The Exchanges

Q And were you at all concerned that this wasn't a full service salon? That the, I mean, the, the, the, this didn't exist before, right? Like come in, quote unquote, just for a blowout.

A 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, this concept work? The name of the game was volume. Ironically, there's so many puns in this world of mine, but. You know, and at the time I thought if we could do 30 to 40 blowouts a day that that would, you know, get us to a good point. Not, not even really making that much money. That was more like breaking even. Um, but, but it would work, you know, and, and, and, 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, 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 gonna turn it into this massive multi-million dollar empire, blowout empire. What I thought was gonna 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.

AI assessment note: “I wasn't concerned, but everybody else was”

Q 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, what happened that you were able to accelerate so quickly?

A Well, you know, we, we realized very quickly, very quickly, like within the first few days, like we had captured lightning in a bottle. It was like, holy shit. Like women were coming in in quite literally droves. I mean, we were turning people away left and right, which sucked. The first couple of stores were really clunky, like getting those open and figuring out how to get, you know, people into those stores. Uh, and then we, we eventually like started hiring people who were smarter than us, who had like knew how to do this. You know, we eventually took, You know, angel investment from some friends and family and customers. And then we realized that we needed to, 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. And then we raised about twenty six million was our first big tranche from Castaneda with the intention of, you know, opening a lot more stores and starting a product line. And that was about, I don't know, two-ish years in.

AI assessment note: “we raised about twenty six million was our first big tranche”

Q So, w, was that part of the original vision? Did that come in later? W, w, where did that originate, and how, cause that's a whole other business you gotta figure out.

A Yeah, and really, I mean, You know, I, I don't know if you're, you know this, but like we sold the product division for two hundred and fifty five million. We didn't sell the whole enchilada for, which is an important distinction because the product was like a little bit of an afterthought for everybody else, not for me. 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 myself and whatever, that 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, they, you know, I think we earmarked like a million dollars, which is like more or less what you need to start a product of that scale. Scale and size.

AI assessment note: “I knew very early on I wanted to do product because what I was finding”

Q Given this journey that you've been on, given what you've learned from Drybar, given, um, uh, the, the personal experience the last several years, um, why Squeeze?

A Well, Squeeze really came out of my brother's brain, you know, because he was not participating in, in Drybar, because he has no hair. Um, and we were, we were long time, like, massage goers our whole life. Our parents were, and so we just kind of inherited that behavior. But similar to Drybar, you know, which, when we started Drybar, there was two bad choices in the market. There was like, you know, the discount chains where you could get a blow up, the experience was bad, and it was variable pricing and all the bad things. And it's similar with Squeeze, you know, and we found that we were frustrated, especially my brother, with the choices that were available for massage, which was like the discount chains, which are like, leave a lot To be desired. And then the high-end spas, you know, where they're, where massages are, you know, upwards of 300 dollars for a massage at a spa, like a, you know, or a hotel spa or whatever. And so we felt like there wasn't this, like, affordable, you know, but great experience place to get a massage. And we really wanted to build it and felt like we could, you know, and that we kind of, you know, kind of cut our teeth on dry bar and that we could do this with Squeeze. And, you know, the beauty of Squeeze is that One of the many things is that it's, it's, even though it's a brick and mortar and you go in for a massage, it's, it's an app based li…

AI assessment note: “we felt like there wasn't this, like, affordable, you know, but great experience”

Q Right, so you're not just slapping a dry bar label on some existing product, you're actually doing product development, right?

A Because, I mean, listen, the way, you know, it's not really, anybody who works in this industry knows that, like, there's a, 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. There's, 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, and they will put something together for you and, 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 I, 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, 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, was again, thinking about the customer and what she wanted after she had a blowout, but it was like everybody was much more focused on the stores and the growth of the stores, which was, which was right, you know, it was like we were growing at leaps and boun…

AI assessment note: “you're coming at it and saying to a lab, I want a product”

Q Ali, I imagine when you opened your first brick and mortar dry bar location, people came in and saying, great, I need to cut, color the whole shebang. And you're like, no, no, no, no, we just do the, the blowout. So what was that customer education experience like?

A 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, but 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, you know, what's a blowout? I mean, a lot of people were like, what's a blowout? And, you know, 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, you know, of the puzzle of going to a salon, the whole experience, and 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, it was an interesting time because we, even as we were opening more and more locations there, there were a lot of questions, you know, from women about like, what, what's blowout? You know, it's like, if you, if it wasn't a thing that, if you didn't know,…

AI assessment note: “I would always explain, like, you know when you go and get your hair cut”