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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