Drybar Founder Launched $225 Million Hair Styling Empire as a Stay-at-Home Mom - YouTube

I really struggled for a long time figuring out what I wanted to do with my life and I also grew up in a generation where my parents were like, we hope you marry well, kind of mentality. And I did want to have kids really badly and I was excited to be a mom and I loved the opportunity of being able to stay home with my boys but ultimately found that I wanted to do something for myself. Hi, my name is Ali Webb and I am the founder of the Dry Bar and author of the Messy Truth. I was born in New York, in Long Island, New York and I grew up in South Florida. My parents were entrepreneurs, not a big surprise there and I think that's really where I got that kind of entrepreneurial spirit and I grew up watching my parents operate a business. It was an upbringing that would turn out to really serve me as I got older and started Dry Bar but one that I didn't even really pay attention to as a kid.

我花了很长时间才弄清楚自己想要做什么。我成长的时代，父母一直抱着"希望你能嫁得好"的心态。我确实非常想要孩子，对做妈妈充满了期待，也很开心有机会能在家带着儿子们。但最终我发现，我还想为自己做点什么。大家好，我叫阿里·韦布，是Dry Bar的创始人，同时也是《混乱的真相》一书的作者。我出生在纽约长岛，在南佛罗里达州长大。我的父母是企业家，这点不奇怪，我想这也是我拥有创业精神的原因。我从小就看到父母经营企业。这种成长经历在我长大并创办Dry Bar时起了很大作用，但小时候我并没有真正意识到这一点。

I did not go to college. This wasn't for me. At a high school, I was pretty confused about what I wanted to do with my life and I was really perplexed by how all my friends knew what they wanted to do and people were going to college with a pretty strong idea of what they were going to do with their life which was like crazy to me to have an idea of what you want to do when you're 18, 19 years old and it just wasn't the path for me. So I moved to New York City and I lived in New York basically all of my 20s and worked a lot of different jobs. I really loved it. I jumped from fashion to PR to hair, all the different things, learning how to kind of take care of myself which I guess is a similar experience that you have in college. I am a long time hair stylist. I've been doing hair for gosh a million years now.

我没上大学，那不适合我。在高中时，我对自己的人生方向感到相当困惑，而我实在搞不懂为什么所有朋友都知道他们想做什么，大家都带着明确的目标去上大学，而我觉得，能在18、19岁的时候就确定自己想做什么，实在是太疯狂了，这条路不适合我。所以我搬到了纽约市，基本上度过了我整个20多岁，在那里干了很多不同的工作。我真的很喜欢那段时间，从时尚到公关再到做头发，换了很多行当，也学会了如何照顾自己，这大概和上大学的经历差不多。现在我是一名经验丰富的发型师，做头发这行，天哪，我干了好多年了。

I started when I was 20. Went to beauty school in Bookerton, Florida where I grew up and then I moved to New York and did hair in New York, the Johns of Hogg and then I moved to LA and that's when I had my boys. So I was a stay at home mom for about five years and then I started a mobile blowout business called Straight at Home and I was only charging 40 bucks to go to women's house and blow dry their hair which is pretty inexpensive for any city especially LA. But it was during that time that I realized there was this pretty big hole in the marketplace. There was nowhere for women to go for an affordable blowout in a really nice place and have a great experience.

我在20岁时开始这行。在我成长的佛罗里达州布克尔顿上的美容学校，然后搬到纽约，在纽约的约翰·霍格（Johns of Hogg）理发。之后我搬到洛杉矶，那时我有了我的孩子，所以我当了大约五年的家庭主妇。然后我开始了一家名为 "Straight at Home" 的移动吹发业务，我只收取40美元上门为女性吹干头发，这对任何城市，尤其是洛杉矶来说，都算是非常便宜的。但就是在那段时间，我发现了市场中的一个相当大的空白。没有一个地方能让女性以实惠的价格在一个非常好的环境中享受吹发和美发的体验。

You know there were the discount chains where you didn't really know what you were getting or there was the high end salons where it was like very expensive and the stylists wanted to use that time to do cotton color. So you know I saw this like small opportunity and that very much came from my mobile blowout business and the price point seemed right that if we could charge little enough that women would do this often and that was kind of the whole idea for the business model. And you know it was definitely a risk because nothing like this had ever been done and you know to do blowouts at $35 you would have to do a lot of blowouts you know in a day and so that was the big question mark if this business would work and ultimately women went really bonkers for this idea.

你知道，过去有那种你不知道具体会得到什么服务的打折连锁店，或者非常昂贵的高端沙龙，发型师们希望在那段时间做一些复杂的染发服务。所以，你知道，我看到了一个小的商机，而这个想法很大程度上来自于我之前的移动吹风服务。而且价格似乎也很合适，如果我们收费足够低，女性们就会经常来做头发，这也是整个商业模式的核心理念。当然，这绝对是一个风险，因为之前从未有人这样做过，如果每次吹风收费35美元，那么一天之内就需要做很多次吹风服务，所以最大的问题是这个业务能否成功。最终，女性们对这个想法非常狂热。

I'm not joking the first day when it was so busy and we had seen what the rest of the week looked like in terms of appointments. We were like we were definitely onto something here and it was a very like emotional day because we realized this thing could be really huge and there's a real big opportunity here to grow this thing into a big business. We didn't really make any money in the beginning and you know I was taking such a small salary and I'll never forget once we made one of our biggest hires we hired a president of retail and her salary requirement was so bananas to me and especially because I wasn't making any money and but that would lead to us raising our first big tranche of money which was about $26 million from private equity and when we did that my brother and I both took money off the table and that was when we made our first millions was when we took a sliver of that $26 million towards the company for ourselves and that was really you know Castanaya who's now Stride that was you know that was something they wanted us to do to get to have some of the fruits of our labor and at that point we had I don't know 10, 11 stores and so we were on this ride and we were this rocket ship to success.

我不是在开玩笑，那是第一天，店里非常忙碌，我们看了接下来一周的预约情况。我们当时觉得，我们确实发现了一条出路，那天非常情绪化，因为我们意识到这个项目可能会非常巨大，有非常大的机会将它发展成一个大生意。最初我们几乎没有赚到什么钱，我的工资也非常少。我永远不会忘记，有一次我们雇了一个零售总裁，她的薪资要求对我来说简直是天文数字，特别是因为我当时几乎没什么收入。不过，这导致我们筹集到了第一笔大资金——大约2600万美元的私募股权。在我们达成这笔交易时，我和我的兄弟都从中分了一些钱，那是我们第一次赚到上百万。当时我们把这2600万中的一小部分留给自己，这是Castanaya（现在的Stride）希望我们做的，让我们享受一些劳动成果。当时我们有大概10到11家店，我们就像坐上了一辆驶向成功的火箭。