like, "Well, you said you can just pop in." We were like, "Yup, we were wrong about that." Because everybody was booking versus the walk-in nature of the business that we thought it might be, which it turned out not to be. So, it was a lot of learnings in those early days. Yeah, we opened that second location within six months of Brentwood, and Studio City, and now we have 100. It's like, I don't know how we got there. It's been a lot.
Feloni: Just even you speaking personally, aside from your cofounders. The seed of this idea started because -
Webb: I have curly hair.
Feloni: Yeah. Because you have curly hair, and because you just felt there was something that you felt was missing that you needed to create something. At what point did it become your desire became something different? Something bigger?
Webb: I feel like once we opened that first shop, and I saw the response that we were getting from women, from the press, from everywhere, I was like, "Wow. We are really on to something." It was really invigorating, and I felt very empowered and I felt like, "Wow, I have to bring this to women everywhere. We have to figure this out and keep going." It was a total life change. My life totally turned upside down and I was traveling all the time. I went to the first 50 store openings. One of the things that I'm most proud of is the fact that we have created all these jobs. Also, kind of bridged this gap between when you come out of a beauty school, the typical path is to work in a hair salon, then be someone's assistant for a year, or two while you're learning and honing your skills, you're getting fed clients. Drybar has bridged that gap where, we can't always take everybody right out of beauty school, sometimes they're not ready, But it's definitely like, middle road for stylists to go, and be able to have this job at Drybar, which, becomes a lead generator for them working at their cut and color salons, and gets them comfortable without doing anything permanent to a client. You're not cutting or coloring, so it's this great way for them to get more and more comfortable with the business. They're doing blowouts anyways, assisting for somebody. I mean, there's so many things that I'm proud of, but that's something that I feel I wished Drybar had existed when I came out of beauty school. It has served so many hairstylists, who will then go on to work at a full-service salon and then come back to Drybar when they're slow and pick up some shifts. So it's a really fluid system. So it's good.
Feloni: Yeah. When you were starting off, you were lucky enough to have a resource with Michael, where he was able to have 250 grand for the seed money for it.
Webb: Yeah.
Feloni: Do you think if you didn't have that resource, that you would have found a way to get this going?
Webb: One hundred percent. I mean, I think that I was certainly lucky that I had him there, but there's so many ways to raise money. Which now I, on the other side, know and understand, that whether it's friends and family, getting a small-business loan ... As someone who's starting a business as a budding entrepreneur, you have to tap all your resources. Even places that you don't think, you never know who would be willing to invest in you, or who knows somebody who would be willing to invest in you, or partner with you. You have to ask a lot of people and really ... I tell people that all the time. You probably, within your personal friend network, there's a lawyer who can help you with all the legal stuff for a small percentage of the company, or whatever it is. There's a lot of ways you can get really creative with raising money, finding partners to get to that next level.
Feloni: There are some entrepreneurs I've talked to where they said that, in their early days, they were driven by a kind of desperation. That they were flat broke or just had nothing. This was their only shot.
Webb: Yeah.
Feloni: If Drybar had flopped, would you have had something to fall back on?
Webb: Yeah, I think that I always felt if Drybar didn't work, we were all pretty smart, capable people; we would either find a job, or, yeah, I'd just find something else to do. I have this tangible skill: I know how to do hair. I could always go work at a salon. That was always something I could do. Even a fallback. Even though that's not what I wanted to do. I tell people who want to start their own business that too. Even if, God forbid, it doesn't work, you can go get a job if you have to. You're a really smart, capable person. You're not going to die; this I not the end of the road; this is just a bump in the road. You get up, you figure it out, and maybe this isn't the right thing. I get asked that question a lot, but I always felt like we were all going to survive if this didn't work, we were going to lose some money, which would really suck, but we were going to pick ourselves up and figure out what was next.
Feloni: What was driving you? If there wasn't this desperation?
Webb: It was passion for this thing that I felt didn't exist that ... I kind of inadvertently stumbled upon. We didn't invent blowouts. Blowouts have been around forever. But to discover this opportunity and this huge hole in the market, I think that was very exciting to discover something new and exciting. I think that's kind of what gets me excited, is being able to build something from the ground up. Or take something that exists and make it really great. That's really what we did with Drybar. I just wanted women to be able to go someplace and have great hair in a cool space that wasn't that expensive. That was my vision; I think that's what kind of kept me going. And then to see it actually work, and women love it, it was like, "Oh!" I just wanted to keep doing it again and again.
Feloni: As this concept was scaling, at some point you bring in an outside CEO to start running it. How did that feel?
Webb: That was not an easy thing, and I think along every step of our growth that you need to know when you need help and understanding things that you've never done, and not only that, but things that you don't necessarily want to do. For me, again, the marketing, and the hair, and the customer service, that stuff was what I wanted to focus on, and not payroll. Nobody wants me to focus on payroll. We all recognized the things that we were good at and what we weren't. So, we little by little started bringing somebody to help us grown the business, and our business was growing so incredible fast. It wasn't until we raised some real money, with Castanea, that again, 10 or 11 stores, that they kind were urging, Castanea was urging us to bring in a professional CEO, and I was like, "What? We don't need a professional CEO; we're doing a great job. Why would we want to change it, nothing's broken, the business is on fire, let's not do that." I was very bratty about that. And my brother was the CEO at the time. So, I also felt like, Michael's doing such a great job, we have this great partnership, and I felt like, if we brought somebody else in from the outside, it was going to change the culture, and I was very against it. And my brother was less skeptical about the idea. I think he recognized the fact that he'd never been a CEO before, he'd taken the company pretty far, but it may be time for somebody who actually had experience with this level of management that it would require. So, we met with a bunch of different potential CEOs. A lot of them were amazing, they had huge salaries, and I was like, "How much do we have to pay these people?" I was like, "This whole idea, I do not like this." But it wasn't until we met John Heffner, who's our CEO now, and he had come from OPI and he'd been in the beauty world forever. It's funny, and I always tell this story, because he's this 6-2, as corporate-looking as you come, and I remember seeing him from across the room, and I was like, "No. No way." We need someone cool. This guy isn't cool.
Feloni: This is like corporate America.
Webb: Shame on me. I judged him so much by the way he looked, but, after we spoke to him for 20 minutes, I was like, "Oh my God, I love this guy." He worked in other founder-led organizations, so he really understood the dynamic of working with a founder, and that he couldn't just come in and overhaul everything, and change everything. That's not what he was proposing. I remember him making this analogy of me, Michael, and him being a three-legged stool. Without the three of us, everything falls apart. I was like, "That's a good one." Because I felt like that was what we needed, was somebody who was going to come in and partner with us, versus someone who's going to come in, like this ivory tower, and change everything. I didn't feel like anything needed to be changed. I think that we needed management, and we needed systems, and things that Michael and I weren't necessarily good at. But we didn't want anybody to change the culture, and to change the core of what the business was. Which, John didn't want to do, and didn't do, and hasn't done. He has brought in a level of management that we just didn't have.
Linking success with the customer experience
Drybar
In Drybar's early years, Webb personally trained many of her stylists.
Feloni: Through this all, what do you think the biggest challenge that you've overcome has been?
Webb: I think for me personally, it is that letting go of a lot of the decision-making, and going from making every single decision, to giving up a lot of that.
Feloni: And you were even personally training for the technique, right?
Webb: Yeah. I personally trained a lot, then I trained other people how to train, and that has grown, and grown, and grown.
Feloni: So, basically you've learned how to let go of certain things, and just focus on what you can specifically do.
Webb: Yeah, totally. I think that I feel like I have a little bit more of a bird's-eye view of the business, versus being in the weeds like I used to be. Where I still weigh in on a lot of things, but I don't ultimately make the decision on everything anymore, the way I used to. There are some hard-and-fast things that are just me, but there are a lot of other really smart people at our organization now who we've empowered to make a lot of decisions. The business couldn't be what it is without that. I feel like there was years ago. I would be a bottleneck. We were progressing so slow because everybody was waiting for me to sign of on something, or Michael to sign off of something, or Cameron. And you know, it's like we've had to get past that a little bit. If I'm being totally honest, there's times that I don't agree with all the decisions that are made, and that is a really hard pill to swallow. But it's like, we have to keep going, and we have to learn from our mistakes, and we have to look back and say, "You know what, we should have done this differently, but here we are." I think that's all part of the learning and growing process.
Feloni: At this point, how do you personally define success?
Webb: That is a good question. I feel like I'm so grateful and proud for what we have built. So I think the fact that we've brought Drybar to so many women, I know it sounds hokey, and probably maybe a little silly, but the fact that we kind of enhance women's lives. Women tell me they don't go to a board meeting without a blowout, or if they have an important date, or sometimes, they're just want to feel better about themselves. Just the fact that we've built this amazing business that so many women love is amazing.
Feloni: So it's seeing that tangible impact?
Webb: Yeah, it's seeing how ... Yeah, that we impact women, we provide jobs, which continues to grow, and grow, and grow. The fact that of our 102 stores that we're at now, almost all of those stores are run by managers who were once stylists. So in our shops, we really try to grow these stylists who show management skills, and are just the hard workers we keep promoting, and promoting, and growing. Sometimes it's harder than others, but we feel really strongly about hiring from within, and promoting those people. Which, I also think makes people want to come and work for our company, because they know there's a path to growth and there's so much opportunity. And there is so much opportunity at our company.
Feloni: Is there a single piece of advice, or maybe the best piece of advice that you would want to give someone who wants to have a career like yours?
Webb: I think it's a couple things. I think it's starting with something that's an extreme passion. Obviously, I know this firsthand. If you're building a business, it takes so much time, effort, money, blood, sweat, and tears, all of it. You can't even understand that until you're in the trenches of it. So, if you're not so over the top passionate about it, it will never work. And then I would say being really open to feedback. And being receptive, and making sure the people around you know that you're receptive. The thing I hate the most is "yes" people. The last thing, I feel like probably every founder, and leader, feels this way, you don't ever want people around you who are just telling you what they think you want to hear. Nothing drives me more crazy. I want you to tell me the truth. I want to know. I don't want to be shielded from things either. I want to hear if something's going on in one of our stores. It makes my team a little crazy when clients directly email me something that happened. Because they're like, "Why are they emailing the founder of the company?" I'm like, "Why wouldn't they email the founder of the company?" I want to know everything. I want to know the truth. I want to know things that are going on in my company. If you surround yourself with people who are going to give it to you straight, I think you're going to be so much more successful, so that you really know what's going on. I think a lot of people find themselves in an environment that's not like that. Or they themselves are not open to feedback, and you don't really want to hear the bad stuff. You've got to hear the bad stuff to be great.
Feloni: Thank you so much, Alli.
Webb: Yeah, thank you for having me. This was fun!