Filtered Showerhead Brand Jolie Enters Ulta Beauty As It Aims To Surpass $100M In 2027 Sales

Filtered showerhead company Jolie has forged its biggest retail partnership yet, joining the brands Apothékary and Neom in Ulta Beauty’s 70-door wellness merchandising concept that launched last month.

The beauty specialty chain will offer four finishes of Jolie’s $165 showerhead and its $36 replacement filter. Established in direct-to-consumer distribution in 2021, 90% of Jolie’s sales are from direct-to-consumer distribution, but it’s been increasing its brick-and-mortar presence by striking partnerships with a diverse set of retailers, including Goop, Nordstrom, The Container Store, Revolve and Erewhon, and premium hair salons. As of the end of last year, it was carried in more than 1,000 physical locations.

In 2025, wholesale is expected to account for 10% to 15% of Jolie’s revenues. The brand is on track to generate over $40 million in revenues this year, up 40% from last year, and it projects 40% annual growth through 2025. In two and a half years, Jolie anticipates surpassing $100 million in revenues. 

“Our focus is growth and profit, not simply growth. We are solidly in double-digit EBITDA year-over-year,” says Jolie co-founder Ryan Babenzien, adding about wholesale, “While on a percent basis this may seem small, the value of our retail partners is greater than just the revenue driven through the channel. It’s another touchpoint for consumers to discover the brand.”

With Jolie’s filtered showerheads designed to improve the strength, hydration and health of hair, the brand landing at Ulta via wellness might be a surprise. With salons in its locations, Ulta has long been known for haircare, and the category constitutes about a fifth of its business. (Makeup is the retailer’s largest category by sales.) However, Ulta has been struggling in haircare recently, and comparable-store sales for the category decreased a high single-digit percentage in the second quarter this year.

Babenzien views the wellness selection as the perfect home for Jolie at Ulta, which the brand began discussions with earlier this year. Although wellness has been a tough category for beauty retailers that haven’t figured out how to communicate about, curate and organize it effectively, Ulta has committed to it and brought in emerging brands across merchandise categories such as Love Wellness, Lemme, Womaness, The Good Patch and Homebody as part of its wellness push.

The retailer’s latest wellness initiative comes about a year after it expanded its in-store The Wellness Shop assortment to almost all of its 1,374 locations. The Wellness Shop made its debut in 350 Ulta locations in 2021.

“We’ve never been a traditional beauty product,” says Babenzien. “We shouldn’t really be in the traditional hair section or next to hair dryers. Retail in itself is evolving and that’s what we like about Ulta. They’re understanding that the beauty space is evolving, the types of products and the behaviors that people have are changing, and therefore there needs to be stores that represent that.” 

Among Jolie’s stockists so far, Babenzien identified upscale Southern California grocer Erewhon as an exceptional retailer for positioning and revenue. The brand entered the chain in 2023 and quickly rolled out to table displays in most locations featuring 50 to 75 Jolie showerheads. Likening Erewhon’s business approach to Jolie’s, Babenzien says, “They move really quickly, and there’s no bureaucracy.”

This year, Jolie made a major play for a channel it had its sights on from day zero: salons. The highly fragmented channel—Babenzien estimates there are about 900,000 hair salons in the United States—largely dependent on distributors presented challenges for Jolie, but it opted to break into it in a way that made sense for its DTC DNA. Jolie created a direct buying experience in collaboration with 100 locations and set up a separate landing page for them where salon clients could purchase Jolie products. Babenzien says, “It worked really well to the point where we got a lot of confidence that this was going to be a great channel.”

“We are building what we believe is one of the great innovations in hair health in a long time.”

In the summer of this year, the brand hired Larissa Rhodes, who previously held sales leadership positions at Hairstory and Olaplex, as its VP of sales. Under Rhodes leadership, Jolie’s salon door count has ballooned from 100 to 1,000. 

Prior to Jolie, Babenzien was founder and CEO of Greats, a sneaker brand acquired by Steve Madden in 2019 five years after it launched. Greats raised about $16 million in outside capital before its acquisition, but Babenzien hasn’t gone the external funding route with Jolie. The brand remains bootstrapped, and Babenzien and co-founder Arjan Singh, a former consultant at Boston Consulting Group, are in no rush to sell it. 

“We get phone calls weekly from a range of interested parties,” says Babenzien. “We are building what we believe is one of the great innovations in hair health in a long time. We’re having a really good time doing it. When the right partner presents itself, we’re happy to listen.”