🎧 Listen to the full episode here: Talking with Entrepreneur Kate Assaraf about Small Businesses
When you talk to Kate Assaraf, founder of Dip, you don’t just hear the story of a beauty brand—you hear the story of resilience, grit, and a refusal to follow the rules when they don’t make sense. Kate is as much about calling out the nonsense in the beauty and business industries as she is about creating high performance, sustainable products that people actually love.
Roots on the East Coast
Kate grew up on the East Coast, raised in New Jersey before living in places like New York, London, Paris, and California. Despite her travels, she wanted her children to grow up with the sharp wit and humor of the East Coast. After 60 years in New Jersey, she half jokes about “running away” when she retired, largely because of the high taxes and the complicated systems that make running a business harder than it needs to be.
For Kate, that extra red tape doesn’t necessarily equal safety.
The Birth of Dip Haircare
Despite the challenges, Dip was born out of Kate’s passion for better, safer haircare. She rents a factory space in North Carolina, employs a small but mighty team and sells all over the country.
Her commitment to innovation shows up everywhere. Take, for example, the time she discovered 40,000 abandoned plastic bottles destined for the landfill. Instead of ignoring it, Kate trademarked the term “great filled dead stock” and gave those bottles one more life before they hit the trash.
“They were ugly,” she laughs, “but I couldn’t let them go to waste.”
Beyond Plastic: Why Bars Matter
Most of Dip’s line revolves around high-performance shampoo and conditioner bars. Not because it’s trendy, but because it works. “Everything’s going to bars,” Kate says, and for good reason, liquids often come with unnecessary additives and wasteful packaging.
Kate also connects deeply with customers who, like her, are sensitive to fragrance. That led to Dip’s fragrance-free line, which is even recommended by functional medicine doctors for IVF patients and those who are immunocompromised.
“I didn’t set out to create products for hunters or hikers,” she admits, “but hearing that our scent-free bars are perfect for them too brings me a lot of joy. Those are happy accidents.”
Rethinking Ingredients
For years, Kate believed essential oils were the holy grail of clean beauty, until she learned about the pesticides often used on those plants.
“I couldn’t sleep when I found out,” she says. “You don’t know how it’s grown, and it takes so much oil just to scent one thing.”
So she pivoted, choosing to use extremely high quality synthetic fragrances, the kind that meet Europe’s strictest safety standards. “It was against the grain,” Kate admits, “but it’s the only way to guarantee safety and sustainability. Not all synthetic fragrances are bad, and I’m comfortable explaining that to anyone.”
An Honest Approach to Business
Kate’s business philosophy is simple: don’t sell junk. “I won’t put anything out there that I wouldn’t use on my own family,” she says. She compares it to buying only pasture-raised eggs—if you care about quality, you don’t cut corners.
And despite being in business for over three years, Dip hasn’t relied on flashy influencer campaigns or endless ads. Growth has been entirely organic, built on word of mouth and authentic customer love.
“We’ve never had to pay anyone to say they like our products,” she says proudly.
Looking Ahead
Dip is more than just a beauty brand, it’s a philosophy. It’s about cutting through buzzwords like “clean” and “organic” to actually deliver products that are safe, sustainable, and high performing. It’s about rejecting industry norms when they don’t serve people. And it’s about building a business rooted in honesty, humor, and heart.
Kate says it best: “Don’t throw junk out there just to make money. Provide something real, something you’d buy for yourself or your family.”
