The Jen Atkin Story | OUAI
Jen Atkin grew up in a conservative Mormon community in Utah, adopted at birth, with one tiny salon in her town and a dream that had nowhere to go. At nineteen she moved to Los Angeles with $300, spent a year calling salons with no callbacks, and took a receptionist job on Beverly Boulevard just to get in the door. In this episode of Fifteenish, I talk about how she worked her way from answering phones to styling Madonna's world tour, built one of the most recognizable careers in beauty alongside the Kardashians, and then did something nobody expected — she started over. In 2016 she launched OUAI, a haircare brand built around the simple idea that women deserved products made by someone who actually understood their lives. It sold to Procter and Gamble in 2022 for nine figures. And it all started because a rock star asked what she wanted and she already knew.
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Welcome back to Fifteenish. This is Leah. Hey friends.
So I cannot believe that I actually forgot to mention this. It has officially as of March 27th, so yes, almost a whole month ago, I've officially hit one year of doing this podcast.
And to be totally transparent, I didn't know how I was gonna have anyone find this podcast. I had no launch plan, no social media, no strategy. I just put it out there and kind of just hoped.
And guess what? You found me. I genuinely don't know how.
I haven't done anything paid. I don't have Instagram, as I mentioned. And you're just finding this show completely organically every single week.
And the numbers keep growing and it's wild and wonderful to watch. So hello if I don't know you personally, but thank you so much for showing up. It really truly means everything.
And while I've mentioned in the past, I do still want to bring on guests eventually. That is a dream. But right now, I am honoring where I am with work and life.
And this format feels really, really good. So yes, guests will be coming. Just not yet.
Now, if I can ask one little favor, if you can share this show with someone that needs it, whether it's a female founder friend, or just someone that you know that's sitting on a dream, really just anyone who needs that little pep talk, please do.
And also, if you can please submit a review for this show, it does actually help people find me. So that would mean the world if you can take a second to do that.
So I'm saying all of this right now because today's episode is about a woman who just started with almost nothing. No connections, no guarantee, no one telling her it was going to work.
She packed up her life and moved to a city that didn't know she existed. And she spent a year hearing nothing back, but she stayed anyway. Her name is Jen Atkin.
She is the founder of OUAI, the haircare brand that sold her Procter and Gamble in 2022 that had built nine-figure business from a simple belief that women deserved better products made by people who actually understood their hair.
The New York Times called her the most influential hairstylist in the world. And before any of that, she was just a 19-year-old Mormon girl from Utah with $300 and a very specific dream. This is the Jen Atkin story.
2:31
Jen Atkinʼs Beginnings
So Jen grew up in a conservative Mormon community in Utah. And I mean conservative. Her parents had never touched alcohol or coffee.
She barely watched rated R movies. She described her childhood as Disney, Disney, Disney. Girls in her community weren't exactly encouraged to go chase big ambitions.
The expectation was more modest than that. But Jen was spunky. Her mom tells stories about how she from a really young age knew what she wanted to wear, knew what she thought, knew who she was.
She was so sure of herself in a way that the environment around her didn't necessarily support. And she was also adopted at birth. And she talks about that with so much warmth.
She said that the adoption made her feel chosen, special, like she was placed exactly where she was supposed to be. And I think that sense of being chosen, you know, being someone's deliberate yes, probably shaped her more than she even knows.
Growing up, she was obsessed with hair. She had cut every Barbie's hair, she'd cut her own hair, she'd cut her friend's hair, and she watched makeover scenes in movies the way that other kids watched sports. There was only one tiny salon in her town.
It was called United Hairlines, and her mom got her haircut by the same woman for 30 years. That was the world that Jen knew, strip mall salons and one stylist, same haircut forever.
I'm curious what it's like to grow up knowing exactly what you want in a place that has no framework for it.
Where the people around you aren't doing the thing that you want to do, so there's really no path to follow or proof to know if it's possible. No one to really point to and say, her, that's what I want to do. I want to know what she did.
The dream just kind of lives within you, quiet and maybe a little restless with nowhere to go. Well, Jen wanted something different. She just didn't have that permission yet.
But when Jen was 19, she found herself on a set of a film being shot in Utah. Dave Matthews, yes, that Dave Matthews was in it. And one night over dinner, he asked her the question, what do you want to do?
She said, I want to work in beauty. I want to move to LA or New York. And he said, you totally should.
That was it. But she said it was the push that she needed. Because she already knew what she wanted.
She had known this for a long time. She just needed someone outside of her world to look at her and say it out loud, to make it feel real and possible instead of reckless and naïve.
And while, yes, her parents were terrified, they did let her go, but they were scared.
They had built a life inside this bubble and their daughter was about to leave it with $300 in her pocket and a dream that she picked up from a Barbie and a rock star. I can only imagine how her parents must have been feeling. And so she did it.
She moved to Los Angeles at 19 years old. And she was alone. She called every salon in LA and for about a year nobody called her back.
A year, can you imagine? You've just blown up your entire life. You've left your family, your community, everything familiar.
And you're 19 years old in a city that doesn't really know that you exist. And for a year, the phone doesn't ring. I want to dive into what that year probably looked like for her because I'm sure it wasn't easy just sitting there waiting.
It wasn't like she was just sitting in this cute apartment manifesting her future. It was figuring out how to pay rent in one of the most expensive cities in the world with $300 and no callbacks.
I'm sure it was watching other people move through a world that she desperately wanted to be a part of from the outside. And I'm sure it was the kind of waiting that makes people just go home. But she didn't go home.
Eventually, a salon in Beverly Boulevard called back looking for a receptionist, and she took it.
6:11
Stylist to Stars
She started answering phones, she learned the business from the front desk, and worked her way up to a salon manager. She said she learned the money side of things there, how a salon actually runs, what makes it work, what doesn't.
And then she got her cosmetology license and landed an assisting job at Chris McMillan Salon, one of the most prestigious salons in LA. She was working alongside Andy Lacomte, who had been Madonna's hairstylist for over a decade.
She said Andy was her big break. He asked her to cover for his assistant for just two months, but Jen, she never left. Within a few years, she ended up on tour.
She was styling the backup dancers for Madonna's Confessions Tour in 2006. And in 2010, she met Kim Kardashian through mutual friends at a shoot for Cosmo.
Kim then introduced her to Chloe and slowly, one by one, she became the hairstylist for the entire family. And what she got from that relationship wasn't just clients, it was really just a master class in building something.
She watched the Kardashians work, the hustle, the strategy, the relentlessness. She had met famous hairstylists that she had grown up idolizing. She sat in rooms where people were building empires and she paid attention.
She also built her own platform in real time alongside them. She was one of the earliest hairstyles to genuinely understand social media, not as just a marketing tool, but as a community.
She created Maine Attics, a digital platform by hairstylists and beauty lovers because she wanted to connect with people she idolized with the younger artists who didn't know who they were yet. She was already thinking like a founder.
She just hadn't made a product yet. But by 2015, The New York Times called her the most influential hairstylist in the world. She had millions of Instagram followers.
She was flying around the world for shoots and shows and red carpets. From just $300 and a reception desk, she had built one of the most recognizable careers in beauty. But Jen was frustrated.
8:11
Founding OUAI
Because after years of being inside the beauty industry, after using every product, talking to her clients about what their hair needed, watching women struggle with complicated routines and products that promise the world but delivered nothing, she
kept coming back to the same feeling. There was no brand that felt like it was actually for her, actually made by women who understood what women needed. Everything was overly complicated, everything was aspirational in a way that felt fake.
She said it felt odd that there were men in boardrooms making decisions about what women wanted, so she just decided to be in the room herself.
She launched OUAI in 2016, the name pronounced OUAI, it's a casual French way of saying yes, oui, but make it effortless.
And that was the whole point, yes to real hair, yes to five minutes in the morning, yes to something that works without a tutorial.
Her target customer, she said, was the girl on the go who only has five minutes to do her hair, which I mean, come on, that's all of us some days.
That's every woman running out the door trying to look like she has it together when she absolutely does not. Hello, Leah. And nobody has made a brand that actually spoke to that honestly.
Everything else was promising you this blowout result, but Jen, she was just promising you the five minutes. She built the brand the way that she built her career, by actually listening.
She spent years asking her clients what they actually wanted, what wasn't working and what was missing. She ran away like a conversation, not a campaign. She had polls, community feedback, direct dialogue.
What do you need and we'll make it. And all of this was done in public. She had 2.9 million Instagram followers when way launched, and she used every single one of them.
And when I say used, it wasn't in a negative way. It was more like, hey, this is my brand that I actually believe in. Let me show you why kind of way.
She was one of the first founders to understand that authenticity and social media wasn't a strategy. It was just the whole thing. The brand then grew into body care and fragrance.
It went into Sephora and then Ulta. It hit nine figures. And in 2022, Procter and Gamble acquired it.
Now think back to her beginning.
10:29
Jenʼs Journey Lessons
She was just this Mormon girl from Utah with 300 bucks in her pocket. And she ended up building this beauty empire. But I want to talk about a year in her life that made a huge difference for her.
It was the year of no. She was 19 years old, brand new city, no connections, no money, no callbacks for a year. And she stayed.
I think about what that requires because it's not just grit or hustle or whatever word we use when we want to make struggle sound inspiring, but it's something bigger than that. It's a decision that you have to remake every single morning.
I'm not going home. This is still the right thing. I still believe in it.
And then I think about Dave Matthews, about how she already knew what she wanted. She had known since she was cutting Barbie hair. The dream was never the problem.
It was just the permission. She was just waiting for someone to say, yeah, go ahead, you can do it. And I do think that's true for so many of us.
We know or we've known for a long time. We're just waiting for someone to look at us and say, yes, you, you go do that. But here is what I wanna really lay down.
Dave Matthews didn't give Jen anything that she didn't already have. He just reflected it back. The want was hers.
The courage was hers. The year of no's and the $300 and her receptionist job, all of that was hers. He just said the words out loud.
I think about who in my life has been my Dave Matthews. And I think about the people that I could be that for. Because sometimes that's the whole thing, right?
Just telling someone that the dream they're already carrying is actually real and actually doable. That they're not crazy for wanting it, that they should actually go for it. You know, Jen was adopted.
She grew up knowing that she was someone's deliberate choice. And then she went out and built a brand that people chose. Because it resonated.
Because it felt real. Now, I don't think that's a coincidence. I do think people who have been chosen know something about what it feels like to be found.
And then they build things accordingly. On a totally different note, I think of the many moments that I've sat with this podcast wondering if it's going anywhere. But I keep coming back to the same thing that Jen did in that year of silence.
You just have to keep showing up. You just have to keep believing it before anyone else does. Because the yes comes eventually.
You just have to still be there when it does. Jen grew up in a community that specifically did not encourage women to dream big, but yet she did it anyway.
13:05
Dream Pursuit
So saying that, you have to understand that the environment doesn't have to be right for the dreams to survive. It just has to survive. That is the only requirement.
And if your environment is not supporting you, you are not a tree. You can move. So if you are waiting for your Dave Matthews moment, if you are waiting for someone to look at you and say, hey, you, yes, you, you can go after your dreams.
Well, if you don't have anyone in your life, let that be me. Because I believe that gift of insight or that gift of an idea, that is meant to be yours.
Whether it's a learning lesson for you, if you go after the thing and it doesn't work, or maybe it actually does work and you build this incredible life because of that idea, that gift of an idea, don't let it go to waste.
So friend, here I am, a Dave Matthews substitute, here to tell you, just go after your damn dream, all right? Thanks for being here. I'll see you next week.
Sources & Disclaimer
Jen Atkin — Blowing My Way to the Top (Harper Wave, 2020)
Jones Road Beauty Podcast — Jen Atkin on the Kardashians and Starting Her Own Brand (September 2022)
FWD JOY by Chrissy Rutherford — How a Therapeutic Retreat Changed Jen Atkin's Mind About Kids (2025)
Behind the Look — Jen Atkin's Journey From Celebrity Stylist to Industry Mogul (joinblvd.com, April 2024)
Yahoo Life — Celebrity Hairstylist Jen Atkin on Her Journey to Being a Mom (2021)
Wikipedia — Jen Atkin entry
All facts shared in this episode are based on information available at the time of recording. Any personal reflections, interpretations, or opinions are my own. If anything is found to be inaccurate, I'm happy to issue a correction.
