How To Start A Riot With David Thurston

You can’t be everything to everyone. Recognizing this, the Pulp Riot team built a business model that is laser-focused to a specific cult and spent the bulk of their efforts to build things that resonate with that niche. In just a few years, it has built itself to become the world’s fastest growing hair color brand. Overseeing the entrepreneurial aspect of the business is the creative and business-savvy David Thurston. As the company’s CEO, it has been quite a journey for David as he watched the company dominate the market and achieve the pinnacle of success that eventually caught the eye of nothing less than L’Oreal. Get yourself treated with a peek into the person, the journey and the philosophy behind this rockstar success as David joins Ryan Weeden for a value-laden conversation.

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Listen to the podcast here:

How To Start A Riot With David Thurston

The Truth Behind Building The Fastest Growing Hair Color Brand In The World

Welcome to the show that teaches you the hair pro, how to work smarter so you can make more, work less, and live a purpose-driven life on your schedule, not your clients. I'll teach you awesome and actionable ways to tap into your personal greatness through marketing mindset and confidence training. It's time to unlock the next level of you. Let's grow.

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I have a very special guest, somebody that I've looked up to for years and years, and somebody who continues to inspire our industry. We've got David Thurston here, the Pulp Riot CEO and Cofounder. He’s widely known and a rockstar himself. I am happy to have you here, David.

Thank you so much for this opportunity. I look forward to spending time with you.

Thank you very much. I've known you for a little while, and I've had the pleasure of doing a video for Pulp Riot. We did that one video, which was a lot of fun. You and your company have been front runners, a company we can look up to as far as your branding is incredible. You're always right on the cusp of what's modern, what’s happening, and moving forward at a rapid pace. You are the CEO and Founder of the fastest growing color company ever. What led to that?

There are a few things I could point on why we had the success that we've had so far. One of the reasons why is that we try not to appeal to everybody. That seems counterintuitive, but I believe a lot of the brands in our industry are trying to make it so that everybody likes them. I don't think that that's the way to grow quickly. You want to find your little cult, your group of people who love you, and then just focusing on creating something that resonates with them. Our timing was impeccable. We came along right as the social media revolution started happening. What happened then is different than social media now. It was right at the right time. Do you remember before we use the word social media star and influencer?

What made it a potent way of marketing was it was genuine and authentic. You had the other brands using celebrity spokespeople who weren't as potent because you knew they were getting paid. You had this group of people who are influencing, inspiring, and educating the beauty industry who weren't getting paid to do it. It meant a lot to the people who were following them. A few years later, that's all been shifted on their head. Now that you have social media influencers who are the celebrity spokespeople, who are getting paid, and so things have changed, but our timing was right. Those are two big reasons. The third is that I'm a salon owner and I spend the majority of my life inside of a hair salon. My wife is my cofounder and hairstylist. She's been doing it for many years. The other people who are high up in our company are hairstylists and salon owners. We know what tools people need and what they want to hear. We know how to reach through people's phones and grab them right in the heart.

You seem to know them better than they know themselves sometimes. You want to have those messages that you put out there with your brand that they're already thinking. They're instantly associating themselves with that. I love how you said cult because we look at cult as such a negative word, but then if you start with a cult like a niche brand, and they say the riches are in the niches, a cult becomes a culture. Once you develop it more, once more and more people start to see themselves as a part of it, it's no longer what you might consider a negative cult like an American horror story. It’s now a culture.

It’s a culture and that’s what we’ve created. We have a Facebook group where our culture comes together. They all get to create this community and they have shared values. That's what we provide. It's different in our industry to have a brand whose core value is positivity. Before us, when I go to industry events, it felt like the people on stage that I would see were very exclusive. They look down on you. After the show, they didn't come out and mingle. A lot of people are drawn to that and want to be surrounded by people who are positive, particularly now more than ever.

I had those same types of feelings when I was going to my first hair shows and saw that. As much as I was inspired to want to be on that stage, I got that same vibe from a lot of those top educators, and those big brands that would look down upon people that weren't in their position because they had this powerful presence. You weren't there and they're like, “I have secrets. I'm not going to share them with you.” That's one of our core mantras. No secrets approach to teaching and learning. We want to make sure that whatever we know, we're going to give it all to you. Hopefully, it'll help you move forward in your life.

There's an insecurity that some people have. They are concerned and vulnerable that you're going to take over. They don't provide you with anything and they keep you at bay. I do feel that there's a new way of doing things that is more effective and that is trying to pull people up. Almost every point in my career where we started to have more of a growth spurt of success, it does come from finding ways to make other people more successful. When that happens, we continually get more successful. It's a good way to do things.

You're going in a positive way, as opposed to somebody who is trying to hold on to everything thinking somebody might steal it, and then they're going to look at how they can cut down the competition. Their whole outlook on life becomes glass half empty and very negative. It's not healthy. It's being jealous, and jealous is fueled by anger.

Stop trying to make everybody like you. Find your little cult and focus on creating something that resonates with them.

It's a good thing that everybody has certain people who they might feel are competitors. That's healthy but sometimes it's nice to get to know your competitors and figure out how you could work together. I had the pleasure of going out to lunch with the founder of PRAVANA. PRAVANA and Pulp Riot battled it out for years, trying to get who's going to use our purple dye. We had two different approaches to doing things, and what an awesome experience to be able to go to lunch with Steve Goddard who is a great guy, and hear his journey, story, what he was thinking about us, and what we were thinking about him at the beginning of this whole journey. It is important not to be too guarded and to share.

You've always had cool hair and you have lots of tattoos. You look like a hairstylist. Have you ever done hair yourself?

It's the biggest compliment I've got. I've educated inside of salons for product knowledge classes before. The biggest compliment I get is someone asking me where do I do hair? One of the reasons why I've been successful in this industry is because I've got equal parts left brain and right brain. There's a part of me that feels comfortable in the analytical world, but I feel even more comfortable in the creative environment. Those who are in the middle have a good shot at being successful in this industry. I have never been a licensed hairstylist, but I've had plenty of opportunities to do hair. Sometimes I get to collaborate with some of the best colorists in the world. They'll throw me a pair of gloves and a brush, and they say, “Let's do this,” and learn from them. I have got two daughters and a wife all with long hair and with lots of hair so I had an opportunity there. Early on when I was a child and I go to church with my grandparents, to keep me quiet, they hand me a book and it had hair in it. I would braid the hair and I would do it for hours. There's a comfortability right from the beginning.

Alexis is the hairstylist in the family and your daughters are probably on their way.

My wife, Alexis, is the hairstylist. It's been wonderful being quarantined with her. Almost every twelve days, I have her do my hair again, which is great. We are a creative family. We take a lot of joy from that creative aspect.

You were saying that the right brain and left brain, you're somewhere in the middle of that. I was on a podcast as a guest, and I had said the same thing. I've found that perfect synergy. My brain is like I love the technical side and the business side of things, but I also like the flexibility of being creative. One of our biggest goals as leaders and coaches in this industry is to try to teach those full-blown creatives how to have that business sense, and how to learn that entrepreneurial side to help them share their talents with the world. What would you tell somebody, and you probably do this often with your biggest creatives? How do you tell them to start being more analytical and more left brain?

You do strike me as somebody who's got a good balance when it comes to creativity and your analytical skills. You have something to share. The problem is a lot of people who have something to share aren't organized and thinking big picture enough to figure out how to take that message and share it with other people. You're clearly killing it at doing that. I focused on trying to change certain behaviors and once those behaviors are changed, things start to fall in place. The number one problem that happens with people who are super far on the creative side is that they're not chronically on time over and over again. If you're a hairstylist and you could stay on time, you're going to have a lot more success in this industry. The problem is so many aren’t.

They're very reactive to other people's whims and they don't take that seriously. That's what I try to teach people. If you wanted to work for Pulp Riot and you wanted to be the person who's going across the world, growing our brand by being on stage, you can be the world's greatest hairstylist, but that's not going to get you on our stage. You have to be on time and show up prepared, and not try to wing it. These little behavioral things are important. It’s starting your day off with some control. Some people hop out of bed and let life happen to them. One thing that I started doing is I make my bed every morning. There's another behavioral thing you can do to get you on track. Why do I do that? At the beginning of the day, I accomplished something immediately. It sets me off from this course of accomplishing things. There's another behavioral habit that helps people get into that right group.

Being on time is huge. It drives me crazy when I'm trying to do something and somebody is not on time if I show up for an appointment. There’s a horse-riding lesson which I was taking and a great coach, but always half an hour late or even longer. I'm about to leave. I'm like, “I have some stuff to do.” The same thing goes whether it's for showing up for training, show, being prepared, but also a lot of our stylists that we know and associate with, they are on stylist's time. They feel like they have the luxury to take as long as they need to with a client, but they get pissed off if one of their clients is late. It's a double-edged sword.

Having so many stylists that I've worked with in my own salon, I see that. Those who rise to the very top start to understand how important it is to be on time. My mentor, his name's Ted Nelson. The first time I became an entrepreneur is by being his partner. I remember the first appointment we ever showed up was to raise money for a company. We got in fifteen minutes early. He gave me a lesson and he told me, “This is Lombardi time.” He named it after the football coach, Lombardi. He's like, “If you're fifteen minutes early, that means you're on time. If you're on time, you're late.” I've taken that with me still to now. You saw that I logged on to this Zoom meeting on time.

I made sure I do the same thing because I value your time. I'm here prepping and getting everything ready. One thing I have learned with anything, whether it's podcasting or a live streaming video is that you need to make sure and test everything at least half an hour early because you might forget to plug in the power, charge a battery or have internet issues. I've run into all those. I’ve got to make sure that I’m ready to rock to the best of my ability, and then God willing, everything will run smoothly.

You've given lots of presentations. If you're ever in a position where you've got to show up in front of a group and give a PowerPoint presentation on a screen, take it from me based on experience, something's going to go wrong every single time. There are a few presentations that I sit through where the speaker doesn't take the first 5 or 10 minutes troubleshooting to get it right. You show up early, troubleshoot it and be prepared.

Every single time, something goes wrong. Nothing went wrong now except for my little daughter who comes and tries to pull out the wires, the computer, and everything like that. I had to reel her in and lock her out of the studio for a bit. Have you always considered yourself an entrepreneur?

I was asked the question and I wrote it down. I was in a group of kids for the church and they had us write down what we wanted to do for our jobs. I was nine years old and I wrote down that I wanted to own a restaurant. From early on, I wanted to do something like that. I went to UCLA and I wanted to do something creative, but it never felt like I had a pathway forward in a creative pursuit. My father is an attorney. You spend time with their friends and they're accountants, bankers or business people. I didn't have that role model of, “You can be successful and creative.” I got a degree in Economics, which is as creative as you can get with numbers. It's still left-brained.

When I moved up to San Francisco and took a job at an international consulting firm, it was very left brain, and I felt like I wasn't able to exercise my right brain. I enjoyed being around the right brain and creative people so much. A lot of my friends were hairstylists. I finally took a leap and decided to become an entrepreneur. I left my career and my education behind in order to do it. I'll tell you that once I got into it, I realized it's exactly where I should be. I don't know if other people have that, but a lot of hairstylists do have that feeling. It's where they want to be and it's where they feel comfortable. That's what happened as soon as I became an entrepreneur.

What would you tell a hairstylist that might wonder, “Am I an entrepreneur? Do I just want to have more clients in my chair?” What characteristics make up an entrepreneur?

Entrepreneurs think big. If you're satisfied with what you have, you may not be an entrepreneur, but if you always have that itch that you want something more, you're dreaming about it, you've got ideas and you're thinking about ways you can make things better. If you're thinking about there are problems out there and how do I solve them, those are pointing in the direction that you want to do something a little bit more entrepreneurial.

Is Alexis, your wife, an entrepreneur as well?

She is. It took a little while to uncover that. Through and through, she’s always thinking about ways of solving issues, and she gets consumed with trying to solve challenges. She created over 200 products. I don't know a lot of living people in our industry who've done that. Every single Pulp Riot product other than five that my good friend, Casey, designed and a few others that Doug designed are things that Alexis designed from inception to completion. She's worked behind her chair her entire career. That process is entrepreneurial. It is like, “What problem does this product have that I'm using behind the chair? How do I make it better?” That's the hallmark of what an entrepreneur is.

I want to quickly dive into your relationship. It’s nothing creepy but one thing that a lot of people say to me when they hear my story about how Jenny, my wife, quit her job to work for the company. She's the creative and makes everything pretty with masters of balayage, branding, logos and everything. I'm the big picture guy. I'm an entrepreneur. She the creative behind it, but she's not entrepreneurial, but we work together. They're like, “You're lucky you have somebody like that. You guys are always together. You're always working and moving forward.” The truth is it can be challenging because it's hard to shut off business and personal. How do you keep your personal life rich? How do you keep your business moving forward? How do you stay friends all the time? I can only imagine that every now and then, you might butt heads.

We're human. We have those moments. Shockingly, it doesn't happen a lot, and that's being honest. Both of us would admit that we wouldn't have what we have today if it weren't for each other. It required both of us to do it and for many reasons. One would be for sanity's sake. When you do what we’re doing, there's a lot of crap that comes along with it. It gives you somebody to talk to or event to who understands what you're doing. More people should do it. Alexis and I started as friends. That was important. It established a pattern on who's in charge of this and who's in charge of that, without the ego getting in. Sometimes it does when you're a husband and wife team. Alexis was my hairstylist and I knew her for twenty years before we got together.

My first company was a hair product line called Level 6. You've never heard about it because it was a failure. I went to my first hair show with my company Level 6. It was the Long Beach hair show and I rented a 10x10 booth. Most of your readers may have gone to a big hair show. If you think about a hair show, you've got these giant booths in the middle, and on the periphery, you've got these small young entrepreneurs who are trying to break into the game. I had a 10x10 booth, a folding table, two chairs, brochures, and some products sitting on there. I needed somebody to help me at the booth so I called my hairstylist, Alexis. She and I sat there at that booth for three days and watched everybody ignore us.

They ignored us because they were all on their way to these giant, Goliath, behemoth booths. It looks like the Las Vegas strip. They are lined up, loud, and there are famous stylists on their stage. It's L'Oréal, Wella, Paul Mitchell, and Aveda all lined up. Here we were at Level6 booth and everyone passed us by. You could imagine what it's like returning her and I, ten years later to the very same show with a Goliath booth that attracted more attention than the other booths that was shinier, brighter and louder. That journey from those ten years of feeling like David and defeating Goliath after ten years, it's been a special journey. To be able to share that with someone is cool, but also being able to bounce ideas off each other. You get in these creative modes that are similar to what I hear people describe of taking LSD, this creative openness popping in our minds that wouldn't pop out if we weren't talking to each other. It's a real recipe for success.

That must have been such a feeling to return and be like, “That's where our booth was right over in that corner. Nobody came and saw us and we felt miserable,” as you're getting ignored.

Success does not come without failure.

After day one, we have to come back. Going from a failure to success is sweet. People may have heard my story before, but it's important to note that that success does not come without failure. There would be no Pulp Riot if there wasn't first a Level 6 of failure. That's important for people to know.

What year was Level 6 introduced?

It’s 2004 when we created Level 6.

How soon after that was Pulp Riot made?

It was released in 2016, twelve years later.

What would you say your biggest challenges were with Level 6? What did you learn from that, that you were able to successfully employ into creating Pulp Riot?

The challenge is we had was the wrong marketing plan. We had thought that we could create something similar to a multilevel marketing program within the professional beauty industry. Multilevel marketing for those who don't know, people will refer to them as pyramid schemes or network marketing, and these kinds of pursuits. We thought that would work and it doesn't. Hairstylists aren't interested in calling other people and introducing them to a product. They are more focused on making sure their clients are happy. That's generally speaking, not for everybody. We also felt we didn't raise enough money. There was a lot for me to learn about the industry that I didn't realize that I needed to know.

Through that process, it allowed me to go into thousands of salons. I was a salesperson, educator, bookkeeper, and VPO of marketing for my company. Imagine getting to know all those things might serve me well in the future if I were to create another product line, and making all the mistakes was important. I found myself after I failed and not knowing what to do. I didn't feel I could go back to the corporate world. Who would hire a failed entrepreneur? That ship I sailed, I turned my back on it and there was no going back, but I didn't know what to do. I talked my friend into throwing me the keys to his hair salon and allowing me to run it as a general manager of the salon. It was a little bit humiliating. I felt like I wasn't getting the most out of my career. It's not what I expected when I dropped out of my corporate job, that I would be a hair salon manager for a salon.

I found out that I loved it. I loved going to work every day. I love the challenges of figuring out how to make a room full of stylists and be positive throughout the entire day. That's the end of the game. If you're a good manager of a salon, it's all about changing the mood of the salon. I love pulling those levers, which allowed me to serve me well, as you can imagine with my own hair salon. My story is about collecting experiences, learning from them, and putting it all together. I didn't have a master plan. If you had told me that one day, I'd be running the fastest growing color company in the beauty industry, I would have called you a liar. At Level 6, learning through failure and going to being a salon manager for so long gave me experiences and owning my own salon. You would imagine by the end of it, I had a well-rounded view of what stylists like, what salon owners want, and how to design certain things because you're designing things all the time. All those served me well.

When Level 6 failed, but when you learn from that, at no point did you say like, “I quit. I give up. I'm going to find a job and try to figure out what I want in my life?” Did you think about that? You tried it and think like, “Being an entrepreneur is not for me.”

I hear people on a podcast talk about failure is part of the equation, but a lot of them don't tell you that failure sucks. It’s hard and it's not easy. It's the main reason why people don't even take risks to start with because they don't want to see the other end and have to experience failure. It's brutal. If I were to go back to that time in my life, I felt I had a lot of peers who were having success. I believed in myself inside, but I felt like I was not successful and it was very hard for me to deal with. I was running this hair salon as a general manager, paying myself $24,000 a year at age 39. It is not what I imagined when I was at UCLA and graduated with a degree in Economics. There was a time where I thought, “I made the wrong move. My friends have all started to climb the corporate ladder,” but I kept thinking about what my mentor told me. He says, “Quit trying to climb the corporate ladder. You got to own that ladder.” I stuck with it and it's paid off.

How many years did you work as a general manager before you opened up the next chapter of your story which is the Butterfly Loft?

I ran David Douglas salon in Tustin. There's a second location in Fountain Valley and Orange County, California. Each salon had about 30 hairstylists at it. I was there for two years. After a few months, I knew what my goal. My new goal was going to be wasn't to start a hair product company. It was to start a hair salon and my own salon family. I learned everything there is to know. I used to do experiments. I would play around with the retail shelves. I would move products in different places and see if they would sell more product because of that. I started to try to learn why at the time the companies like Enjoy and Unite were lighting the world on fire. I'm like, “Why?” and trying to figure out what was it that was making the stylists fall in love with their brands. I took advantage of that knowledge later on in my life.

One thing I learned the most is I would drive there from Los Angeles. It was a good hour drive. I realized that if I walked through the doors of the salon, and I come in around ten to try to avoid rush hour, if I walked through the salon doors with a certain mood or attitude, it would change the day completely. I would do experiments where I would come in and I would say something negative. When someone asked me something about anything, I start talking about the weather and complaining about the weather, whatever it might be. It was a different day. Whereas if I proactively came in, I go over to the stereo, turn on some feel-good vibes, I'd go around and start talking to people. The clients work in the room, etc., the whole day was different.

I can only imagine those stylists when they went home to their spouses or their loved ones or went to the bar afterward, they changed somebody's mood because of that as well. It’s something I try to carry through the day. It’s cliche to say but successful people, if I have one attribute they have in common, it's that they're positive. They are spreading positivity and lifting people up. I believe that you could only have two effects on people. You either lift them up and inspire them, or you have a negative effect in their lives. You have one choice or the other. The more I get to meet more and more successful people, they're lifting people up with their attitude. It's something I notice.

I was going to continue on with your journey which I will, but you're talking about how you can approach the world every day, and the attitude that you have affects everybody around you. This has been an effed up year. How do you carry that positivity into this world that seems to be crumbling for so many people?

I feel it's my responsibility to do that. When I do it, it comes right back to me. I do find that the more successful you get, the more people that are around you who are successful. It's a way that you evolve. I do notice the more successful people around maybe acknowledged that there is a Coronavirus, but they don't talk about it in the first ten sentences like the rest of the human civilization does. When you hear, “How are you doing?” You say, “I’m okay, all things considering.” It goes in the wrong way. We're all dealing with it. There are a lot of people suffering and for them, I feel bad.

For those who have lost their jobs, I feel terrible about that. For anybody who's got a job and their health, they're abundantly blessed by having those two things. It's all-time for all of us to acknowledge that it's there, but what is it preventing us from doing? The biggest thing it's doing is it's providing everybody with a better excuse to complain. A lot of people want to take that. It's like saying when it's hot weather, "It's hot outside.” It's the same thing. People are looking for something, but now it's socially okay to say something negative right away. I love to see that change.

Surround yourself with positive people and try to be the purveyor of positivity at all costs. That's what you're saying.

We can't go to concerts. I miss going to concerts and I'm certain that before long, we will be able to go to concerts. It's not the reason to wake up and be negative for the rest of the day. We can't go to restaurants inside, but we can go outside and make a sit down with people and have a meal. We should feel good about that. When you come down and put a list of things we can't do, it isn't very long. We all went in through that lockdown, and we held onto this feeling of, “We're trapped. We can't do anything.” Here we are, you and I, being able to socialize and communicate. There are things we can do.

You've got some cool things coming to help inspire people as well. One of them is RockStar Camp, which I want to hear a lot about, but I want to go back to Butterfly Loft, you opened that. When did the education start? I'm sure you had your education, but then there was a butterfly circus, you were touring around. Was that the next thing that happened? When did that whole education before the product release?

For Butterfly Loft, we opened up this giant salon. It was way bigger than we intended it to be. We had so many chairs to fill. Alexis and I looked at each other and thought, “How are we going to do this?” We thought, “Let's do education.” Instead of thinking about our education program is only being for us, let's open it up to everybody in Los Angeles. There are a lot of independent artists who don't have an education. Let's get it out there. That's what we did. Every Wednesday night, you'd have a sea of people dressed in black, coming up the escalator up to our salon, we'd have the music up loud and playing music that was more challenging. There would be cocktails and appetizers. It’s important to social drink, and there would be education.

Because we did that, everybody was in our salon. O on the way out, they would leave and they grabbed me and say, “Do you have any stations available?” I go, “We do.” They'd want to be part of this creative culture. We started it that way. That was the kernel of creating a community. The idea of you could create this community through education. A funny thing happened along the way, social media comes out and we started to think of ourselves as, “Let's not open our education to just Los Angeles. We could have a global audience. Let’s opened it up to everybody and share what we know with the outside world.” Once we started doing that, we started promoting our stylists heavily as a way to build their clientele, and also to have some stability inside of our salon.

If we make them successful and they recognize us as being a reason why they're successful, then they're not going to want to work at a salon down the street. If anything happened, we try to make them successful and they became successful, but we became successful through the process. I was putting my face on our Instagram page telling people what my values were and what I believed in. I started getting recognized at hair shows. People started to come from other parts of the world to California on vacation and they stopped by our salon to see this mythical place where we were taking blonde women and turning them into mermaids. It started all in education. It morphed into something once social media came out because all of a sudden, we realized that me and my salon were educating, inspiring, and creating trends. This was something that used to be only for big product companies. That was their job and all of a sudden, this salon in LA is doing this thing. I noticed that there are certain individuals in other parts of the country who were also inspiring, educating and creating trends.

One attribute that successful people have in common is that they’re always spreading positivity and lifting people up.

While reading a book one day in Costa Rica called Never Eat Alone, I had a eureka moment, “Why don't I connect with all these people and why don't we work together? If I've gotten all this influence, what would it be like if all of us got together?” That's when Butterfly Circus was born. I was calling people who are famous in our industry, but at the time weren't quite as famous as they are now. Nobody was calling and asking them to be social media influencers. Almost every one of them had never been educated before in their lives. When I called them and since nobody else was, they all picked up the phone and they would say, “David, I love what you're doing out there in LA.” I'd say, “I love what you're doing.” The next thing you know, they're all in Los Angeles and we're teaching the class to sold-out classes for $25,000 a night and sometimes $80,000 a night. You could see how that would morph into the Pulp Riot.

During that time, before Pulp Riot was inspired, were you already doing vivid colors? Was vivid like the thing?

Vivids were the thing. In our salon, they are catching on. We were playing with vivids and we were looking at ways of, what do we want from these things to make them better? I look fondly back at Butterfly Circus. The people are larger than life personalities now. I give a lot of credit for inspiring me along the way. There are people like Larisa Love who was renting a station from BMI salon, who early on and in this Instagram evolution, I was able to see from her what power she had, and the idea that she can post a picture and you see the thousands of likes coming in. In exchange, I gave her the first opportunity to educate. There's a lot of these win-win relationships.

There's Rickey Zito who was living in a swamp in New Orleans. He comes out and rises to the top of our industry. XoStylistXo, Confessions of a Hairstylist, Jay Wesley Olson and Glamiris, all these people are the first generation of people. Now everything is more often not about being a giant social media influencer. It's getting a large group of people that like what you're doing and people realizing that they're not getting paid to like you. You've got this generation of Style-Lush Salon and Jessika Power paints. There are some of these young talented people. It's a lot of fun to see these new up-and-comers who are as talented as people with millions of followers. It’s just they didn't come out at the right time when algorithms were kind to you.

They're tricky. You're lucky to get any growth.

Back in the day, you post a picture and all your followers would see it.

Good luck with that now. You don't even see some of your best friends anymore. You used some of these artists to help you create Pulp Riot.

That’s correct. That was important to us. We felt like we get the product in their hands and start looking at what colors they wanted. We had them send over submissions. It's interesting the way we do it and we still do it now. We use other people's product lines to formulate our product. In the early days, it would be taken to other people's product lines, combining them together, and then trying to come up with the color that you want to create. You go to the lab and say, “This is our inspiration color.” That's how it all began. You start taking out Pantone Color Charts and saying, “In the dream world, here are the colors I'd have as well,” and you'd start grounding out stuff. The process is super complicated between that, but that's as simple as it is.

For those who are out there going, “I want to create a product line,” it can be done and you don't have to be a Harvard trained chemist to be able to pull it off. I've spent a lot of my quarantine time writing a book, which I hope to launch sometime in 2021. It's going to give a lot of people insight on how to start a company. That's what everybody asks me like, “That's great. I have ideas, but how do you do it?” There's not a lot of books out there that break it down and specifically say, “Here's what you do if you want to roll up your sleeves and create a company.”

It sounds like you started with culture and education first before you launched full-fledged into designing Pulp Riot, which is brilliant. Having a brand and all that first is huge because then you can release things and people already know about you. A lot of challenges that a lot of entrepreneurs have is creating great products, but nobody knows about them. It's hard to sell that and create a brand at the same time.

Brand is important. We are a company in the business of making other people successful, and then we've got a product. You have to think about your business. You have to think about what purpose do you serve and don't have it be as product-focused. Once a company is around for twenty years, the founder is gone, and there's not the culture of story around, those brands start to focus on product and product performance. What does their product do that other products don't? Something that is not interesting to me, but you're right. What is the difference between the time I went with Level 6 to the hair show, and everybody ignored us, and the time that I went with Pulp Riot and everybody wanted to be at our booth?

The difference between the two is with Pulp Riot, I created a brand before launching a product. That was the key to our success. Back in the Butterfly Circus days, we made it a rule that we would never have more men on stage than women. We were vocal about that. That became part of my brand and the Butterfly Circus brand. That's one example of when you start launching Pulp Riot, we still do the same thing. It's very much an opportunity for women and it's this brand that becomes Pulp Riot that attracts people to it. It's a value.

Is that because you saw more men on stage in this female-run business, more or less?

Yes. I went to Level 6, you open up the catalog and all the opportunities were for the men. On the big stage, where the men. Who was going on at the prime time? The men. There wasn't much opportunity there when you look at our industry being over 80% female. Where's the role model and why is it that it's happening? I have a lot of theories on why it is and some of it makes sense, but at the end of the day, it's important to me to play a part in changing that. Not to say that opportunities shouldn't go to men. It should look a lot like our industry and that perhaps 80% of the opportunities should go to women.

I never thought about that before. When you do go around, a lot of these stages at the hair shows, a lot of men are on there. Maybe because they have louder voices or maybe a little bit more outgoing. Why do you think that is?

In the early days, I felt like the same guy was on every stage. They all look the same. They all wore True Religion jeans, middle-aged, had British accents, and a lot of them sounded fake. For some reason, a lot of brands thought that's going to sell, and that what's going to get people in there. For whatever reason, maybe it does. If you could go to a concert and you can bow down to somebody and you say there is a role model or whatever it might be. It's even more of a connection with the audience when the person in the audience because I could do that and be up there. I could aspire to be that and you don't get that if it doesn't look, sound and feel like them.

With Pulp Riot, you had this huge success. You were approached by L'Oréal and they decided to purchase Pulp Riot. Is that how it went?

Yes. We launched our brand with our cell phones. We had no sales rep and had no money to spent on advertising. All we did was we took our cell phones and we did an Instagram post. The Instagram posts said everything's about to change. That was our first one. Twenty-three months after we touched the button to post that picture, we sold our company to the largest beauty brand in the world, L'Oréal. A name where you could go to any corner of the globe and say that name L'Oréal and people know who that is. When I pushed the button, maybe my biggest dream of all would be I would sell it to L'Oréal one day many years from then. Twenty-three months was seemed stupid. When you think about it, it takes a while to sell your company. You guys have a lot to go through.

My first connection with L'Oréal was eleven months after we started the company. I got a message from the Premiere Orlando Hair Show. I got a message that someone from New York wants to fly down and meet with me and we're going to go out to breakfast to talk. It's someone from L'Oréal. He chose a place where we wanted to get a quiet table and we didn't want anybody to see us because it's like, “What's the head of L'Oréal doing with the head of Pulp Riot?” We didn't want people to start talking. The waitress brings us over to our table and to our left is the table for Modern Salon Magazine and to our right is the American Salon Magazine. We had a first conversation talking in code a little bit, but they were interested in buying Pulp Riot. There were a lot of promises made. They promised us that they would not L’Oréalize Pulp Riot. Instead, they're wanting to buy us to Riotize L'Oréal.

We continue to run our business in Los Angeles with the same employees. I would continue to run the company and Alexis would continue to create products. They said to me, “David, you're not going to be an employee of L'Oréal. We will be employees of Pulp Riot. You just tell us what we need to do in order for us to help you achieve your vision of getting your products across the globe and creating a cult community and culture, which is in every country in the world.” That was the deal. There's money and the money is life-changing. It could be life-changing in 1 of 2 ways. It's been a few years and I've processed this. I've talked to therapists. It's an unusual position to be in, but it could have made me lazy because I would never have to work again. It could have meant that I took on some bad habits or living on an island somewhere being not productive.

It could make it so that you could answer that question that everybody asks themselves. That is, “If I was rich, financially free, and never had to work again, what would I do with my life?” That what it's given me the opportunity to do. I don't get the pleasure from seeing sales reports that I do with working with artists and seeing them succeed, and feeding off of their energy. The answer to the question, “What would you do if you had all the money you ever needed?” My answer is I'd love to run the fastest growing, coolest, edgiest color company in the beauty industry. I'm doing it without thinking about getting paid. It doesn't matter. What I'm doing is what brings me joy and what could bring other people joy.

Have you ever thought you would be able to answer that question?

No. At age 39, I was making $24,000 a year and feeling like a failure, and you flash forward and we are abundantly blessed and we recognize that every day.

You can have all the money in the world and it's not going to make you happy. You have to find purpose in your daily life.

I hope to be there one day. If I look back many years ago to where I am now, it's like a dream to have this financial freedom and to start having this money coming in, so I can focus on what I want to do like you're saying. One thing I have realized, and I'm sure you realize this as well, is that you could have all the money in the world and it's not going to make you happy. You have to find a purpose in your daily life. You have to find purpose or else you feel completely unfulfilled.

It's cliché but money don't buy happiness. There's a period of time where after selling my company and you have the money and that's what you were working toward. Even though you love what you're doing, there's always that thing of striving to have a better lifestyle. When you have it, there is a period where you start questioning, “What’s your why? What's your motivation? What are you doing it for?” It didn't come at first. It was kind of L'Oréal to hire me a coach who was part life coach and part business coach to help me try to discover what that is. Before the growth part of it was what you were looking for, I'm going to grow something into something.

When that's not your motivation, what is it? Once you buy a few things and that's exciting, I can't think of anything that I want. What are you working for if you're not working for things? It's a good thing to go through and it makes you evaluate why you're doing certain things. My coach has worked with me on, why does it make me feel better if I get more likes on Instagram, for example? Why do I check back to see how many likes I got? It's revealing on what your attitudes about money and people's acceptance. I look at you and I have no doubt that you're doing what you love. You also are an entrepreneur and ambitious and want even more. You talked about looking in the rearview mirror and saying, “This is where I came in. I could see this growth that’s happened.”

In my journey from Level 6 to Pulp Riot. You don't see it forward. It looks like you're not even growing. All of a sudden, I'm working as a manager at a hair salon and owning a salon and now I'm doing this education thing. It didn't feel so much growth when you're in it but when you look back, it is. It's all about challenging yourself and getting out of your comfort zone and taking risks. Even though there are failures and it's a sideways action or it's up and down, when you look back at the end and you connect the dots, there is growth. You don't see it when you're in it.

What do you think some of your most successful habits are? I feel like habits and the consistency of which we employ those habits make us who we are. It's factual. I want to know about some of your best habits. Making your bed is a great one. Maybe some of the habits that you wish could be better.

I do not have it all figured out yet. I've listened to podcasts where a successful person will talk about their routines and as if there aren't any bad habits. The truth is in the mornings, I do have a routine and I find this to be very common amongst successful people. Tony Robbins talks about priming yourself for the day. I liked that word priming yourself. After I make my bed, I'd spend time doing meditation. I only do ten minutes of meditation because I lose it after that. The whole purpose for me for that isn’t that it makes me a super happy person. What it does is I feel like it gives me moments throughout the day that are flashes of brilliance. It feels like it opens my mind to new ideas by doing that.

After I meditate, I give myself a small pep talk and I do it out loud. It's embarrassing if someone ever listened in on it, but it's a mantra. If I have a lot of my mind, I journal. It's writing all that crap that's going on in your mind on a piece of paper and I don't revisit it. It gets it out there and through that, sometimes I find creative solutions to the problems that I'm dealing with. I have a sauna and I spend twelve minutes in the sauna where I think about what I was doing that day. I do that because I have a weakness and it is anxiety. If I don't think about the meetings I have during the day, the events I have to be at, or this podcast, for example. I have to think about it. What could go right? What could go wrong? The wrongs are not so bad. I feel go into them with a little bit less anxiety. That's the way I prime for my day. Think about that versus the person who hopped out of bed, who has the advantage?

That hits this news button seventeen times and they're late for their first client. That's amazing to hear. I want to jump into Rockstar Camp. This is something that is happening now or that it's going to happen?

Rockstar Camp is underway. Rockstar Camp is our solution to a problem. Because of lockdown, we can't be flying educators and our marketing people across the country. We needed to find a way to continue to educate digitally and we also film videos of people. We needed to keep that branding going. In addition, we recognized in Pulp Riot that we had a diversity issue. We needed to figure out a way to fast track and get people from all cultures to be rockstars in Pulp Riot. We started to look and we thought we have my stylists at Butterfly Loft. A lot of them are already are educators, but there are a lot of them who aren't.

We thought we can work with them. We don't need to fly them anywhere. We have the venue at Butterfly Loft where you could shoot video and they could educate. We're going to work with them a lot more during this lockdown time. We thought, how do we fast track these artists of color into becoming rockstars in Pulp Riot, and making their careers more successful like we've been doing with other cultures? We thought, why don't we have an intensive education training for these people? We do it through the magic of Zoom. We have an eight-week intensive course where they spend hours each week learning from the masters that we have working for our company. They teach them not only how to teach digitally, so it prepares them for having success.

It also teaches them how to teach in a salon, in a store, how to be on stage, how to stand like a rockstar on stage, how to project, where you should be standing, your clients shouldn’t be uncomfortable, how to project, how to answer questions by repeating the question, so everyone else can hear. Everything they need to know to be rockstars and have more extraordinary careers. When they graduate, they don't just get a certificate. They are now part of a community of rockstars. They all get to know each other, become friends, their text group continues after we're done, and they're lifting each other up. When they graduate, they have to teach a digital education on our platform in front of our millions of followers.

In these Rockstar Camps, they're practicing giving speeches like they were on American Idol. You'd have these judges that are saying, “Here's what you can do better. Here's what you're doing good,” and they practice. It requires a lot of us, but it requires a ton of them. These are people who are hungry and they want to be part of it. We're proud that we've graduated rockstars at this point about sixteen rockstars, and 12 of the 16 are artists of color. It's exciting. When you think you've got everything figured out, all of a sudden, new challenges arise, and that's the entrepreneur's call. You come out and you find ways to solve the problems. Rockstar Camp is the solution to that problem. I look forward to having more people in Rockstar Camp. I'm hopeful that when the vaccine comes out and we can all return to a normal, to conduct my own Rockstar Camp in person and have people like yourself come and teach a session at this Rockstar Camp.

It's the most rewarding thing. If you were to ask DougTheo and CoryHoffmanHair. I'll use their Instagram name so everybody knows who they are. They are the people who are running the Rockstar Camp. It’s the most gratifying moments of your career. These people have gone across the world with me on stages in nightclubs and big arenas. They would say teaching Rockstar Camps is the best thing they've ever done.

How does somebody find out about this? Is this an invite-only or is it membership or how does it work?

At the moment, it's invite-only. I visualize doing this on a bigger scale because there's enough of us out there that people like you and I who can make a real difference in people's careers. Aren't we not living in the golden age of hair? The idea that you can be a rockstar with a little bit of talent and a cell phone? We started this conversation off by talking about this. What do they need in order to take their careers from being a hairstylist behind the chair into something bigger, different or better? They need a little talent and a cell phone. They need people to help them learn how to do it and that's what we provide. It's invite-only now, but let’s see where we go from there.

I would love to even share some things on what's worked for me with my online business as well because I know that it's not like you're not used to that and going that direction, but I've had a lot of success with that. I'd be happy to share what I've learned as well with that.

I would make a list of people in the industry who I know it would be tailor-made for this. You'd be at the very top of the list.

Thank you. I've had such a great time chatting with you and I could talk to you a lot longer. One question I like to ask a lot of my guests is you've had so much success in your life aside from anything that didn't go quite as planned. You'd have one success after another on your resume or whatever. Somebody might Google search you and find you on. Do you consider yourself successful?

I do. It feels good to say that and because for many years, I didn't. I've learned to feel that way because when you think that the moment you feel success is the moment you walk out of the office, walked down the street, and realized you sold your company to L'Oréal. That should be the moment in the movies, but it wasn't for me. It took a little bit longer to realize that I'm a success and it does feel great to feel that way.

It's been such a pleasure having you on the show. Where can people find you or listen to you? You have a podcast, Zero Gravity Genius.

First of all, thank you for having me on this. This has been wonderful. You are a gifted interviewer and you've made my job easy. People could find me on Instagram @DavidThurstonOfficial. They could also find my website at David Thurston Official. There you'll see my podcast, which got off to a false start. I aspire to bring it back when COVID is over because I want to interview people in person in their environment. That was one of the hallmarks of what I wanted to try to do and I can't do that right now. We'll get back to that, but those are the best places to find me.

Thank you. I wish your health, safety, continued success, and thanks for Riotizing our fans.

I wish you all the best. Thank you for the opportunity.

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Important Links:

• Pulp Riot
• Facebook - Pulp Riot
• Butterfly Loft
• Never Eat Alone
• Zero Gravity Genius - Apple Podcasts
• @DavidThurstonOfficial - Instagram
• David Thurston Official

About David Thurston

David Thurston is a beauty industry entrepreneur, educator, and disrupter. He is best known for being the Founder and CEO of Pulp Riot, an innovative, professional hair color company. In May 2018, L'Oreal acquired Pulp Riot. David continues to serve in the CEO role. Over each of the past four years, Pulp Riot has had the largest sales growth in the professional beauty industry.

The product catalog currently consists of over 200 different products, which are distributed throughout 33 countries through a network of professional beauty distributors (Salon Centric in North America is the largest distributor.) The brand's Instagram page has the highest engagement of any other hair brand. David Thurston is also the founder and owner of Butterfly Loft, an upscale salon located in Los Angeles (Encino), that makes up over 10,000 square feet of salon space, replete with 71 hair stations, 2 makeup stations, and 2 spa rooms.

The salon is the best-reviewed salon in Los Angeles county. David Thurston is also the founder of Butterfly Circus, an education company that has revolutionized how education is taught in the beauty industry. The Circus consists of a team of high-profile stylist educators that travel the United States and Canada putting on large-scale education events using a unique teaching format. David is often invited to speak at events. His lectures typically aim to teach and inspire beauty professionals, salon owners, and business leaders in the fields of branding, social media, and business ownership. He also helps others understand how to adapt to the changes caused by the digital revolution and thrive in the new world.

Prior to entering the beauty industry, David was a Managing Consultant in the San Francisco offices of Navigant Consulting, an international management consulting firm. David received an Economics degree from the University of California, Los Angeles. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and business partner Alexis Thurston, and their two daughters.