Drybar (B): No Cuts. No Color. Just Blowouts!

Drybar (B) is presented in an innovative cartoon storybook format to help enhance participants' understanding of Drybar's offering through an entertaining experience that is both informative and emotionally engaging. Supplementary Video and Lecture Slides can be obtained at https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/teaching-materials/drybar/

1. Hair (Beauty) salon industry has long been existed and it is growing further as people’s aspiration for looking good and being pampered has grown more. The hair salon industry is a classic example of fragmented industry where thousands of small players offer similar products and services. They all essentially competed on the same factors. Locked in the conventional strategic logic, they had to make a tradeoff between differentiation and low costs. 2. Drybar, on the other hand, defied conventional strategy logic and created a new market space for specialized blowout service. It captured a blue ocean opportunity in blowout service, which had been largely ignored by existing hair salons. By identifying key pain points of existing, refusing, and unexplored customers of salon blowouts, Drybar created a new concept of blowout service through which all women enjoy their me-time and feel good. It made professional blowouts an affordable habit. Here, Drybar broke the tradeoff between differentiation and low costs by eliminating and reducing over-served or irrelevant offerings while creating unprecedented value to buyers.