Robbie Salter: Co-Founder of Jupiter

Episode 825

On today’s episode, we welcome Robbie Salter, Co-Founder of Jupiter — the clinically proven, salon-grade scalp care brand redefining how dandruff is treated. What started as a personal frustration during an intense period of work stress led Robbie to discover that the dandruff category hadn’t meaningfully evolved in decades. Most products forced consumers to choose between efficacy and experience — outdated drugstore formulas that worked but felt embarrassing, or premium haircare that looked good but didn’t actually treat the condition. Jupiter was created to bridge that gap.
Through extensive consumer research and early demand testing, Robbie and his Co-founder Ross Goodhart uncovered a major opportunity to modernize the category. They built Jupiter as a science-backed brand that treats dandruff at the root while also acknowledging the role lifestyle, stress, and environment play in scalp health. By combining clinically proven formulas with clean ingredients, elevated design, and stigma-breaking education, Jupiter is helping normalize dandruff care and setting a new standard for results-driven haircare.
In this episode, Robbie shares the insights that helped validate the opportunity in a legacy category, what surprised him most about building in a space historically associated with stigma, and how Jupiter is helping shift the conversation around scalp health. We discuss the role of consumer education, the importance of destigmatizing common conditions, and how thoughtful brand storytelling — including campaigns like the “Shampoo Heist” — can turn challenges into momentum. From navigating the emotional highs and lows of entrepreneurship to redefining what premium dandruff care can look like, this conversation offers a fascinating look at how founders can rethink even the most overlooked industries.
If you’re interested in building modern consumer brands, redefining legacy categories, or how founders turn personal insight into meaningful innovation — this episode is for you. Tune in now on The Kara Goldin Show.

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be, we just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. Control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin show. So excited to have my next guest here. Robbie Salter is the co founder and CO CEO of an incredible brand called Jupiter, the clinically proven salon grade scalp care brand redefining how Dandruff is treated. So Robbie’s journey started with a very personal problem. I cannot wait to get into hearing a lot more about that story, but during an intense period of work stress, he began experiencing dandruff. Who wants that? But decided not to stress or complain about it too much, but instead create a create a product that actually or a series of products that actually helps with this. So consumers were essentially forced to choose between products that worked but felt maybe outdated and embarrassing, and then came along Jupiter. So that insight led Robbie and his co founder Ross to build Jupiter, a modern science back back brand designed to treat dandruff at the root. And I cannot wait, like I said, to get into exactly how they built this company, how they’ve been able to scale this brand? They started during 2020, which we all know was a cuckoo, crazy time to be starting a company. So welcome. Robbie Salter, CO, founder and CO, CEO of Jupiter. Very excited to meet you.

Robbie Salter 2:19
Thank you. Thank you. And I’m excited to talk about a topic that I know all of your listeners want to talk hear about, which is dandruff. Let’s talk about dandruff for half an hour.

Kara Goldin 2:28
I love it. So how would you describe the brand that you’ve built? Jupiter, yeah.

Robbie Salter 2:34
So we’re the new standard in dandruff care. So think about everything that you hate about all of the existing Blue Bottle brands, you know, we kept all the good stuff, which is the medicated ingredient, and threw out all the bad stuff, so it’s a cleaner, more premium, elevated, seriously effective product. So, you know, oftentimes I’d like to compare us to, you know, or make the comparison between matcha and Mountain Dew, right? So if you’re going to use the old brand, the old brand is the Mountain Dew. It’s, you know, the blue goo liquid that you know will do the trick, but you don’t feel great using it. We’re the matcha, right? So we are the cleaner version that still gives you what you need. We still get you the end result guaranteed, but we do it in a cleaner, more beautiful fashion. So we’re sulfate, paraben, phthalate free. We’re safe for color treated and chemically treated hair, no. Ma, no MITs, no. BHT, so all the all the toxins that you don’t want in your product, and that the modern woman most, mostly because I’d say 85% of our brand is focused on on women. It’s what a modern customer really is looking for in a dandruff care product. And it only you know, it’s only been 75 years since the last innovation in the category. So we’re we’re coming to market, or we’re in market, rather, with a totally new, elevated product, so interesting.

Kara Goldin 4:03
So I’d love to hear your experience when you were launching the company. A lot was going on in your life and and as you mentioned, what were you dealing with beyond having this problem with dandruff,

Robbie Salter 4:19
beyond having dandruff with that. What else was going on in your life? Well, there seemingly was a lot going on that was causing me dandruff. And, you know, I imagine some listeners will say, Oh, I have, I have dandruff, and I’m not sure how I got it, but so a little taking a little bit of a step back, Dandruff is kind of like acne, in that you can get it from your genetics or from your lifestyle. So genetics is Thank you, mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, you got it. And then lifestyle, it’s things like your diet. It’s about exercise, how frequently you’re washing your hair. And now to address your question, stress. So. So the idea came to me and my business partner separately, we independently had this idea and came to the same idea at the same time, which is a crazy story in and of itself, but it during that time I was in 2018 I was working as a consultant at a media company or a company that focuses on the media industry. We had just sold the business for a lot of money. My boss made a lot of money. I made zero monies from that transaction, but I was at my desk scratching my head, saying, What the heck am I going to do with my life? Where am I going? Having a little bit of a panic attack, a stressed out moment as somebody in their, you know, mid 30s at the time, and I just looked down on a on my desk, saw pilot dandruff, and I said, isn’t this interesting? Right around there, my wife told me the greatest news possible, which is that we were pregnant or she was pregnant, and that we were going to be having a baby. So that was in November of 2019 we ended up securing an apartment in February of 2020 we got a puppy in March 2020 and the world shut down in April 2020, so to be clear, I’ve left my job to start a dandruff brand of which I have no background in, no beauty background whatsoever. My wife is pregnant. I have a new puppy, and I have an apartment that I’m now paying for. Add to that a global crisis that is preventing me from launching this company that I was so optimistic and positive about so quite, quite the crazy time that’s

Kara Goldin 6:53
that’s insane. How did you meet your

Robbie Salter 6:55
co founder? Yeah, so we both, is through, the answer is through a mutual friend. We both went to the University of Michigan, and we had a friend who went to the University of Michigan, who said, Hey, you guys should meet. You both have entrepreneurial interests. You know, probably some complimentary skills. My background is more in the brand building, brand storytelling world. His is in the finance and also, strangely, Amazon world too, which we can talk about a little bit. But he just said, you guys should get together. And we got together. We started kicking around some ideas, and nothing really felt personal. Nothing felt true to what you know, who we were as humans. And a year later, I texted him, and I said, I got this idea. Let’s get back together. Let’s get a cup of coffee. We sat down. I told him the idea, and he just started laughing at me, and I’m like, okay, he thinks Dandruff is a joke. And what was ultimately revealed was he was working on the exact same idea at the exact same moment, but taking a different angle. He was analyzing it from an Amazon perspective. Because most people don’t know this, but a dandruff brand is the both number one and number two, top selling shampoo on Amazon across any category. So dandruff, dandruff shampoos comprise seven of the top 10 selling shampoos on Amazon. Or it’s a scalp scalp treatment related, dandruff related, or color treatment related, are all in the top 10. Half the world gets dandruff. 50 to 75% of the world gets standard. So we were both looking at this enormous market and approaching it from different angles. And it was just sort of this moment of serendipity that brought us together.

Kara Goldin 8:53
So so interesting. Go Blue. By the way, I my son goes to Michigan as well. So we’re, we’re huge fans in the south,

Robbie Salter 9:04
yes, amazing and our greatest, greatest city in the country.

Kara Goldin 9:08
So, so much fun. So how did you decide on the name Jupiter? For sure,

Robbie Salter 9:15
it’s a question we get asked a lot. So it’s and it’s a fun one. So Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system, and it blocks Earth from getting hit with what astronauts call space flakes or meteorites. So the fact that Jupiter, because Jupiter exists, Earth can exist in addition, and perhaps even more funny is the fact that Jupiter has that red spot on it. I don’t know if you remember that Jupiter, the planet Jupiter, it’s got this it’s well known for having this red dot. That red.is a storm on its head that has been burning for 300 years, and scientists. Describe the dissipation of that storm, the breaking up of that storm, as flaking. So put it together, and then you can add all the Greek and Roman references of who Jupiter was or is, and how, you know, he pushes you to be better and to, you know, push your boundaries and limits, and wants you to be a better version of yourself. So it all just sort of made sense. And I would say the final two points are the kickers for us, where it feels sciencey, sounds sciencey, but it doesn’t sound it doesn’t have like a hard X in it, like a lot of the other brands do, it doesn’t feel like, you know, it feels like something that could be in your shower. And we didn’t want to create a word. We just wanted to go with a word that already existed in the world so people didn’t have to guess how to pronounce it.

Kara Goldin 10:54
How long did it take you from the point where you were you and Ross said, we’re going to go and do this to actually getting a product on the shelf. And how many on the shelf or into market, I should say. But how many SKUs Did you also launch with?

Robbie Salter 11:14
Yeah, so again, having no background in the industry, I thought this was going to be like a three month process of creating a product. But we, while many companies will borrow something that’s off the shelf from a formulator, you can just go to these formulators and say, I want a shampoo and I want it to smell like rose and lavender, and they can take an existing formula and change it Ross. And I really wanted to, no pun intended, start from scratch. So it really, it took us about 18 months to nail the formulations. Because we’re we’re again, we’re formulating with a medicated ingredient. So the stuff that actually does the heavy, heavy lifting is difficult. It’s difficult to mask the scent of texturally, it’s hard to work with, so it took us a long time to perfect the holistic experience of having a great dander shampoo that smelled worked and looked amazing. We ended up launching with six SKUs overall, not just shampoo and conditioner, but also a pure a mask, so an exfoliating mask, which is Vogue’s three year in a row, top scalp mask on the market. So that’s a chemical exfoliant. We also launched with a physical exfoliant, which is our brush, our scalp brush, which another top selling item on Amazon. We sell a tremendous number of those, and it’s unbelievable. We also launched with a serum. So while some people wash may wash their hair every day, some people wash their hair two to three times a week. Some people wash their hair once every two weeks, or even once a month. What we wanted to do is we wanted to create a product that could be used in between washes that contained the medicated ingredients. So if you didn’t shower as much or wash your hair as much, excuse me, you would still be able to get the medicated treatment you needed. So so yeah, collectively, those were, those were our SKUs, and we felt it was important to give a full variety and a full batch offering to customers who had been, you know, fighting an issue that just simply wouldn’t go away. I thought

Kara Goldin 13:30
it was fascinating when you talked about the makeup of your consumers now that you’ve been in the market six years. So 80% women, yet, I guess primarily, dandruff shampoo has been marketed to men. So the the opportunity to speak to women differently about this was obviously there. Did that surprise you? And how did you

Robbie Salter 13:57
tackle that totally so it was entirely surprising, and for the first 18 months that we were around, we weren’t we were seeing that data, but we weren’t certain that that data was statistically significant, because we’re such a small company at the time, right prior to launch, funny enough, we actually launched a fake brand called headway. So we said, why don’t we? We’ve got this great idea. It’s easy to launch a website. Let’s, you know, have somebody on Fiverr make designs that look like the products that we ultimately would want to sell. So we put them together, put together a site, put it up online, and drove about, you know, 10, $15,000 of ad traffic to this site to see what would happen and who would respond and when somebody would get to check out a pop up would say, Hey, we’re not ready yet. But if you leave your name and number, or you leave your name and email, we would give you 20, 30% off on. Launched. After doing that for about a month, we had called six to 10,000 people who had signed up. And looking at that data, it was predominantly women. So pretty much, from the get go, we saw that data, but we just weren’t convinced yet, right from the start, that that was who our customer is, and after time, and you know, after iteration, after iteration, and as we just grown, after we had grown, we realized that the female consumer was just speaking so clearly to us, saying that she needs this product she’s feeling left out of the conversation or she doesn’t want to use one of the Blue Bottle companies because it’s stripping her hair, or it’s, you know, impacting her keratin treatment, or she wanted cleaner ingredients. So it took us, it took us about two years to really come to that, you know, conclusion or discovery, rather,

Kara Goldin 16:02
so interesting. So Dandruff is kind of a taboo topic. It’s not like you necessarily tell your friends that maybe your close friends that you’ve got this dandruff and you should actually go try the shampoo, right? They can see it. Yeah, it is kind of this taboo thing, you know, as compared to we were chatting about hint, you know, you you don’t worry about telling your friends about, you know, hint and, and, but Jupiter is in this category that is hard, right? Because you’ve got to that word of mouth, people almost have to own that they’ve got an issue or a problem first, and it’s it’s hard. So how do you tackle that, like, how do you strike the balance of of being a clinically effective but also premium and clean product and and getting the word out

Robbie Salter 17:04
about it. Yeah. I mean, I think in many respects, the answer is, you talk about it, right? You’re not listen. I think one of the geniuses of companies like Starface, or even do skincare in that they are, you know, acne, putting these patches on your face. You’re walking around and you’re seeing that somebody has acne, and you’re sort of trying to make it a or a pimple, excuse me, and trying to make it a positive moment. You know, do skin care with their under eye patches? It is it? We don’t have that opportunity, like we’re not going to put glitter in people’s hair when they have dandruff, just to be outward about it. But I think the I think, just like those categories, the answer is having conversations like this and talking about it and and frankly, when you find something that you love you you do want to tell people, right? You know, we have a lot of customers who send products to their brothers or cousins or husbands or children at the University of Michigan, right? So it is. It is one of those things where we, we may not be so out about it, and like a bottle of hints, you carry it with you, and it’s a walking advertisement, just by putting it on the table for us. I think the idea, really, or where what it really comes back to, is, how do we talk about it more? How do we do bold advertising and things that just sort of rip the band aid off and say, let’s have a conversation. We’re all experiencing it. Half the world gets dandruff like enough of this already. Let’s just, let’s talk about this issue.

Kara Goldin 18:44
Yeah, definitely. What were some of the biggest challenges you faced early on while building building in a legacy category?

Robbie Salter 18:53
Well, listen what I love. What I love about these conversations, Kara, is that there’s, there’s there’s a humanity to it, right? I think the, I think part of the biggest challenge was leaving my job, you know, living in a world where I’m not making money anymore, that my bank account isn’t going up, it’s going down. I think we I think early on, people, you know, they would tell they would tell me that, like, hey, it’s going to be, it’s a different world. It’s gonna, you know, it’s gonna feel scarier. Early on, when you’re just getting started, and there’s massive delays on everything, because it always takes longer and it’s much more expensive than you imagine, you start to question yourself. You start to wonder like, am I? Am I doing something wrong? And the answer is, generally no, it’s just things take time. You know, certainly again, the fact that there was a global pandemic, that was one of the biggest challenges. Logistics. So we launched as a primarily a direct to consumer business, and as you know, the world supply chain shut down. So we ended up launching on Amazon sooner than we expected, because they were some of the only, you know, delivery services and shipment providers that could actually get product in the hands of of our customers who were placing orders without massive delays. And I think really again for, I would say, for the first two to three years, it really came down to supply chain and managing, managing our raw ingredients. There was a period of time when funding was exceptionally dry, the market was exceptionally dry, and it was difficult to raise money. But we were able to get through that because the our numbers were just indicating that we had we had hit on something that we had touched on something that people found compelling. But it was, like most businesses, it was, it was tough out of the gate.

Kara Goldin 21:07
Yeah, definitely. Well, entrepreneurship can be an emotional roller coaster, for sure, and it’s, you know, I think, especially if you’ve never launched a company, or don’t know an entrepreneur Well, you may not hear about these stories, right, and it’s very consistent across all categories, but maybe there’s a setback that or something that happened that you didn’t expect that ended up turning into something amazing that you were surprised about.

Robbie Salter 21:46
Yeah, listen, I’ll tell you it’s, it’s almost a layup of a question for something that just happened to our business. So in, in November of last year. So so I should just say we’re in about 1200 targets today, right? So we had launched our we had launched our partnership with them in February of last year. Q4 of last year would have been our first holiday season with them in late October, I think around October of last year, Ross called me and he said, Robbie, I don’t know how to tell you this, but one of our delivery trucks carrying 27,000 bottles of dandruff shampoo on the way to target For the holiday season, the truck was stolen, and you know, we, I, I had no idea how to even respond to that, right? No, like, what do we do? Do we call target? Do we get in our cars and retrace the route of the trucker, and we went into action mode. And fortunately, over the case, over the course of the next couple of weeks, we were able to track down where the truck was. We recovered the product. But it gave us this idea to do, what was our latest campaign? Which is our stolen shampoo campaign? So we decided to come up with a campaign where we shared with the world that our dander shampoo is so good that it’s being stolen off of a truck, and it’s the campaign has gone really well. I am deeply indebted to our marketing team, our internal marketing team, who, and our PR team, who’s who’ve done a great job getting word out about it. And we just had, we just had one of our social media videos go viral on Tiktok. We’re at about six plus million views on one of our videos, and it’s just crazy. But that was, you know, lemonade from lemons, for sure.

Kara Goldin 24:02
I love that story. So did you ever get the the shampoo, the truck back? Or what happened?

Robbie Salter 24:10
Yeah, yeah, it was, you know, I’m sure you know this. It’s like the, you know, the trucking industry is, can be very, very shady. And we were able to track down where the products were. It was, you know, a bad actor. We had to get a warrant to break into their warehouse and uncover the product. And thankfully, we got it all back, and we’re able to ship it to target, you know, a few days late, but it got to target, so we’re able to fulfill our commitment. I love that story.

Kara Goldin 24:41
So what have you learned personally that you’ve had to change as as a leader? You know you mentioned, when we first hit record, that you had been working for somebody else and and the. The buck stops with you and your co founder for this company. But what have you had to learn along the way since, since you’ve started, I’m sure, a lot of things. But if there’s one really big thing for you personally,

Robbie Salter 25:15
yeah, I mean, listen, it’s It’s something my wife has been telling me for a long time, which is, I’m not always right. You know, I have, you know, the point of bringing on a team is to help delegate responsibility and to tell and to have individuals who know how to do things better than I, to take responsibility and to really put forth their ideas. And when you’ve been, when you’ve when you’ve been running or owning or overseeing your baby for so long, it’s really hard to let go. And I think I’ve really had to, I’ve really had to try to take a step back and try to let the team run and sort of feel confident, and give confidence to my team that they have, you know, room to run before I dive in. I’ll also say that, you know, I’m I’m in Kara. Obviously, this is my, my my livelihood. It must be successful. I have. I’ve learned that you can’t let doubt creep into your mind, even though it will. You have to learn to find a way to compartmentalize doubt, because it can be a disease, and you really need to find a way for your team and for yourself, for on those dark days, to say it’s just a dark day, but we have an incredibly bright month and an incredibly Bright year, so really looking at the long game versus worrying about, you know, the the changes in stock every day?

Kara Goldin 27:07
Yeah, definitely. So last question, what are you most excited about for you, for Jupiter and the company, and what’s coming up for the brand that you’re most excited about

Robbie Salter 27:23
we’ve got, we’ve got some amazing partnerships coming up, an amazing a couple amazing products that are, I think, revolutionary, you know, the team really, every single day, we try to defy the category. And I think with one for one product in particular that’s coming out this June. I think it’s going to be a total category disruptor, and we’re really looking forward to how we’re going to continue to change routines for women who experience these types of issues. But I think just more broadly, it’s going to open the aperture of how people look at what we at Jupiter do further destigmatizing the category and sort of bringing people into and interested in something that historically felt, you know, stigmatized and icky. Now we’re doing it in a way that is, I think, really beautiful and groundbreaking. So can’t say too much without giving it away.

Kara Goldin 28:23
Love it well. Robbie, thank you so much for joining today your journey building Jupiter is such a great example of how a personal experience can spark innovation. And when you just think about what can I do to solve this problem? Those are the best ideas that entrepreneurs and and brands that we can remember, that that’s where they start. So Jupiter is at Hello jupiter.com Follow along to see everything that they are doing at Jupiter. And Robbie is the co founder and CO CEO of Jupiter Robbie Salter, so thank you so much for joining today, and thanks everyone for listening. Thanks for

Robbie Salter 29:10
having me. Thanks for listening.

Kara Goldin 29:13
Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit, and of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast, just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms. At Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book, undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building. Hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening and goodbye for now.

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