This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Let's talk about hair ties and shampoo for men with long hair. This is a Throwback Thursday segment. We're gonna hear from a man on a mission to create hair equality. Throwback Thursday is all about going into our archives and getting an update on somebody we featured long ago, what has changed or evolved or transformed in their business, what have they learned along the way. And this guy is pretty cool.
His name is Chris Healy. He's a partner in the business known as The Long Hairs. It is a booming business in San Diego, well, based in San Diego, but serving men worldwide, serving men with long hair in particular. And so I think this is an interesting case of identity and belonging. Often when people think about their side hustle or business, they think about demographics and their mind immediately goes to traditional demographics.
I often encourage people to think more about shared values, like shared values, not just what do these people have in common in terms of their age or their geography and so on. In this case, it's a very clear target market. The target market is men with long hair, right? You just get it immediately in one sentence. A lot of lessons here.
So pay attention to Chris Healy's update. I'll have a couple of comments of my own at the end. As I said, some good stuff here. Let's pass the mic to Chris Healy. [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 that guy's been through the same thing as me. He went through the awkward stage and he wonders 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. 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 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 the 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 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. So 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.
[Music]
So I think this is all about shared identity. It's not about hair ties at all. I mean, hair ties are practical, but those are pretty cheap, right? You can get hair ties anywhere. In this case, people are paying for something more.
Chris calls it a global fraternity. And that's where the real value is, a sense of mission of connecting to something bigger than yourself. So if you're thinking about your next side hustle, maybe consider how can you inspire that sense of belonging with the people you're trying to serve? And it might show up a little bit differently, of course, but nevertheless, a lot of value there. So thanks a lot, Chris, for sharing that update with us.
Listeners, thank you for being out there. For nine plus years and counting, we've made daily episodes here on "Side Hustle School." You can access all of them completely free at sidehustleschool.com, or you can just remain subscribed, following along in your podcast feed, wherever you get your shows, to get the new episodes that drop seven days a week. Much more is coming up. My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
