This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello everybody, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School, your host, Chris Guillebeau here. Now, this was supposed to be a week of note. This was supposed to be a tax week. April 15th is usually the tax deadline, at least for a lot of tax returns in the US.
And guess what, it's not now. Now that deadline has shifted at least three months until July. For the first time in history, or at least for the first time that I'm aware of, maybe a hundred years ago, it changed or something. Now I usually do an extension, so I don't actually file my taxes until the very last minute, which I believe is sometime in October or something. But who knows, maybe with this reprieve, these extra months, I will actually get it done in time.
If for some reason you've actually filed your taxes already, like you did it early, you're awesome, congratulations. Now you don't have to worry about it, okay? But you're probably in the minority. All right, this is Throwback Thursday/Where Are They Now, where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved considerably since we first featured them. Last week's segment was about a beekeeper and cheesemonger who is living the dream in Houston, Texas.
That dream would be, you know, keeping bees and eating cheese. Cheese and honey, two good things. Today in our latest feature, we'll hear from Chris Healy, a partner in the long hairs. What's the long hairs? Well, it's a booming business in San Diego that serves men with long hair worldwide.
Now this is all about identity and belonging. Chris sells products, but it's connected to something much deeper than a physical product. There are a lot of lessons here, so pay attention to Chris's update. I'll have some detailed analysis at the end because as I said, this is some powerful stuff. First, I would like to thank our sponsor, thank you so much sponsor, for making all of this series completely free to you.
[Music]
I'm Chris Healy, co-founder of the long hairs. We are located in San Diego, California, and we were previously featured on Side Hustle School, episode 64. We started as a small two-person web shop and digital marketing agency with really no experience. As we learned and practiced our trade, we were always in search for our own thing. The digital agency life was great, and we were figuring it out and making some money and getting some good clients, but it still wasn't really our project.
So as two guys growing our hair long for the first time, as we happened to be, we started recognizing the many things that suck about being a guy with long hair from trying to figure out how to take care of it to go into the store and just trying to find the most basic black hair ties, not really knowing what to get or how to take care of your long hair. So recognizing these things, we set out just to make it better for guys growing their hair long, and it became our side hustle. The whole hair industry is very much feminine-focused, and I don't think we would have ever thought of this if we weren't both growing our hair out for the first time, but we'd even see other guys on the street or restaurants or just out and about, and you kind of know like, that guy's been through the same thing as me. He went through the awkward stage and he wonders, you know, how do I tie it up or what should I do with this now? So it really started developing as a community even before we had the actual idea of the long hairs, which was, and even to this day, we still have these referral cards that we hand out to guys with long hair that we see on the street, and it's a fun way.
It's our hand-to-hand tactic to tell guys about the long hairs. We were sticking with the marketing agency for several years until we just, it was really hard to devote enough time to the long hairs while keeping the agency going. So really at the end of 2017, we pretty much went full-time with the long hairs. We still had a few clients on the agency side that we liked working with, but just about a year ago, we have dissolved the agency completely, and the long hairs is a full-time gig. We've burned the ships, there's no going back.
Since the last time we were on the show, a lot has happened, definitely. Some of the highlights, we appeared on ABC's Shark Tank in January of 2018, where we secured an investment deal with Mark Cuban, although we're still trying to get him to grow his hair out. Turns out that's a little bit harder than getting an investment deal. Soon after that, well, in March of 2019, just about a year ago from this recording, we hosted The Great Cut. It was a charity hair cutting event where we broke the Guinness World Records title for the most hair donated to charity in 24 hours, donating over 339 pounds of hair and $50,000 to children with hair loss.
They're our charity partner who provide real hair replacements to children with medically related hair loss. It could be alopecia, cancer treatments, trichotillomania, burn victims, any medically related hair loss. So they were the primary beneficiary of The Great Cut. It was on March 16th of 2019, and it was a heck of an event with nearly 3,000 total haircuts accumulated to reach that 339 pounds of hair. So I feel like the dust is just barely finally settling now, almost a year later.
Soon after that, we launched our shampoo and conditioner. It was a project we were working on for a long time. It was an important new product line, and it quickly became the number two product in our revenue mix. And the hair care line is really working out well for us with our world famous hair ties for guys holding a commanding number one lead still at this point. And then finally, towards the end of last year, we have exceeded $60,000 a month in revenue, and we were especially excited to hit $1 million in lifetime sales, which is a lot of packs of hair ties.
I would say the biggest challenge we are facing as a community is the continued presence of antiquated grooming policies in schools and workplaces that prohibit boys and men from growing long hair. This is something that recently came up, really got a lot of notoriety with DeAndre Arnold. He was a student, a high school senior in Texas who was gonna be denied walking in his graduation unless he cut off his locks. This is just one of these cases. In fact, recently we published a case study with eight different cases that we've learned about.
We've had parents writing us in, students themselves, and we've just come across a lot of these instances. We're really in this for the long run, and we recognize it's going to take time, and it's gonna take years. But at the same time, we are seeing the progress, and we're seeing the gains and hitting some of these ambitious goals that we're setting for ourselves. It's all part of the journey, overcoming the challenges and the struggles, and there's definitely gonna be a lot more ahead of us, but we're ready to tackle it. - Thanks so much, Chris, really appreciate that.
This kind of thing, this episode, this business, this mission that he's on, essentially, this is all about shared identity. It's not about heritize at all, in fact. I mean, heritize are practical. I often talk about what's a practical solution to a problem, et cetera. But just think about it.
How cheap are they to make? I know he's making some really nice ones, but still, couldn't anybody else sell them? Aren't they worried somebody's gonna come and undercut them with really cheap heritize from China? The thing is, people are paying for something more, so much more than just that accessory. It is that global fraternity that he talks about, and that is where the real value is, that sense of mission, that sense of connecting to something bigger than yourself, as expressed, for example, in the world record they set.
I mean, that's pretty cool, right? So my encouragement to you, if you're thinking about doing anything similar, and again, I don't mean heritize, I just mean anything that's about identity, anything that's about bringing people together in some shared sense of belonging, ask how you can inspire that sense with the people you're trying to serve. Ultimately, that's gonna be far more important than which platform you build your website on. It's gonna be far more important than which social network you use. This is the key to success, along with consistency, along with service, along with just getting better over time, continuous improvement, et cetera.
All this stuff matters, but I really think in terms of what is most impactful, it's like connecting with people based on this shared sense of belonging, identity, and value. So once again, congratulations to Chris and the long hairs. Check them out, we'll link them up on the notes page. 2020 is our year of interaction. If you have a question, if you'd like to update us about your side hustle, if you've got your own shampoo recipe, whatever it is, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions.
We're gonna feature them throughout the year, along with updates from other listeners as they launch their projects. I'm always so happy to see what our listeners are up to. You can always write to me from that website or just at hello@chrisguillebeau.com or look me up on social, twitter.com/chrisguillebeau, Instagram at 193 countries, 193 countries. Thanks so much, have a wonderful day, and I hope you'll join me again tomorrow. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
