Meet Drybar's 48-year-old self-made millionaire who launched a $225 million hair styling empire as a stay-at-home mom

Fortune

Alli Webb didn’t need a college degree to build a blowout business. Webb, the 48-year-old founder of blowout empire Drybar and author of The Messy Truth, went straight from high school to New York, where she jumped from job to job until she landed on styling hair, a career she never left.

Transcript

00:00 I really struggled for a long time figuring out what I wanted to do with my life.

00:03 And, you know, I also grew up in a generation where my parents were like,

00:06 "We hope you marry well," kind of mentality.

00:09 And I did want to have kids really badly, and I was excited to be a mom.

00:13 And I loved the opportunity of, you know, being able to stay home with my boys,

00:18 but, you know, ultimately found that I wanted to do something for myself.

00:21 Hi, my name is Ali Webb, and I am the founder of The Dry Bar and author of The Messy Truth.

00:27 I was born in New York, in Long Island, New York, and I grew up in South Florida.

00:31 My parents were entrepreneurs, not a big surprise there,

00:34 and I think that's really where I got that kind of entrepreneurial spirit.

00:40 And, you know, I grew up watching my parents operate a business.

00:43 It was an upbringing that would turn out to really serve me as I got older and started Dry Bar,

00:49 but one that I didn't even really pay attention to as a kid.

00:52 I did not go to college. College wasn't for me.

00:54 Out of high school, I was pretty confused about what I wanted to do with my life,

00:58 and I was really perplexed by how all of my friends knew what they wanted to do,

01:01 and people were going to college with a pretty strong idea of what they were going to do with their life,

01:06 which was, like, crazy to me to have an idea of what you want to do when you're, you know, 18, 19 years old.

01:12 And it just wasn't the path for me, so I moved to New York City,

01:16 and I lived in New York basically all of my 20s and worked a lot of different jobs.

01:20 I really loved it. I mean, I jumped from fashion to PR to hair,

01:23 you know, all the different things, learning how to kind of take care of myself,

01:27 which I, you know, I guess is a similar experience that you have in college.

01:31 I am a long-time hairstylist. I've been doing hair for, gosh, a million years now.

01:34 I started when I was 20.

01:36 Went to beauty school in Boca Raton, Florida, where I grew up,

01:38 and then I moved to New York and did hair in New York for John Sahag,

01:41 and then I moved to LA, and that's when I had my boys.

01:44 So I was a stay-at-home mom for about five years,

01:48 and then I started a mobile blowout business called Straight At Home,

01:51 and I was only charging $40 to go to a women's house and blow-dry their hair,

01:54 which is pretty inexpensive for any city, especially LA.

01:58 But it was during that time that I realized there was this pretty big hole in the marketplace.

02:02 There was nowhere for women to go for an affordable blowout in a really nice place

02:06 and have a great experience.

02:07 You know, there were the discount chains where you didn't really know what you were getting,

02:10 or there was the high-end salons where it was, like, very expensive,

02:14 and the stylist wanted to use that time to do cut and color.

02:17 So, you know, I saw this, like, small opportunity,

02:20 and that very much came from my mobile blowout business.

02:23 And the price point seemed right,

02:25 that if we could charge little enough, that women would do this often,

02:29 and that was kind of the whole idea for the business model.

02:31 And, you know, it was definitely a risk because nothing like this had ever been done,

02:35 and, you know, to do blowouts at $35, you would have to do a lot of blowouts, you know, in a day.

02:42 And so that was the big question mark, if this business would work.

02:44 And ultimately, women went really bonkers for this idea.

02:49 I'm not joking.

02:50 The first day, when it was so busy,

02:52 and we had seen what the rest of the week looked like in terms of appointments,

02:56 we were like, "We are definitely on to something here."

02:59 And it was a very, like, emotional day because we realized this thing could be really huge,

03:04 and there's a real big opportunity here to grow this thing into a big business.

03:09 We didn't really make any money in the beginning,

03:11 and, you know, I was taking such a small salary.

03:14 And I'll never forget once we made one of our biggest hires,

03:17 we hired a president of retail, and her salary requirement was so bananas to me,

03:23 and especially because I wasn't making any money.

03:26 But that would lead to us raising our first big tranche of money,

03:30 which was about $26 million from private equity.

03:33 And when we did that, my brother and I both took money off the table,

03:36 and that was when we made our first millions,

03:38 was when we took a sliver of that $26 million towards the company for ourselves.

03:43 And that was really, you know, Castaneda, it was now Stride,

03:46 that was, you know, that was something they wanted us to do,

03:48 to get, to have some of the fruits of our labor.

03:51 And at that point we had, I don't know, 10, 11 stores.

03:55 And so we were on this ride, and we were this rocket ship to success.

04:00 (Music)

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