T3 Hair Tools Cofounder Julie Chung Has the Career Advice No One Else Will Tell You

Julie Chung is in the business of making people happier and their lives easier. It started more than 20 years ago when she graduated from medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, and it still applies today, when she is the cofounder of T3, the beloved tech-driven brand of hair tools.

Hair is personal, and Chung—who founded the brand with her husband, Kent—delights when customers shower her with the same excitement they would a celebrity. (Myself included.) It wasn’t until I discovered the T3 Featherweight Stylemax hair dryer years ago, followed by their line of curling irons and, most recently, the Airebrush that doing my hair—previously a chore—became something I actually looked forward to.

“At the end of the day, it’s about what can I do to make your life easier and more pleasurable—or at least, to more easily understand how to do your hair,” Chung says. “Hair is a crowning glory for women. If your hair feels good, then you can go out and do amazing things with more confidence. It’s so gratifying.”

Chung recalls a fashion designer friend of hers who’d recently brought the Airebrush on vacation. “Here’s this busy woman who can run a company, do everything, and yet she normally can’t do her hair and needs to pay someone once a week to come and do it,” she says. “And who doesn’t love their stylist, but now she knows how to do her hair thanks to this tool and feels good about it. That kind of feedback means everything.”

T3 started as a passion project, which is a big reason why the brand is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. “Kent had his own job, and I was in medical school, so to think this would turn into a big company…we weren’t thinking that far in advance.”

But it was that passion for hair, technology, and the overall beauty industry that helped Chung see it to fruition. On top of med school—to become an ophthalmologist, a profession she still practices—she and Kent were staying up all night talking to factories in South Korea and China as well as working on PR plans, design aesthetics, and more. “We’d spend hours on how lightweight it is, or where the handle sits, where the buttons sit,” she says. “But that’s important for any founder, right? You have to know every little thing that makes a product successful in the marketplace.”

And now you can buy T3 everywhere from Sephora to Nordstrom and even Best Buy. “I still very much cannot believe how far we’ve come and how much people love us,” Chung says. “It’s still sort of this pinch-me situation.”

For Glamour’s latest edition of Doing the Work, Chung opens up about the specifics of bringing T3 to life, why it’s never “just hair,” and the mindset shift you need if you want to be happier at work.

Glamour: Starting a brand of hair tools doesn’t come without a lot of thought and planning. Where did this passion come from, and how was T3 born?