For Jolie Founder Ryan Babenzien, Showers are a Simpler Business Than Sneakers

At Jolie, co-founder Ryan Babenzien likes to keep things simple.

The product line-up has barely changed from the showerhead and replacement filters the brand launched with four and a half years ago. There are just five full-time members of staff, and when universities or hotel chains offer to kit out their hundreds of bathrooms with Jolie’s product, the answer is often no.

Despite this, Babenzien says Jolie is “more successful in every metric” than Greats, the direct-to-consumer sneaker brand he sold to Steve Madden in 2019. “It’s bigger, it’s more profitable, it’s done more revenue, and it’s becoming a bigger brand.” Babenzien says Jolie made $50m in sales in 2025.

Greats was an early success of the DTC era, where brands promised quality goods at lower prices by cutting out retailers. Founded in 2014, it raised a total of $15m and built up to net sales of around $13m by the time Babenzien sold.

It was a good time to move on. As the economic environment shifted, businesses built on DTC foundations came under pressure. Allbirds, once valued at over $1bn, recently sold off its shoe business for just $39m.

For Babenzien, stating over meant an opportunity to build in a category better suited to selling online, and without the distraction of venture capitalists valuing consumer businesses as though they were tech companies. “Capital raising was a thing people celebrated when I was building Greats, but truthfully I never understood why it was such a big part of the story,” he says. “Jolie is different. We’re not focused on how much money we raise, but how much we make.”

While sneaker brands sell endless shapes and sizes, and have to deal with complicated things like return logistics, Jolie is far simpler by design. Babenzien's thesis is that he could build an even more successful business with one product, focused on vanity, that people used every day. “That felt like a magic mix of things that could work, and it’s how Jolie ultimately came to be.”

Experience helps, too. A first-time founder muddles through supplier agreements and hiring decisions, figuring things out as they go. The second time around, founders are more discerning with their time. After mapping Jolie out, Babenzien brought on Arjan Singh as a co-founder — a first-timer eager to get into the operational weeds where Babenzien had already done his time. “The first time I was learning things, but I don’t need to do that again,” he says. “Arjan is younger, it’s his first company, and he’s at a stage in his life where he wants to, and can, do the things I don’t want to do. It's a perfect partnership.” Mistakes learnt the hard way at Greats — like hiring the wrong people and not letting them go quickly enough, or agreeing to deals that stretch the business too far, too fast — are easier to avoid, too.

There are new challenges, though. The pressure Babenzien puts on himself to make Jolie bigger than Greats is self-imposed, but still real. “Even though I’m a beauty outsider, the learning curve wasn’t that hard,” he says. “But there is success and there is failure, and I’m going to be judged on that. You want the second one to be bigger than the first — more impactful, more widely known.”

The irony, he notes, is that it would probably be easier this time to raise money if he wanted to. “Because we have a track record, we’re more investable,” he says. “But a lot of my peers the second time around are doing exactly what I’m doing. They’ve tried not to raise that much money, if at all, and they’re trying to do it differently. Smarter, more efficiently, and more profitably.”

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