Under The Hood: Ryan From Jolie

Give us the backstory on Jolie - how did you discover the problem you’re solving? Why did it resonate so much that you built a business to solve it?

Jolie was a result of my building the digitally native footwear brand, Greats. The idea for Jolie had been years in the making but once I realized how harmful our water is to skin and hair, the bridge from there was quite short. One day I had a ‘shower thought’ to create a beauty wellness company that purifies water for better skin, hair, and wellbeing.

The beauty industry has completely overlooked the source of many of the issues they are trying to solve for including dry skin, acne, damaged/ shedding hair,  change in hair color, eczema, and more (that source being the water). This is a problem that is found in almost 100% of our public water supply, so it’s a problem worth solving. That’s where Jolie begins… Jolie is “step 0” in everyone’s routine. 

There are a lot of Jolie copycats popping up. Looking back to when you started, did you expect this? How do you mentally see it as a “win” vs. a threat? 

Copying is the greatest form of flattery and we fully anticipated it. Although, I would say we didn’t expect people to copy our tone of voice and thought they would have their own brand vision as opposed to copying ours. But our consumer is smart and knows that Jolie is the innovator in the category so it’s fine by us.

The market is so big that it would be unreasonable to think that Jolie would be the only player in the space so it’s a rising tide scenario. Jolie just happens to be the best and biggest boat.

How do you think about balancing the focus you put on strengthening your own IP and advantages against competitors vs. focusing on growing the category?  

This is a brand new market and one with a lot of white space. Our focus is on growing the category at this stage. That said, we are the only clinically tested and lab-certified filtering shower in the market at this point. 

What’s one thing about operating Jolie that you didn’t expect to be true when you initially started?

I came into this as a second time founder so there were actually quite a few expectations of what should happen. Our goal was to develop an elegant business and one that could scale and operate without a lot of baggage. We measure that in different ways but in our 2nd year in business we managed to generate $10M per full time employee. That’s pretty unique.