Ryan Babenzien (Jolie) - The Shower Idea That Built a $65M Business with Just 5 Employees
On this episode, Jolie CEO and Co-Founder Ryan Babenzien joins us to unpack:
- The shower moment that turned years of whiteboard thinking into the idea for Jolie, a filtering shower head positioned as a beauty and wellness product, not a plumbing fix
- Why having the lowest return rate in footwear e-commerce at GREATS still wasn’t enough to make it a good business, and how that frustration became the “one size fits all” blueprint for Jolie
- Selling GREATS to Steve Madden, planning to take four months off afterward, and lasting four weeks before starting Jolie
- Why Ryan believes a brand can be built on word of mouth alone, a philosophy he traces to a broader lifetime of observing human behavior rather than just his earlier years as a talent agent in LA, and how giving away the first 150 units of Jolie turned into nearly 80,000 pieces of user-generated content and a 70% conversion rate in four and a half years
- Why Jolie leans into being the “bad boys of beauty,” including the truck ad that told New Yorkers their shower water was dirtier than the truck itself
- The clinical trials Jolie started funding as soon as the company turned a profit, and the growing list of benefits, from less hair shedding and breakage to improved skin elasticity, they’ve since proven
- Why a nearly overlooked retention problem, an unsubscribe flow that sent just one email and no texts, got fixed fast once the company’s new president, a former summer intern, was asked to focus on it
- The surprising culprit still driving most of Jolie’s subscription churn, failed credit card authorizations rather than people actually canceling, and why Ryan admits they haven’t fully automated a fix yet
- Why Ryan thinks the venture-backed world’s obsession with celebrating capital raises and headcount is “crazy,” and how a friends-and-family round, after regretting how little he raised at GREATS, shaped a five-person team now doing $65 million a year
- The hands-off hiring philosophy that followed years of personally approving every product photo at GREATS, and why Ryan says most people who claim they don’t want to be managed are actually wrong about that
- Why the company is named after his wife, and how she’s made peace with having a shower product named after her
Learn more about Jolie at jolieskinco.com
