YouSaid · the spoken record

Amy Errett

lines on the record: 88
first: 2025-08-18
most recent: 2025-08-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I, you know, I think a lot of it is upbringing. I was raised by a strong woman. You know, in some ways, the harder it gets, the more I dig in. My coach and I talk about, well, could you still be really motivated and I'll have to torture yourself? That's the essential question. And I think the answer to that is yes. I'm getting there. My wife would tell you I'm much more pleasant to work with.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They can be with your desk. By the way, they're kind of of similar age, so we'll be together with three walkers. And so... I don't know. You know, I'm I don't think I'm cut out to retire”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thanks a lot, guys. I really appreciate that. I'm ready to go. That's a dance. Yeah, as I joke with my investors, I will have a walker as I ring the bell on the New York Stock Exchange.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's an element of both. I think I work really hard, really hard. And I think I've been lucky. As I used to say adventure, great venture capitalists position themselves to get lucky. They hang around in the right places and they talk to the right people and they know enough relationships and they have the capital. But most of the time their outcomes have some luck to do with it. So I think it's a healthy mixture of both those things. And I feel grateful for that.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you. And we are growing pretty significantly. And it's still hard. I think consumers in general are fatigued and scared of the price of eggs and gasoline. And for any consumer company, it has an impact on the emotional state of your buyers. I also think that this is a good thing for us to prove that hair color is pandemic proof and recession proof, because that just means it's going to happen no matter what happens.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Predicted the IPO market closing, I wouldn't have predicted some of the instability that consumers are feeling. But my head's down every day because I want that big outcome.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought it would take 10 years. I thought that this kind of category, because you have to build your reputation and efficacious feedback, you know, really different than a razor, right? This is like you've altered my appearance. So now I got to figure out whether I'm willing to give you the business to take that risk. So I thought it would be slower. I also thought that we had a chance to build something that was a legacy, an iconic brand that changed the industry. Remember, we're using the same box of hair color in our hair color bars that we sell. It is not a different product. It's the same. So we're an omnichannel business where the box of color we think is superior. Would I have predicted this curveball now? No. So I, just like every other entrepreneur in growth stage company, because that's what we are, we are more a private equity target. I wouldn't have”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Extremely hard. So, and if you look at the IPO window, it's non-existent for consumer companies. So we're still like anybody else fighting the good fight. I mean, it's not gotten easier.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Profitability wasn't. Now the world has shifted to wanting both. People want you to grow at least 20 plus percent top line, but they also require profitability. And to do both those things is not easy.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“General. If you're not AI, you're not, right? That's the conventional wisdom that if you're not AI, you're not something that's going to give venture returns. Of course, the founder is going to tell you how different we are, right? As I call it, the lies one tells themselves. One of the things I talk about in the company all the time. You can believe your own stuff because you're used to saying it.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or Practer and Gamble at that level. So our window sort of, we self qualified ourselves out of a certain window. And now I will say that to you that there's a limbo window now, a significant limbo window for consumer companies now.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, but having been an investor, I thought the chances of that were slim because remember in the pandemic a lot of these strategics just went away. They pulled back. And in addition, remember, I have a very nascent business model. So I got it really quickly like, oh, this could be really good, but not now. And there's other window that we had already passed. Many of these strategics buy things that are sub $100 million in revenue. When something gets bigger, It becomes harder for them to get the board to approve”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you're never going to get real estate in places that we have it today. We could never afford it today if these were brand new deals. And I knew that all those people that came to us were going to go back to their stylist. So, could we give them an opportunity to stay in Brandt? And it's hard to measure that. We think a number have stayed in brand, but we've also grown since then. So our numbers as a company never went down. We kept the doubling of the business and then have grown since then every year.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, the opposite was happening. However, I had this instinctual thing like this is going to come to an end. So sure enough, past pandemic, our e-commerce business started to, you know, we weren't gaining as many customers. But we also did an interesting thing was we took a lot of real estate because we understood that commercial real estate and four walls was at an all-time low.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so you can imagine how overwhelmed our customer service department was. And so I decided, I said, I don't know how long this is going to last, but these people need jobs and we need more train colorists. The majority of the people in our customer service are X colorists. So we had a way to say, okay, out of the 300, how many of you want to stay? And we'll send you, I think bought, well, we bought 300 Google Chromebooks in two days with headsets and shipped them to the people that wanted to stay and then did what would have been months of training in four days and put them to work. Some of them are still in customer service and never went back to stores.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, one of the things that was happening was the online business exploded, but it was a lot of women that went to Ceylon. So they had no idea what color to buy, even when the quiz told them they were unsure. So our inbound, we were getting 16,000 inquiries a day.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, you're going to test my ability here. You don't have to remember all of them, but just give me a minute. Ammonia PPD resourceinolates, gluten, blah, blah, blah, right? Got it. And we've put in three things, ginseng root, extract, argon, oil.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we've invested a lot here to be safe about this. And we talk about Better For You formula and we are very factual about these eight things that we factually have taken out that nobody else has taken out.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we have a technology enabled company. We all know that a busy woman lives her life with her phone. And so the camera, we talked about taking a photo. The camera became something and is something where we let you take a picture and on one side of your hair, you see your natural color and then you can swipe and see Madison Reed colors and see what you might look like. When somebody uses that, they convert 30% more than any other customer that doesn't use it. And in addition, the same quiz is given to every customer on their first Madison Reed hair color bar visit because we have a belief that we should allow you to go to any one of our 95 locations and have the same outcome. And so if we don't log in the color that the stylist puts on your hair, that wouldn't be possible”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first one was the pop up in flatiron closed and we found the permanence base one block away. So flatiron was the first one.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I have spent a lot of time like rationalizing and this would be bad. And here's the reason why I can't. Every single person that is no longer at Madison Arena has gone on with great things in their life, with courage and dignity, and we've treated them well. But I could have skipped a bunch of humiliation of them. I think it's humiliating for someone to do a bad job”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have remended that relationship, but it took a long time. And then the third one was the hardest because he was the closest to me as the co-founder and handled finance and handled logistics. And I'll never forget that two other relatively senior people came to me and asked me to come into the conference room and said, Amy, where are you? And I'm like, what do you mean? And they're like, so-and-so is really terrible at his job. And why aren't you doing anything about this? Like, are you not paying attention? And so my denial, I have this saying now when you know you know.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In his life. And so there was a lot of honest conversations between us. And that was amiable in the leaving. I think the key about someone's leaving is to figure out what they need, what motivates them to be okay. And in that case, kept a desk, kept being listed as a co-founder, kept an email address. In the second case, it was clear that this person couldn't do their job as the CMO of the company, that there were no we couldn't get things done, the hiring was slow, the branding was not as crisp as it needed to be. The media allocation of dollars was off. And that required, that was my closest friend, and that required just really honest, really honest, painful conversations.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had to learn really quickly honesty and directness with people. And to be really clear about expectations and to try to separate that I like you from this isn't working. You're not doing your job. Here's tangible examples of what is going on. In the first case, it was just clear to everybody in the company that the first guy that left just he was going through a hard personal time, which made it even worse because, you know, it was a hard time.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that all four of us were the right cultural fit with each other. Like we wrote the values of the company together and they're still the values of the company. So there wasn't a... A difference of, if you will, how we wanted the company to operate or how we treated people or what were the values. I think that I did not get the level of expertise that one needed to be in a technical business like this. So, you know, one co-founder was focused on finance and the supply chain. And a supply chain part of this business is really a big deal, especially when you have product coming from Mindley. And what I thought was that his experience would suggest he knew how to do that. And that started to fall apart as soon as the company scaled.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is on me. This is definitely on me. These are four, you know, three extraordinary human beings, wonderful human beings. This was Amy's magical thinking, as I call it, to put something together with a group of people that I liked, which is a bias, by the way, that one hires for liking a lot as a certain bias that I would suggest everyone start thinking about. It's not just about like. And I thought I could will it to work. And it didn't. And it would say it cost the company a couple of years in retrospect of... Of what I would call substantial developmental leaps that we needed to take.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And we had four co-founders when I started. And I believed that they all represented sort of the cream of the crop from where they came before. And all three of them are gone from the company through some of the most painful experiences that I've ever had in my life. These were three people that I cared deeply about. Two were personal friends. And in one case, I've lost that friendship. That is really hard. And it set us back as well. Because when a business starts scaling, but the people that you have there can't scale with it, the business moves at the rate of the slowest senior person. What I've come to understand. And I learned a lot my Series A investor said Amy, four co-founders is too many. And I said, no, it's not. And boy, was he”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's amazing how branding works. I do radio and podcast commercials to tell the story about naming this after my daughter. And a very senior person at Alta kept hearing it on the way to work and went into the buyer and said, do we have that hair color that's named after a founder's kid? Because it's better ingredients and we're going in that direction. And the woman was like, I don't know what you're talking about. And then they contacted us. And it just, again, synchronicity. The buyer used to work for our head of product at Sephora. They knew each other. It was just. Serendipitous And in my infinite wisdom, I said, we don't go on other people's shelves. We're a D2C motto. We control all of our own business. And my head of product looked at me and said, Amy, I think we should just hear what they have to say. I think you're crazy”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Only be ninety minutes, which is part of the model. You're in and out in 90 minutes. And so What you can do. So we opened a small pop up in flatiron. We spent $25,000 of the 75 for out-of-home advertising, like billboards on sides of the buses and phone. Booth, still phone booths in New York. And in five weeks, we were totally full. And we had no idea what we were doing. And it had been in operating salon, so we didn't need to do the renovation to put Sinks in and stuff. But it was really clear that there was a lot of things that were going well, but a lot of things that we had no idea.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was like, oh, curious. That's curious to me. And it was not like three. It was like hundreds. And at this point, we had maybe eight stylists that were in our call center. And I started to ask them, do you think this product is good enough to use as salon quality as we advertise? And they're like, absolutely. These are people that used to work in salons. So yes, I went to the board. said interesting idea. Why do you think you can disrupt salons? Because the only reason to do this is if you could do it better than a traditional salon, which took us down a technology path much like the path of that color matching quiz. Could we make appointments on a mobile phone? Could we keep all the data for the customer? Could we build an app for a stylus that work for us that made the application?”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were two things that happened that spurred that. One, stylist started reaching out to us asking if they could buy our color directly from us to apply to their customers' hair in their salons.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not, I don't believe you're going to have a successful business, Amy. I don't believe you can give me a 10X. Right, that's the piece.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So if you are a guy and you know nothing about hair color and you don't color your hair or if you do, you're not telling anyone, you don't pay attention to how much your wife or your daughters or those people are doing it around you, it isn't relevant. So it wasn't, in retrospect, it felt very personal at that time. Remember, I identify myself with being successful, successful. What do you mean you said no? Are you telling me my baby is ugly? But in retrospect, I've come to realize that this was not personal. It was just relative to using your capital. This isn't the place that you'd want to invest in because you didn't think this is the important part that we get venture returns.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The series A was highly sought after for some of the reasons that you talked about. And then when we got to the Series C, not so much. And from that period on, it has been a difficult business to raise money for. And here's the key. Most people invest in things they can relate to.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And sales started to trickle in, trickle, the word trickle. But the great news was people that purchased it stayed. So we learned trial by free, not so good. If I pay for it and I love the results, they stay. And that has been a hallmark of the company, high retention.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Story Yeah, that's called not. The business model wasn't sustainable. And for us, it was like, oh, okay, this was deal seekers. That's what we thought. These are just deal seekers. The box is probably sitting there, never used, right? And so that taught us like a lot about these kinds of deals. However, the boomerang of that was all that email that went out to people that didn't take the offer, there was all of a sudden a lot of exposure and the PR articles and the influencers talking about it. And slowly but surely, we started to introduce in those days just Facebook ads, which in those days weren't expensive compared to what they are today. And we were able to start targeting that very specific 38 plus woman professional of a certain household income level.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that it was maybe 7,000 or something like that. So in a small company, that was substantial from the beginning out of the gate. You got 7,000 customers. Then the knock good thing happened. Very few of them came back.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exact value. Yes. And so we had really good success with the, we were shocked the number of people who took the box, but then again it was free. But it was hair color and a big risk.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gave away a lot of free boxes. The good news of our business is it's very high margin. So it appeared like a lot of money, but compared to the cost of acquiring a customer, it wasn't a lot of money compared to a Facebook ad, right? So I'll never forget. One of our engineers early on said, I'm going to build this thing in the office where a bell would ring. And the bell would ring every multiple of 58 because our first address was 58 South Park. And the group on thing went live on Groupon and the bell just, there was like three days where the bell was ringing every millisecond. There were a lot of people that took the offer for the trial.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we had hired a PR agency that was pretty well known in beauty. And we had developed a launch plan of getting a very famous stylist to tell people that this was efficacious, that this was salon quality hair color, that they could trust and use at home. And we had a big, what would now be called an influencer event in their salon in New York City. And lots of press came. Lots of people let us do their hair, believe it or not. And it was very, very successful. And so now all of a sudden all of these blogs, all of these magazines, all the online magazines and content are saying this hair color is amazing and you can buy it online and it's better for you. And so initially the first bang, if you will, was really PR and influencer driven.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and the idea was since we knew that we wanted it to be a subscription-based business, that building the core of the subscriptions would scale the business faster. So you have to need a splash to get above the sort of noise for these women and figure out a way to stop them from using what they're using now and have them come to you. Having been a VC, I knew that it was going to cost a lot to acquire customers initially.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, 38 to be exact, 38 in older. That's one acceleration of gray hair starts showing up. And our business model makes sense is based on the repetitive usage. So the more someone colors their hair, the more money they're worth to us. And so it was very important to get that market. 50% of women in the U.S. color at home. So that is a bigger market than people thought. And that's who we were focused on. The at home user that wanted a prestige product with better ingredients who had gray hair.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Looking for influencers, but also we saw an opening with the age group that we were actually targeting, which was women that are starting to go gray.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a meaningless word, but lots of people use it. So we knew that if we got early adapters, maybe people that had been sick and they cared more about what they were putting in and on their body, that we had an opportunity. And so the marketing in the beginning was about better for you.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes and yes. We marketed and still market as ingredients you could feel good about. And we talk about an eight-free formula. So we're very factual. We're not aspirationally. We don't use the word clean because that's a word”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we started to see very early on actually measuring customer satisfaction and net promoter score whether or not this algorithm, because that's what we built, machine-learned algorithm, worked. And that was the moment that we understood we had something here because the retention from the beginning and the color predicting from the beginning was very accurate.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely more profitable, higher gross margins. And the one little thing that I realized was color matching the person coming into our site was going to be the most important thing. When you walk into a stylist, they are looking at what your hair looks like at that moment. And they're deciding what your hair could look like if they put various colors on it. That's what they get trained to do. There is science to this, not just art. And so I was thinking, well, geez, maybe we could do a quiz. And it had 18 questions that you were answering, including what color is your hair now? How much grade do you have when the gray grows out? What's the texture of your hair? And then what is your desired result?”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Waiting for three months. And then we're getting models. So we recruited models in Italy that come into their salon and then they color their hair. And then we see what it looks like pre and post. And then you start doing things like looking at it in sunlight, looking at it under UV, looking at to make sure that it's actually the representation of what the consumer thought they were going to get.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Work on it? And we had to spend a lot of time there because one of the things you do is when you make a color, it has to sit in testing sort of quarantine for three months. First to”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I mean, look at every person has a different hair color. So the nuances of your hair is very specific to who you are. So there's 15 today different brunettes and 20 different shades of blonde, right? And eight different shades of red. So we had to have a full enough spectrum of color that people could take us seriously in order. And so we started out with 19.”
2025-08-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Madison Reed: Amy Errett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT