How Alli Webb Grew Drybar From Her Backseat To A $70 Million Blowout Chain

On March 10th, blowout chain Drybar will cut the ribbon on its 57th salon, in Virginia’s ritzy Tysons Corner mall. By the end of the year, there’ll be 70 Drybars across the U.S. and one in Vancouver, B.C., with plans to expand across Canada in 2017.
The six-year-old company is on track to improve on its 2015 revenues of $70 million, with a quarter of those sales now coming from its fast-growing line of prettily-packaged styling tools and treatments.
Drybar’s numbers are impressive on their own, but its trajectory is staggering when you consider where founder Alli Webb was just seven years ago: in her 2001 Nissan Xterra, braving Los Angeles traffic to visit clients of her mobile blow dry service Straight at Home.
It was later in 2009 that longtime hairstylist Webb, seeing an explosion of interest in her $40 blowouts, enlisted the help of her marketer brother Michael Landau. He agreed to invest $250,000 to open the first Drybar salon in affluent Brentwood, Calif. He was Webb’s business partner, and the company’s first CEO. Webb and her husband put in their $50,000 savings.

Thankfully, Webb’s hunch that women would pay $40 (and $45, since a 2015 price hike) for expertly-applied hot air has proven correct. Drybar has only ever offered styling services — “no cuts, no color, just blowouts,” as its tagline reads.  the company was reporting $20 million in annual sales.
“We did, to a certain degree, change behavior,” Webb said. “I say that with a lot of humility. It’s such an easy luxury that can change your day. The awareness for this category really wasn’t there before.”

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Its 250% revenue growth in the intervening years has been in part organic, with demand driving the opening of new Drybars from coast to coast. In New York alone, there are 13, with a 14th planned for Brooklyn’s pricey Boerum Hill this year.
It’s also been thanks to a canny roll-out of products designed to replicate the Drybar experience at home, including a bestselling $195 blow dryer in the brand’s signature canary yellow. Women can buy Drybar’s goodies at the salons themselves, online, or — crucially, for both revenues and brand recognition — at Sephora and Nordstrom JWN -0.91%.
The company’s current marketing campaign encourages women to “extend” their blowouts, which last three or so days, with $23 dry shampoos and $45 silk pillowcases.
Webb knows, though, that you can’t really fake a Drybar ‘do in your bathroom. Nor can you recreate the ambience regular customers have come to expect of the chain: its sunny palette, with vases of yellow roses refreshed weekly; the champagne or coffee offered on arrival along with trays of mini cookies; the subtitled chick flicks playing on flat-screens, their sound drowned out by the drone of hair dryers.

Drybar’s just-launched Extend Your Blowout kit.

“There’s a secret sauce that is not easily duplicatable,” said Webb. “In the early days my brother and I were apprehensive to talk about what sets us apart.” Now, despite a low barrier of entry to market and a slew of competitors, she’s more candid.
Consistency is key to Drybar’s magic formula. The chain’s “menu” of available styles is as recognizable to repeat clients as Starbucks SBUX +0.10% drink offerings. They know to order a ‘Manhattan’ for sleek, straight locks and a ‘Mai Tai’ for loose, beachy waves. A Drybar blowout in Atlanta is intended to look the same as one in San Francisco or Dallas.
Webb herself oversees a robust training program to ensure each stylist takes the same steps, down to conversational patter with clients and the direction of a brushstroke to achieve a certain look.
“There’s an educator in every shop, and then layers above that,” she said. “There are guardrails in place.”
Drybar’s trajectory hasn’t been entirely without a hitch. Growth was slower than expected in 2014, said Webb. “We took a beat, and took stock.” That same year, Drybar hired a new CEO: beauty industry veteran John Heffner, most recently of nailcare line OPI. (Webb’s brother Landau remains board chair.) “It was about getting the company from level to level,” Webb said.
Next up, along with planned openings in Canada: conquering Europe. Webb has her sights set on London as Drybar’s first outpost outside North America. In recent years, blow dry bars have cropped up in the English capital, but the idea of dropping $45 (or more, as is often the case in the U.K.) on a temporary hair style is still new. “They’re ready,” said Webb. So is the company. Since 2010, Drybar has raised $53 million in funding to expand.
Now chief creative officer, Webb is regularly approached by women who swear by Drybar for business travel. What these frequent flyers are paying for is a guarantee of good hair whether their meetings are in Phoenix, Chicago or Washington, D.C.
“We’re selling confidence,” she said. “That’s worth more than $45.”