Steve Barth [00:00:04]:

Losing hair has a very powerful emotional effect on our personality because we can’t control it, right? But yet we’re left with this real discontent or this real feeling of not looking our best, which means that we’re not always feeling our best. And it’s so important in today’s world that’s so competitive to have that level of confidence.

Kevin Rolston [00:00:40]:

Welcome to HairPod, the podcast where you get to hear real people talk about their hair journeys. I’m your host, Kevin Rolston, and each week I get to interview people from different walks of life whose lives have been touched by hair loss in some form or fashion. Many of our guests have experienced hair loss themselves and found a way to get their confidence and their hair back. In this episode, I spoke with returning guest Steve Barth, a longtime client and founding father of HairClub. We learned a lot about HairClub in our previous episode, where Steve shared his experience meeting the company’s founder, Sy Sperling. If you want to hear about how HairClub went from being his hair loss solution to becoming his career and life’s work, check out our show notes for a link to that episode. What inspires me so much about this story is how profoundly Steve’s hair loss impacted the course of his life. What began as a search for a hair loss solution became a lifetime of innovation in the ways HairClub supports clients at all stages of hair loss.

Kevin Rolston [00:01:40]:

In this episode, we’re going to pick up with Sy Sperling bringing Steve onto the HairClub team and talk about how Steve’s work with the company led to the development of the revolutionary Trichovu hair and scalp analysis system.

Steve Barth [00:01:58]:

As I spoke earlier, always envisioned me as working for him because he felt that I had the ability to share my experience that would hit a common chord with a lot of people. So once I became so enthralled with my experience with HairClub, I then decided to go ahead and approach it as a career. I did kind of see myself in sort of a romantic way, being a writer and being possibly a lyricist, but I didn’t think that I was going to be that one out of a million people that was necessarily going to make that. And I thought this was a great opportunity to sort of represent something I really truly believed in. So I became a consultant over at that one HairClub center, and I luckily had a great deal of success. And Sy was experiencing a lot of financial issues at the time because he was trying to put together the root system of a national organization, and that required a lot more money than he was making. And I used to be in the office with him when his accountant would tell him how much in the rears he is in his bills. So I finally made an offer to Sy because I believed so much in what HairClub was about and what it was attempting to be, that I then offered to waive any my commission compensation until we can get into a better situation.

Steve Barth [00:03:23]:

And I continued to consult, I continued to bring in new people, and we eventually became more stable financially, and we put ourselves in a better position to expand. And as his thank you to me, he said, ‘Steve, I want you to go ahead and have your own franchise, and I’m going to give you the pick of the litter wherever you want to go in the country.’ And I decided to go to Boston. After much deliberation, I decided to go to Boston because Sy then was advertising in the New York Times Sunday magazine section, and that was attracting a more educated consumer, more creditable consumer, but it also had a very significant circulation in the New England area, in the Boston area, as you would imagine. So I felt there was some brand awareness there, rather than starting out at ground zero. And I went in, took a whole floor of the building, which I had no right to do, and from there became sort of the prototype or the roadmap to success for HairClub center operating away from New York City. And I kept on expanding from there to become the largest franchisee. Not to mention I also became a partner to Sy and the parent company in important markets such as Chicago and other markets.

Steve Barth [00:04:44]:

And through this expansion and through my success, we were able to become more of a viable national advertiser, because when you advertise on TV, national cable, in those days, you had to have enough representation so you can make use of the people or the leads that were being generated. And by me being able to personally expand and populate more of that national roadmap, that was a very important step to become a national brand. So you’re right. It became literally the defining value in my life.

Kevin Rolston [00:05:19]:

What do you think was the difference where you finally said, hey, we are going to turn this company from the size that it was one small office in New York City, to now expanding? What do you think made that happen? And was there a defining moment where you said, this is going to be huge?

Steve Barth [00:05:36]:

Yeah, that’s a wonderful question, by the way, and really appropriate. You know, I try to look at things very analytically, and I came to realize that we were advertising and marketing HairClub’s name, and we were getting all types of people that were raising their hand that had interests, but at that time, we were still a single solution provider. That solution was really more appropriate for somebody that was getting at the further end of hair loss. That was just at a point where they were really unhappy, and they realized they weren’t growing their hair back, or they realized that transplants might not have been a really good option for them. But I felt that, as a marketing person, we need to expand those solutions so that we have appropriate solution for somebody that’s just beginning to lose hair. I went ahead and reflected back in our last segment to that time that I went in as a young guy learning more about hair therapy, and that resonated in my brain forever. Then finally, I had the opportunity to roll that out, HairClub version of it. I was the one that brought that hair and scalp therapy to and added it to the HairClub product line.

Steve Barth [00:06:55]:

And that was huge. That was huge because not only did it give us an opportunity to have a really good solution for people that were just beginning to lose hair, and we had really a lot of success with this because I collaborated with a different formulator, another formulator, a product out of New York. His name was David Kingsley, and he was one of the few people that had a PhD in trichology, which is a science of hair and scalp. We together came up with a product and also an in clinic protocol where people would not only use home product, but they would also come in once a month for a clinical session. This was really huge, because now we all of a sudden became a multiple solution provider and not a single solution provider. And even more important, our consultant, who was what we call an image consultant, when we were only working with one solution, which was an aesthetic improvement. But now, once we got into the science of hair and scalp therapy, they had to become a hair loss expert, and that’s a whole different gig. They had to become more scientific.

Steve Barth [00:08:05]:

And with all this, and it was my group of centers that, you know, rolled this out, my corporate partners were a little nervous of it because it was an expansion, and it was, to some degree, potentially a rebranding, and they were nervous of that. So they wanted the Barth group to sort of test it out. We had great success, but I think that the amazing thing is that now we were in the science of hair, and we weren’t just into just the aesthetic side or the non-surgical side, and we continued to build that product and those formulas. But I still remained unsettled and discontent about where we were, even though it was a good, bold step, and it was particularly, I wasn’t happy with the consultants who were now, who used to be image consultants, and now they’re becoming hair loss experts. How do I make them more creditable? So I decided then to develop, to conceive of, to develop a diagnostic system that we refer to now. You could see on the site TrichoView. And what TrichoView is, is it’s a diagnostic software system where we developed it from ground level up. It didn’t exist and it only existed HairClub.

Steve Barth [00:09:24]:

And we were able to put in there a bunch of intelligence so that it can actually look at some of the important features of your hair and scalp, where it’s healthy, where it’s weak, and convert those properties into actual measurements so that we have a better sense of the difference between the properties where the hair is healthy and the properties of where the hair is threatened to be lost. Now, that sounds really complicated. It’s really not. It’s difficult to put it in just a quick session like this, but it became absolutely a huge innovation that gave us the science, gave us the ability to track, particularly if you chose a solution that was about hair therapy. We were able now to track progress through the TrichoView system. Not only were we able to identify these characteristics and properties of the hair and scalp to begin with, but by being able to record this, and if you were getting involved with the hair and scalp therapy product, we were able to continue to apply TrichoView to track the progress. So we were taking that all out of the abstract and making it very tangible.

Kevin Rolston [00:10:42]:

It is fascinating to learn about the development of this technology. And here’s Steve’s passion for continuing to develop solutions and approaches for all stages of hair loss. Steve’s personal experience with hair loss and as a consultant with HairClub gave him an intimate understanding of how unique each person’s journey can be. His dedication to supporting each client through their specific circumstances led HairClub offering multiple services to meet a variety of customer needs.

Steve Barth [00:11:16]:

You know, HairClub, really, to me, one of the big distinctions is we try to take a very individualized, personalized and customized approach. So it’s possible that a non-surgical solution would be terrific for you or for me, but it may not be right for the next guy. And the purpose of TrichoView was for us to be able to again measure certain properties and characteristics of the hair and scalp and make a determination whether we were at a phase of hair loss that could benefit from hair and scalp therapy. Before you go ahead and take that step or decide to take the option of a non-surgical solution. We became, overnight, a multiple solution provider, and the only multiple solution provider at that time in the country. I think that it just. It’s changed us completely. And I don’t think a lot of people that think of Hairclub in the early days with Sy Sperling, they don’t really know what HairClub is about today and where it’s going and what the vision of the future is.

Kevin Rolston [00:12:23]:

Right. How many years are you in on HairClub before TrichoView comes into fruition?

Steve Barth [00:12:29]:

Me, personally?

Kevin Rolston [00:12:30]:

Yeah. How long did it take for you guys to get to that level of business?

Steve Barth [00:12:34]:

I’d say about 25 years.

Kevin Rolston [00:12:35]:

Okay.

Steve Barth [00:12:36]:

Yeah. And maybe even a little longer. I had conceived of this from another experience I had in business, where we were designing a personalized, individualized fitness program. It was way ahead of its time. It was ahead of AI, became an investor in this software development, which was meant to take in information about your fitness health, about your habits, about your fitness goals and objectives. And then it was able to sort of generate from that a completely personalized, individualized and customized fitness and nutritional program and wellness program.

Kevin Rolston [00:13:19]:

Right. So as you’re maybe seeing the physical and how that’s affected by your diet, your exercise, your sleep, are you starting to see correlations and patterns where it’s affecting hair loss and the levels of that as well?

Steve Barth [00:13:30]:

Well, I think what that sort of brought to light for me is that HairClub, again, could distinguish itself by not only looking at the physiology of hair loss and the physical effects of hair loss, but also paying equal attention to the psychodynamic and the psychology of hair loss. So that’s really. I got a lot of that thinking from an investment I made years ago into this, what we call fitness expert program, which was designed, actually, believe it or not, by my now CFO. I met him originally. He’s an MIT computer engineer, and he designed this. He was very entrepreneurial, and he designed this program, but it was way ahead of its time. This is before e-commerce. This is before a lot of things.

Steve Barth [00:14:21]:

I became an investor, and I was also really intrigued by that, because I was obviously very heavily involved with HairClub at the time. And I said to myself, wouldn’t this be cool if we could take this concept and use it as a way of gaining deeper insight into the needs of a HairClub buyer and being able to also pay as much attention to the psychology and philosophy of a buyer as is the physiology of the buyer. And that’s what TrichoView attempted to do. That’s what it was conceived to do.

Kevin Rolston [00:14:57]:

Putting it all together.

Steve Barth [00:14:58]:

Putting it all together so that we’d be able to generate a really highly personalized, individualized and customized treatment plan.

Kevin Rolston [00:15:03]:

So when a person goes into HairClub, they’re going to have a different experience than anybody because they’re going to have their own unique set of circumstances on every different category that you have.

Steve Barth [00:15:13]:

Yeah, I’d certainly like to think so. And TrichoView is that sort of gateway into that, because TrichoView gives that consultant the ability to gain a lot of information that he or she wouldn’t have if they didn’t have the use of that TrichoView diagnostic system. So we set up a record. Once that’s done in consultation, I mean, there’s no charge for that. It’s all part of the interview intake, so that we could better understand your needs. We then continue to keep these trike of you records. So we continue to expose people, particularly that are gravitating towards the whole hair and scalp therapy program to. We continue to load up those records with progress reports and profile photographs and things like that, record keeping that is able to show tangibly the progress that somebody can make.

Steve Barth [00:16:09]:

But this also had its application TrichoView to even our non surgical solution. Because by being able to gain deeper insight into the hair, we gain a deeper ability to be able to go out and get the hair that we need, so that we’re able to make the non surgical option so successful. So it has multiple ramifications.

Kevin Rolston [00:16:36]:

It is so cool to hear about the ever-evolving industry of hair loss solutions, research and technology. There are a lot of barriers to seeking help, something Steve and I both know from our own personal hair loss journeys. Its not surprising that the emotions of hair loss come up so often in this show. Hair loss can feel isolating, stressful and overwhelming. Many people simply dont know where to start, who to trust, or how to make their solution work financially. Steve shares how HairClub strives to make hair loss solutions more accessible and less training, so that seeking help could be a positive, personal and empowering experience.

Steve Barth [00:17:18]:

Now HairClub, by the way, also has ways in which we can get people in, you know, through a financing program that I think a lot of more distressed buyers find extremely helpful. So that’s certainly available too. But most important is this initial intake. There’s no charge for that. And to be able to work with a consultant in a very relaxed and comfortable environment, and a very, very anonymous maintaining your confidentiality and your anonymity. You’re in an office, one on one, and you’re basically working with a hair loss expert who can start to give you the guidelines that you need to help you in understanding what’s out there in the world, in addition to what we also provide as a company. So I think that it’s a great first step, and it’s an important first step. And some people take a little longer than others to take that first step.

Steve Barth [00:18:16]:

But I think once they come into a HairClub center, it’s certainly designed to make you feel extremely comfortable, very relaxed. There’s a camaraderie. People are there for a common purpose. Extremely. You’ll deal with a very sensitive staff. You’ll know them by first name. If you decide to get involved, they’ll know you by first name. We’ll be able to keep your customized needs always at the forefront of our treatment with you, regardless of what solution you take advantage of.

Steve Barth [00:18:45]:

We have a network throughout the country so that we can, you know, if you decide to relocate and people do decide to relocate, that doesn’t end your relationship with HairClub. And we could pass on that information to the center that you’re relocating to so that it’ll be able to always have your unique set of specifications. So, listen, we’re always improving, and, you know, we really make a big effort to continue to put the customer needs in front. It’s a tough job. Oh, yeah. Because it’s a very emotionally driven experience. And when there’s emotions involved like that, that means there’s expectations. Sure.

Steve Barth [00:19:24]:

And the expectations of a buyer, no matter how much we try to make sure that we keep these expectations realistic, they’re very high. And the good thing that I have found that even with those very high expectations, an overwhelming amount of time we meet them, even at times where people are somewhat unrealistic about what to expect from this experience. So I think we have a terrific track record given the amount of people that we deal with.

Kevin Rolston [00:19:50]:

You’ve driven the industry when it comes to innovation. So where is this all going? The end game eventually could be, do we cure male pattern baldness?

Steve Barth [00:20:00]:

Well, that’s been out there a long time.

Kevin Rolston [00:20:02]:

And if so, what is a timetable? On something like that?

Steve Barth [00:20:04]:

Yeah. Well, that, I’m not so bold to go ahead and quote for you, that’s a loaded question. But because I’ve been hearing about the ultimate cure for hair loss for many, many, many years, I mean, listen, there’s been, obviously, there’s a lot of motivation to try to come up with that.

Kevin Rolston [00:20:19]:

Yeah.

Steve Barth [00:20:19]:

And for those products that allegedly will grow hair back then, you got to go ahead and tease apart those. That, does it actually grow hair back? That’s going to contribute to a hairstyle and a look, or does it grow hair back, much like the hair on your arms? Okay. And so you really need to be a well-informed, intelligent, and honest consumer, because it’s very easy, when there’s emotions involved, to be very impressionable and to jump on anything that sounds like it’s too good to be true. But the old expression too good to be true means it’s probably not true.

Kevin Rolston [00:20:56]:

Well, I know that that’s the case in the weight loss industry, that there’s always something that comes along that promises to be revolutionary, and it’s completely different. It’s going to change the game. Do you see the same thing when it comes to hair loss? That people are going down paths that they shouldn’t, that they’re wasting a lot of money, a lot of time? And you talk about the emotions of it as well, that it becomes very frustrating, and people have a hard time dealing with that emotionally. 

Steve Barth [00:21:18]:

Yeah. Well, I could tell you that HairClub is deeply embedded in researching all the most progressive and almost unimaginable opportunities. We have relationships in Asia where there’s access to a lot of science and a lot of labs. There’s, of course, now AI that’s becoming such a formidable force in our lives, and I think that will give us some of the important toolbox to operate from. We are acutely aware of always being relevant. So I would venture to say that it will take the resources of a company like HairClub to be able to continue to successfully blaze, that you.

Kevin Rolston [00:22:02]:

Will always be on the forefront of innovation.

Steve Barth [00:22:04]:

Well, it’s funny. I’m 70 years of age. No way I’m 70 years of age. And, you know, I’ve been with HairClub now since I’m 20, what, 22? So, obviously, that not only talks about the durability of HairClub and the value that I get from being a HairClub user and the empathy and the understanding I have to what everybody’s going through, because I went through it myself. I was asking the same questions. I was taking the same journey. I had the same anxieties, I had the same resistance. But so much of that has formed the sort of textbook of my career.

Steve Barth [00:22:43]:

And I’m absolutely committed to always having a lot of influence in HairClub and continuing to give hairclub every opportunity to be progressive and to be innovative. But there’s no miracles. At least not yet. And if somebody is at a point where they are unhappy about the way they look, then we feel we have some very intelligent, healthy, and effective ways of dealing with that. But a lot of that depends on you, too. I mean, it’s like going to a gym. You fantasize about having this body, but it doesn’t come by accident.

Kevin Rolston [00:23:24]:

No.

Steve Barth [00:23:25]:

Even though you can get a trainer with all types of knowledge, it’s going to take that individual to be committed, to be committed to those goals, whether it be for nutrition, exercise, and cardiovascular activity and everything else. And I think that if you’re in this world and you’re losing hair, and unfortunately, that’s not like gaining weight where you could lose weight. Losing hair has a very powerful emotional effect on our personality because we can control it. But yet we’re left with this real discontent or this real feeling of not looking our best, which means that we’re not always feeling our best. And it’s so important in today’s world that’s so competitive to have that level of confidence.

Kevin Rolston [00:24:14]:

Those of us who have been through hair loss know how deeply it can affect our self-esteem. And if you’ve listened to this show before, you’ve heard stories of many people whose hair loss affected their personality and the way they carry themselves in the world. This makes it all the more important that this industry continues to grow and develop comprehensive and individualized solutions. It’s been so fascinating to learn about HairClub, its offering Steve’s journey and the development of TrichoView. We hope Steve’s insights will shed some light on your own experience with hair loss and encourage you to seek a solution that will allow you to navigate the world with confidence. If you’d like to hear more from Steve, make sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app. We are definitely going to be having Steve back on as a guest as he has just got so much wisdom to share. Thanks for listening to another episode of HairPod.

Kevin Rolston [00:25:06]:

Check us out at HairClub on Instagram or search HairPod on Facebook to continue the conversation. If you know someone who could benefit from hearing this episode, wed love it if youd share it with them. If youre enjoying the show, consider leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. We also have a website. Check it out by going to podcast dot hairclub.com. We’re here to build people up and share real stories so people experiencing hair loss feel a little bit less alone. And when you share, review and subscribe, it helps us do just that. So thank you.

Kevin Rolston [00:25:39]:

Until next time.