Jolie CEO Ryan Babenzien on how to market a shower head as a wellness product in the post-DTC era

Jolie launched with the thesis that it could convince people that a shower head is a wellness product.

The bet seems to have worked. The company, which says it is profitable, is about three years old and brought in more than $25 million in revenue in 2023. Co-founder and CEO Ryan Babenzien credits two things with its success: an ardent fan base that evangelized the brand and a growing omnichannel strategy.

Babenzien joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and spoke about Jolie's growth and future business strategy.

Jolie makes a filtered shower head. As Babenzien described it, this is "step zero" of everyone's skin care routine. "The one constant… is your shower," he said. "You may change your shampoo every week, but you still shower."

With that, Jolie has taken great pains to market itself as something beyond a product you would buy at the hardware store. Some of the brand's first store accounts were in untraditional spots. This was by design -- find retail environments that cater to people looking for better wellness products. For example, Jolie is available at Erewhon as well as Revolve.com. "That was sort of step one, let's show up where the customer with an interest in this stuff will show," said Babenzien. "It's pretty simple, not a lot of complexity, common sense. And from there, we can start to scale out."

Once the customers found Jolie, the company made user-generated content a big part of its marketing play. "People influence people," Babenzien said. With that, the company has amassed nearly 20,000 pieces of unique UGC over the last few years.

The idea was to use this free content as a way to offset expensive digital marketing. "Paid marketing has not performed well for over a decade. And yet the entire industry is still spending the majority of their marketing budget on paid," Babenzien said. "It just isn't working, guys."

With that the focus is on more growth, but keeping profitability in mind. While the company has focused on beauty and wellness destinations, that doesn't mean Jolie won't be sold in some more traditional environments.

"We see us showing up in Home Depot one day and Costco," Babenzien said. "Even though we're a beauty wellness tool, we're just going to be positioned slightly different in Home Depot."