“Hippie.” “Freak.” “Get a job.” “You look like a girl.” “Unprofessional!”
After hearing these and all sorts of other snide comments about their atypical personal grooming choices, Chris Healy and Lindsay Barto founded The Longhairs. This global community advocates for, educates, and celebrates men with long hair.
Why? “Because longhairs are badass,” their site says. “From Samson to Jesus to George Washington, real men let it ride. Don’t let ’em convince you otherwise.” Healy and Barto realized early on that women are taught from birth on how to care for, style, and manage long hair. But men haven’t had that luxury. So the duo created a blog to serve this unmet need. And now that they’ve gathered a vibrant community on their popular blog, they are starting to sell products, initially Hair Ties for Guys.
“Content is absolutely the cornerstone of our community,” Healy says. “In fact, we began with no product—or really almost anything at all. We just started with three or four blog posts, and we had a pretty good idea that there would be lots of content that we could come up with. I think the first four blog posts were ‘Long Hair at High Speed,’ ‘Six Tips for Guys with Long Hair,’ and a couple of other really basic ones. But we decided from the very beginning that content was going to be the backbone of our community and our business.”
The site is beautifully designed. That’s not surprising when you learn that Healy and Barto also run Round Two Creative Group, a creative studio in San Diego, California. But consistency is their key to success. As I write this, they’ve blogged every week for more than 100 weeks.
“The blog content is written within the three categories of our mission,” Healy says. “We advocate for men with long hair. For millennia men who are leaders, warriors, scientists, and politicians have all had long hair. Only in the past century has it become ‘unprofessional’ to have long hair. There are employers who won’t hire men with long hair, and the stereotypes are well documented. One of our content categories is the Longhairs Professional Series. We interview CEOs, business owners, and other successful professionals with long hair to illustrate that you can in fact be a successful professional.”
For example, there is a conversation with Dave Littlechild, a successful business professional from the United Kingdom. Littlechild has lived around the world building businesses, most recently as executive vice president for dotmailer, the largest email marketing software firm in the UK.
The educational content of the blog is focused on addressing that male knowledge gap about long hair. “We’ve got no idea what to do or how to brush it,” Healy says. “Is it okay to do a ponytail? How do I braid it? None of these things we know about. Before The Longhairs, the only place to learn was women’s blogs, websites, magazines, or asking our moms and our sisters about it. And frankly, some of the videos can be a little uncomfortable for men to watch. We help guys by teaching them, ‘Hey, you don’t need to be a hair expert, but there are a few things every guy with long hair needs to know. We got it. You need it. Here it is. Let us help you out and show you how to do these things.’
“And you know, since probably very few people are encouraging you to grow your hair out, you’re probably not celebrating it with your mom or with your buddies or your sister. So we have some fun by celebrating on the blog with ‘Hair Whip Wednesdays’ and ‘Famous Long Hair Fridays.’ You know, it’s a club and it’s a community. We should celebrate it. So we do that with our Celebrate Style content.”
Many of the new visitors to the community come through search. As Healy and Barto pored through their stats, they realized that people were coming for some of their more unusual posts. “We wrote a blog post about a year and a half ago called ‘The Uncomfortable Truth about Awkward-Stage Hair’ that documented that phase when guys start to grow out their hair between about four, five, six months until about a year and a half,” Healy says. “Man, it just looks bad. There’s nothing you can do about it. But that’s part of why long hair is a minority among men, because you have to get through that awkward phase. It turns out a lot of guys are searching for information on awkward-stage hair: how to deal with it, how to accelerate it, how to make it go faster. Now, if you Google ‘awkward-stage hair,’ we show up in the number one position.”
While the blog posts are the primary content on the site, Healy and Barto also publish videos, record podcasts, and use photography. The content drives people to where they can get updates via email and become part of the community of Longhairs.
The flagship product of the Longhairs community is Hair Ties for Guys. “That was the original idea before The Longhairs even existed or was an idea,” Healy says. “We were thinking ‘Hair Ties for Guys’—man, we need that. It tells you what it is. It’s sticky. You’re not going to forget that!”
Once the community launched, they started work on Hair Ties for Guys. The process involved a great deal of product testing and searching for manufacturing sources, but after more than a year they released the first offerings. Today they have six collections of Hair Ties for Guys.
“We have some fun names, including the Outdoorsmen, the Kokomos, and the Up All Nighters,” Healy says. “Instead of what you would find in the women’s hair care aisle (pastel colors and maybe some more feminine designs with flowers), we do rocket launchers and shotgun shells, camouflage, surfboards, fishing rods, and stuff that guys are into. And guys love them. The reach has been extraordinary. We have now shipped Hair Ties for Guys to 47 states in the U.S. and 36 countries around the world.”
Now that the Hair Ties for Guys product is doing well, Healy says he is looking at new products to offer the community.
The potential market for his products is huge. Healy estimates that men with long hair make up somewhere between 3 and 5 percent of the population of the United States. If you also include men who live in other countries and have disposable income, the target market is in the tens of millions. Guys with long hair is a distinct buyer persona that had been ignored by nearly all other companies.
As Healy and Barto say in their introductory video, “In the end, long hair is about more than just hair itself. It’s commitment. It’s identity. It’s a lifestyle. It’s all of those things and more. So even if you’re not a guy with long hair, if you’re a mother of a boy with long hair, if you’re a wife or a girlfriend of a man with long hair, if you’re a few months removed from your last haircut and you’re ready to press on, if you have an ailment and you’re not capable of growing hair, The Longhairs are here for you. Because long hair lives in the heart.”
Content sells products to guys with long hair. A well-written blog targeting a specific audience with a well-defined buyer persona has the power to sell your product or service too. It’s about tapping into a shared challenge and rallying the community around it.
Think Like a Publisher
The new publishing model on the web is not about hype and spin and messages. It is about delivering content when and where it is needed and, in the process, branding you or your organization as a leader. When you understand your audience—those people who will become your buyers (or those who will join, donate, subscribe, apply, volunteer, or vote)—you can craft an editorial and content strategy just for them. What works is a focus on your buyers and their problems. What fails is an egocentric display of your products and services.
To implement a successful strategy, think like a publisher. Marketers at the organizations successfully using the new rules recognize that they are now purveyors of information, and they manage content as a valuable asset with the same care that a publishing company does. One of the most important things that publishers do is start with a content strategy and then focus on the mechanics and design
