How John Paul DeJoria Built Paul Mitchell While Living in His Car

John Paul DeJoria was homeless twice, fourteen years apart, and the two were nothing alike. The first time it was done to him. The second time he had seven hundred dollars and chose not to spend it on rent. This is the John Paul DeJoria story — how Paul Mitchell was built out of the back of a car. In 1980 he was thirty-six years old, freshly pushed out of the hair care industry, with no capital and no job. He started John Paul Mitchell Systems with seven hundred dollars — half of it borrowed from his mother — and for the first two weeks of the company's life he lived and worked out of a twenty-year-old Rolls-Royce, selling salon to salon, door to door. Fourteen years before that, his wife had left with the car and the savings, and he was evicted days later with a toddler son and no plan at all. What he did then is the part almost every version of this story skips, and it is the reason we made this one. There is also a decision about the colour of a bottle that turned a thing he could not afford into one of the most recognisable objects in the industry. It is still on shelves, unchanged, forty-five years later. Products in more than eighty countries. A tequila company started nine years later that sold to Bacardi in a deal valuing it at five point one billion dollars. And a high school maths teacher who told him, out loud, that he would never succeed at anything in life. Three walls, three completely different mechanisms. Not one of them was "never give up." 👇 A teacher told John Paul, straight out, that he'd never succeed at anything. Who wrote you off — and what did you do with it? 🔔 Subscribe for the founder stories behind the brands you already know — one every week. Next up: the woman a hundred investors turned down, who got funded by learning to kitesurf. Sources: John Paul DeJoria's own account (Big Think, 2017) · CNBC · Horatio Alger Association · published company histories of John Paul Mitchell Systems · Bacardi/Patrón acquisition reporting, January 2018.