Luxury barbering is having a second act, and this time, it is backed by institutional capital, franchise infrastructure, and a very different playbook. Two decades after The Art of Shaving, Grooming Lounge, and their peers introduced American men to premium grooming as a retail category, a new wave of brands including Barberino’s, Boardroom Salon for Men, and others is rebuilding the barbershop as an investable, scalable asset class.
The market fundamentals support the bet. The global men’s grooming products market is valued at roughly $66.44 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach $90.21 billion by 2031, growing at a 6.31% CAGR, with premium lines outpacing the mass segment, expanding at a 7.52% CAGR compared to mass-market products. That premiumization tells the story that men are moving away from buying more grooming products, into paying significantly more for the experience wrapped around them.
The last barbershop wave largely died at the hands of e-commerce. Eric Malka, who built The Art of Shaving to $100 million in revenue before selling it 16 years ago, is now an investor through his firm SBI, backing Barberino’s and clean-ingredient brand Jack Henry. He’s watched the pendulum swing and swing back. “Post-exit of The Art of Shaving, we saw a huge push digitally, and The Art of Shaving model was considered a bit archaic,” Malka said to BeautyMatter. “Between 2010 and 2020, it was all about digital native brands. But what we found after 10 years is two things: First is that the competitive landscape digitally is very difficult, and secondly, there is a ceiling on digital brands.”
His conclusion is that “brands now need a real marriage between the online and offline world,” combining strong digital communities with physical retail through wholesale partners or owned stores. That’s exactly the thesis at Barberino’s, the Italian barbering brand now expanding aggressively in the US. Michele Callegari, co-founder and CEO, said the brand deliberately zigged when capital was fleeing physical retail.
“Despite that, we came out to the business in a moment everybody was going online and telling investors, ‘Hey, I don’t want brick and mortar because it’s capital-intensive’; for us, it is the other way around,” Callegari told BeautyMatter. Barberino’s currently operates roughly 20 stores in Italy, two in Manhattan, two more in negotiation, and is scouting Miami, Las Vegas, and Orlando next. The stores double as brand infrastructure, Callegari said, generating “a negative cost of acquisition because the customer that comes discovers Barbarino’s and our products,” a reversal of the typical retail cost structure where the store subsidizes the sale rather than the other way around.
Jeff Helfgott, CEO of Boardroom Salon for Men, founded in 2004 and acquired by Los Angeles private equity firm LightBay Capital in 2018, framed the shift to BeautyMatter in similarly stark terms. “Five years ago, a good haircut was the whole product. Today the haircut is the price of entry. The experience around it is what earns the next visit,” he said. Boardroom recently acquired Texas-based Finley’s Barbershop and its ten locations and is preparing its first new franchise disclosure filing in over a decade. “The winners will grow through operators who invest in their relationships,” Helfgott said.
If the last cycle was about product margins, this one is about subscription economics. “Recurring revenue is the foundation everything else sits on,” Helfgott said. “When 40% of your visits are member-driven, you can forecast, you can staff with confidence, and you keep your chairs full during the slower stretches of the year that used to punish operators like us.” Membership, he added, more than doubles visit frequency and has pushed Boardroom’s guest retention to its highest level on record. Also, voluntary staff turnover is down 56% from its 2023 peak, and new client traffic is up almost 50% year over year.
However, Helfgott is careful not to oversell the model. “Recurring revenue built on a mediocre experience is just a cancellation waiting to happen,” he said. “Prove the experience first, then the recurring revenue takes care of itself.” Barberino’s is proving the same discipline works internationally, with a strikingly different pricing structure between markets. “In Italy, the average ticket is €30 ($35) plus taxes,” Callegari said. “In the US, my average ticket is $150 plus taxes,”—a fivefold jump on largely the same service, reflecting both scarcity of premium options and America’s deeper base of high-income male consumers.
Callegari also cited internal figures, noting that “20% of American men are netting more than $200 [thousand] a year,” a demographic he said is underserved on the grooming side despite spending freely on suits, cars, and real estate. The brand’s product line—about 36 SKUs spanning haircare, shaving, beard, and skincare—is built to reinforce that retail relationship, with roughly one million shaves, scalp treatments, and skin consultations performed annually feeding formulation decisions.
Both Malka and Helfgott stressed that today’s capital is far more disciplined than the growth-at-all-costs strategy of the last decade. Malka, who studies why 90% of startups fail rather than why the 10% succeed, said the top killer is premature scaling. “The days where we’re just irresponsibly buying sales are kind of over,” he said, adding that unit economics have to be strong. His firm specifically targets founder-led brands that are pre-Series A with proven concepts, rather than writing the large checks reserved for VC and private equity, and evaluates them on brand power, product differentiation, and what he calls “values and ethos alignment.”
Helfgott pointed to a specific industry warning sign. “There are brands in our industry where over 30% of open stores are losing money. Investors need confidence in their returns.” He also flagged dependence on star talent—“heroism,” in his words—and “over-reliance on gimmicks” as red flags, arguing durable brands are built on systemized experience and staff retention rather than one celebrity barber. “The mistake many brands have made has been focusing on unit count rather than unit economics,” he said, citing Boardroom’s own value-engineering exercise targeting a three-year payback period on new units.
Why now? It’s simple. The convergence is cultural as much as it is financial. Helfgott pointed to the collapse of stigma around male self-care. “Twenty years ago, if a man cared about his appearance, you’d hear the term ‘metrosexual,’ and it was not complimentary. Now ‘looksmaxxing’ and ‘Brotox’ are trending on social media.” Callegari ties it to post-pandemic behavior, opining that consumers are trading goods for experiences, and grooming rituals satisfy a basic human need for community that even digitally inactive Gen Z customers, in his view, still crave in physical form.
Where the 2000s wave sold men's skincare disguised as shaving, this one sells recurring, systemized experience to men of all ages, underwritten by membership economics, franchise scale, and investors newly comfortable with brick-and-mortar risk.