Sarah Gibson Tuttle launched Olive & June in 2013 — then made a major pivot six years later.
“ I’ve been obsessed with nails since I was a kid,” Sarah Gibson Tuttle, founder and CEO of Olive & June, tells Entrepreneur. “My dad didn’t let me paint my nails, so I had a box of nail polish under my bed, and I would sneak manicures, especially red. That was his least favorite color.”
Gibson Tuttle left a decade-long career on Wall Street to bridge what she saw as a gap between very high-end nail salons and mom-and-pop shops, similar to the way Drybar came in with blowouts at a mid-level price point.
In 2013, the founder opened her first nail salon, Olive & June, in Beverly Hills. However, as the salon continued to grow, expanding to additional locations in Pasadena and Santa Monica, Gibson Tuttle realized the category didn’t just have an issue with affordability — but one with time and access.
“ There’s a limitation on the number of manicurists in the country, and the demand far exceeds what that capacity is for those manicurists,” Gibson Tuttle explains. “And so you go to pockets of the country, and there isn’t an offering like there is in LA or New York.”
Nearly every other category on the beauty market had a meaningful at-home offering, but nails didn’t, Gibson Tuttle says. So she set out to create one.
It took almost six years from Olive & June’s first salon opening to the launch of its own product line.
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