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The Brand Atelier Show
Most brand advice chases trends. This podcast builds brands that last.
Hosted by Shayne Mackey, a brand strategist with over 30 years working with Fortune 500 companies and legacy brands, The Brand Atelier Show cuts through the noise of viral tactics and flavor-of-the-month marketing to focus on what actually matters: strategic positioning, enduring identity, and brands built for the long game.
If you're a founder, brand strategist, or creative director tired of being told to "just post more on TikTok," this is your antidote. Every episode delivers expert-level thinking on brand architecture, messaging, visual identity, and the strategic decisions that separate brands people remember from brands people scroll past.
No hype. No shortcuts. Just decades of experience distilled into actionable strategy for building brands with staying power.
New episodes weekly.
[INTRO — SHAYNE SOLO]
Hi, I'm Shayne Mackey. Welcome back to The Brand Atelier. In the last episode, David Chang showed you what founder-led cost looks like when you pay it in reputation. Public opinions, publicly held, publicly corrected when he got something wrong.
Today's founder pays in a completely different currency. Not reputation, revenue. Chosen on purpose, year after year, in a number most people would never think to look at.
Kate Assaraf is the founder of DIP, a plastic-free, salon-quality haircare company built to last. She has been named Oprah's number one pick for curly hair, New Jersey Mompreneur of the Year, and she is a Forbes Council member. But none of that is really the story. The story is a founder who built real distribution and then started sending her own customers away from it, toward small, independent stores instead, on purpose, every time. That is revenue she is choosing not to take. I have wanted to understand what that actually feels like since the day I heard about it.
So Kate, welcome to The Brand Atelier. I am so happy you're here.
Kate: Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here.
[SEGMENT 1 — THE ORIGIN]
Shayne: So I'm going to dive right in. You spent real years inside the beauty industry before DIP existed. What did you see from the inside that made you know you had to build something different?
Kate: In my span of about two decades, I've seen so many things from the inside out. It felt kind of normal in the early 2000s, but as attitudes and times changed, they just felt so inherently wrong. In the early 2000s, I worked for a company where we had to draw wrinkles on someone's face and then do a live before-and-after on a home shopping network show, talking about a skin cream that was supposed to have amazing effects, and then they'd send the models in for Botox in between the photos. They'd have it timestamped exactly right for the truth-telling part of it. I was young, in my twenties, and everyone acted like this was normal. The consumer never sees what's behind the curtain. Now I can say stuff about it because it's so old, but back then it was a little bit of a Wild West dressed up in corporate garb.
Shayne: I totally agree, and having been in advertising forever, I was on the food styling side where they were putting glue in for milk, hamburgers greased with all kinds of things you don't want to know about. You go, my god, nothing is really real. Even before AI, we still made everything look like it wasn't real.
Kate: But when you were in it, didn't you find it fascinating? This is how the sausage is made.
Shayne: Absolutely. You're behind the scenes, it's movie magic, it's Hollywood, smoke and mirrors.
Kate: You don't realize your brain is going to change, and be like, wait, actually, this is not the way to do it.
Shayne: Right. So what was the breaking point for you, where you thought, I have to do something different?
Kate: For me it was the sustainability boom of 2018, 2019, into 2020. I'd already learned about the horrors of plastic, its accumulation and what it was doing to human and animal health, back in 2014 when I was pregnant with my first son. Back then it was almost a tinfoil hat attitude to have, so I kept it to myself, but I still tried to reduce plastic for my own family. What made me genuinely frustrated was, as a consumer who already knew all the dirty tricks of beauty marketing, seeing that paired with the fear marketing of sustainability, and then having products that were only plastic-free. They weren't good. They went above and beyond to change the packaging but never obsessed over the formula. There was a rush to market during the sustainability boom, brands went hard on Meta ads and sold a lot, but mostly first-time buyers, not repeat ones. I had a whole graveyard of sustainable haircare in my shower.
Shayne: I do too.
Kate: Tombstone after tombstone of shampoo bars. I was creating more waste, the exact opposite of what I wanted.
Shayne: Perfect segue. With all that in mind, was there a version of DIP you almost built that looked more like everything else on the shelf, or did you get it right the first time?
Kate: No. I had a company before, for four years, called Nope, N-O-A-P. I loved it, but I'd partnered with the wrong partner. It was fast to launch and fast to go away, but it was bold and very much my voice. I parted ways with my partner and started DIP. I wanted it to be so renegade that everyone would doubt it, something fun about going so far off the deep end with the marketing and messaging that people go, I don't want to copy that, I don't even understand this. I didn't want to make something for the masses. I wanted to make a brand for the frustrated, which turned out to be a lot of people, but I didn't know that going in.
Kate: The frustrated, sustainable consumer is exactly who DIP is for. That includes people who bought products that left them disappointed, and people who felt left out of the messaging entirely. A lot of sustainability marketing acts like there's only one version of sustainable, the boho, make-your-own-oat-milk person in linen overalls. That's not how anyone I know who navigates this planet actually operates. Everyone's kind of blended.
[ASIDE — ON SAMENESS AND USP]
Shayne: I love that positioning, the frustrated sustainable consumer. You just taught an entire lesson, because I'm about to write a newsletter, maybe a podcast episode, about why everything's gone gray all of a sudden. Why has everybody forgotten what we used to call, a hundred years ago, the unique selling proposition, where you differentiate, and you don't have to be for everybody, and you'll be more successful if you're not. I went to your website and instantly loved it, and I couldn't even buy anything, and I loved that. You're standing there saying, here's where we are, come find us, we're not for everybody, and that's okay. I wish more brands would do that instead of jumping on every trend out there.
Kate: It's hard. Being unique is a genuinely risky endeavor right now, when everyone's so quick to categorize and cancel. You see it with the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle campaign, with a Bumble billboard that stepped slightly outside a safe zone and got piled on. There's a nervousness now that didn't used to exist, because everyone can have an opinion, and everyone's primed to misinterpret something, because rage is a cheap currency right now.
Shayne: People are almost expecting to hate things before they even give them a chance. We've gotten to a place where it's okay to be cruel first, and that's unfortunate.
[SEGMENT 2 — THE COST: REVENUE, ON PURPOSE]
Shayne: Walk me through this decision. Most founders spend years trying to direct traffic to their own site. You built real distribution and then started sending customers away from it, toward small independent stores instead. Make the case for why that's not leaving money on the table.
Kate: It's absolutely leaving money on the table, depending on how you operate. My goal is sustainability. I already know I made the best shampoo and conditioner bars on the market, because I obsessed over it, and so did the chemist I worked with, who'd done some of the most famous haircare and luxury hair products out there. I built outside the normal marketing and product development process. Make it the best, no matter what it costs, then work backward from there, instead of starting from a price point and building down to it. That was step one, the bars had to be able to sell themselves because of how good they were.
Kate: Step two was accepting that, yes, it's leaving money on the table, because I have a lot of faith in sustainable people specifically, and I want to get frustrated consumers into a sustainable store. Not just one that carries DIP, but one where they can ask questions about it from a real human, and where that store owner has vetted everything else on their shelf too. I want them to get that target halo shopping effect, where you go in for one thing and come out with other things. That, to me, is how you actually move the needle on sustainability. Not selling things super discounted to someone and praying they like it and talk about it. I want people to have these conversations.
Kate: I have a campaign that's been running since 2021, called Refill is the New Record Store. It's that feeling of walking into a record store, telling someone what band you like, and having them say, you're also going to love this. Or a video store, when someone says, you haven't seen this one? I thought that feeling was congruent with sustainability, and it's what people craved, because they were tired of buying crappy sustainable things.
Shayne: The brand strategist in me is coming out. I think you're in a market that's only going to increase over time.
Kate: I used to be a brand strategist too, and my biggest frustration with brands was that they wouldn't go far enough. Everyone who walked in wanted to make the next Glossier. I'd ask, why? Where's the unmet need? You don't need an entire market, you need a segment, and a flag planted where nobody else exists. That's what's lost right now.
Shayne: What did that decision actually cost you in the early years, if you're willing to share real numbers, and what did it buy you instead?
Kate: Not being on Amazon absolutely costs us. I think we could probably ten X our revenue if we were on Amazon. I waffle about it all the time, because Amazon shoppers get a true read of the general population, not just people already in the sustainability bubble. But earlier today I was on the phone with my top retailer, an independent store owner in New Jersey, maybe four hundred square feet. She's sold two hundred and twelve thousand dollars of DIP in that one store. She's one of many who can survive because I'm not on Amazon, and there's an emotional currency there that's a much stronger pull for me.
Kate: I do know most of our retailers by name. It dances between three and five hundred. I get to know who they are, we do retailer retreats, and I spend a lot of time getting to know them. I know the Nashville store has different scent sensibilities than our store in Alaska, and the Brooklyn scents are different too. It's cool to see human data on stuff instead of the automated churn everyone's so used to.
Shayne: You're also funding store build-outs and creating local, one-off products for specific retail partners. Is that scent related, product related?
Kate: Scent related, and the box gets its own art for that store. The store owner helps design it, finds the scent, and now that store has something only available there. The orange blossom scent is only at Phillip Buttercup in Costa Mesa. The lilac scent is only at Marilla's in Rochester and Geneva, New York, and those two stores have shipped that bar to nearly every state.
Shayne: I love that you use brand ambassadors instead of influencers. I think that's part of why you're funding these stores, you're building and supporting a community, not just moving units.
Kate: There's an undertow of people fed up with waste, and it's mostly unspoken, partly because the identity of being sustainable creates an avatar a lot of people don't fit. People don't want to say I'm sustainable because then they feel judged on ten other things. I love fake nails, I'm not the angel of the earth, I compost within reason but I'm not tearing up every piece of paper in my house. I think sustainability is heading toward more cheerleading of good actions instead of nitpicking the actions that aren't good enough.
[SEGMENT 3 — THE SHORTCUTS SHE WON'T TAKE]
Shayne: Everyone's racing toward AI and paid influencers right now, and you won't do that. What do you think other brands give up when they take that shortcut?
Kate: On paid influencers, I don't think there's anything wrong with someone making a living that way, and there are categories where it makes total sense, swimwear for example, you need to see a lot of different bodies in the same suit to understand how it'll work on you. But for haircare specifically, I can read an ingredient deck and tell if an influencer is lying about what actually gave them that hair, versus the serums or the heat styling doing the real work. There's a frustration people have with disingenuous marketing, and most women are discerning enough to feel it, even if they can't name it. That was a pretty hard line for me.
Kate: The AI stuff is different. I'm watching a lot of my competitors embrace AI models and AI marketing, and I think they're trading off a whole consumer base, especially in the sustainability scene, that's concerned about the water usage that comes from AI. But there are real use cases for AI in all different forms, and I don't think it's going anywhere, so I don't know if holding a purity test on AI is worth it. Even Riverside, the platform we're recording on right now, uses AI to make the best cuts. Am I going to punish myself for that? It becomes this snowball of frustration I don't think is worth it.
Shayne: It gets back to the idea that nothing is black and white, even though we've arrived at a moment that wants to treat everything that way.
Shayne: Other than the Amazon piece, has holding the line ever cost you something real, a specific opportunity you turned down because you wouldn't compromise on product?
Kate: My anti-influencer stance put me in a real bind once. A swimwear brand I love, run by founders I'm friendly with, invited me to a Sports Illustrated shoot in Miami. I'd already dug myself into a pretty firm no-influencers-unless-supermodel-swimsuit-people position, so I said no. It was exciting and cool to be invited, and I let it go, because my audience wasn't going to respond to that kind of imagery anyway. If I'd built a different brand, it would have been an easy yes.
Shayne: I think that's what real brand stewards do, they hold the line even when it costs them something like that.
Kate: Everything feels like an opportunity until it isn't. You never know what kind of door would have opened, or if it would've been the wrong door. When you're wired for imagination and hope, it's hard to say no to things.
[SEGMENT 4 — THE HONEST PRODUCT]
Shayne: Your whole promise is three things happening at once, plastic-free, travel-ready, salon-quality, and each one is genuinely hard to deliver. What was the hardest part of making the ethics of the product and the actual performance of the product true at the same time?
Kate: Making the formula work for all hair types. That took close to forty iterations. My best friend is mixed, with a range of curl patterns across her family, and I thought about a family like hers needing to use all the same products. I didn't want sustainability to be an expensive burden, buying eight different bars for one family isn't practical, nobody can store or manage that. On the accessory side, our bamboo travel cases aren't meant to live in the shower, wood molds in a wet environment eventually, but someone new to sustainable habits will keep it there anyway and learn the hard way. That's part of the job too, educating all the way through, meeting someone who genuinely wants to learn and make a change.
[SEGMENT 5 — THE CLOSE]
Shayne: If you were sitting across from a founder at the very beginning, someone who hasn't yet made their first hard, expensive choice, what would you tell them about paying for it on purpose?
Kate: I'd tell them to learn to bank on themselves. The hardest lesson I learned was bringing on a partner out of nervousness about the parts of the business I didn't know. Don't fear your shortcomings, you can learn them, or you can hire someone who already knows them. Hiring is way better than partnering. A business partnership breakup is like a divorce, on the same level, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone, especially when your livelihood is tied to it.
Shayne: Last question. Where should people find DIP, and where should they find the stores you're building up?
Kate: Go to dipalready.com, use the store locator, and it'll pull up the nearest zero-waste store, hair salon, or surf shop that carries it. Or find us on Instagram and TikTok at Dip Already, I'm there if anyone has questions.
Shayne: If you're starting a company, what's the best thing you can do?
Kate: Watch how your customers shop. I watched for six months how people bought haircare before I launched, and I learned more from that than from any other kind of research.
[SHAYNE CLOSE — SOLO]
Kate, thank you. I did not expect to leave this conversation with an actual number, and now I have one. One independent retailer, roughly four hundred square feet, somewhere in New Jersey. That single store has sold two hundred and twelve thousand dollars of DIP. And Kate told me flatly that skipping Amazon probably costs her business ten times its current revenue. Ten times.
That is not a vague founder's tax, a nice idea about values. That is a specific, countable choice, made over and over, in favor of three to five hundred retailers she knows by name instead of a marketplace that would multiply that number overnight.
And it's not nothing she's building instead. She has a name for it. Refill is the New Record Store, the idea that walking into a real shop and being introduced to something you didn't know you needed is worth more, over years, than a one-time sale ever could be. That's not a tagline. That's the entire trade, spelled out.
To everyone listening, this is the Founder-Led Brand module of The Brand Atelier. We have gone from the deep dive, to David Chang and Momofuku, to this conversation with Kate. Next time, I bring it all together with my take.
Founder-led is not a personality type. It is a way of paying, financial, reputational, or something else entirely. Know your currency. Pay it on purpose. And do not let anyone talk you into pretending it doesn't cost you anything, because that is the moment the brand stops meaning anything at all.
If this episode made you think, I want to stay in touch. The link to download my Four Pillars of Brand Architecture white paper is in the show notes. It's free, and I'd love for you to have it. I'll see you next week. I'm Shayne Mackey. This is The Brand Atelier, and we're here to build something that lasts.