Blind Barber:a barbershop,a hidden bar,bottled into a brand
In 2010, four friends in New York put a real barbershop in the front and a hidden cocktail bar in the back, and named it Blind Barber after the old slang for a speakeasy. Two years later they bottled the whole thing into a grooming line, with products named after liquor proofs. It now runs shops across the country.
Blind Barber started with a simple, slightly ridiculous idea: what if the barbershop had a bar in it. Not a metaphor, an actual cocktail bar, hidden behind a working barbershop, the way speakeasies used to hide behind ordinary storefronts.
In 2010, four friends, Jeff Laub, Adam Kirschenbaum, Josh Boyd and Matt Breen, made it real in New York's East Village. Laub had grown up around salons and wanted a grooming spot that actually felt like somewhere he would hang out. Boyd and Kirschenbaum knew hospitality and bars. Boyd was about to sell a bar he owned, read Laub's plan, and turned it into the first Blind Barber instead.
Speakeasies were once called blind pigs and blind tigers. A barbershop with a bar behind it almost named itself.
The front was a proper, top-tier barbershop. The back was a real bar. You could get a haircut and a cocktail in the same visit, and the combination did what a good idea does, it gave people a reason to talk about it.
The two halves were not a gimmick stapled together, they were the same hospitality instinct pointed at a part of life that did not have much of it. A men's haircut was usually a chore. Blind Barber made it an evening out, and built a community of barbers and regulars around the room.
That community turned out to be the real asset. People did not just get a haircut, they belonged to the place, and a brand people feel they belong to can sell them more than a service. The founders had built an audience before they had a product to sell it.
A brand built on a physical room is wonderful until the room cannot open. Blind Barber learned that twice. The Williamsburg shop, its first big bet outside the East Village, ran four years and then closed. In the founders' own retrospective: "after 4 hard-but-fun-but-kinda-stressful years, Brooklyn inevitably met its downfall and closed up shop." They did not dress it up. They called it their "first roadblock" and "turned it into a hard-earned lesson, dialing in on future expansion plans."
Then came the part no expansion plan covers. "Covid Hits. What a wild time," the same account reads. "The world had shut down, OUR world had shut down." For a business whose whole product was people in a chair and a drink out back, that was existential, and it ran long: "It was relentless. It never let up." A barbershop you cannot sit in earns nothing. What kept the brand alive through the shutdown was the half of it that did not need the door open, the grooming line on the shelf and online, the piece of Blind Barber a customer could buy without walking in.
Once you have a room full of people who trust your taste, the next move is to give them something to take home.
In 2012 Blind Barber turned the barbershop into a product line, high-quality grooming made first for its own barbers and customers, then for everyone. The products were named after liquor proofs, 90 Proof, 101 Proof, so the pomade on the shelf carried the same wink as the bar in the back. The shop became something you could buy a piece of and keep using long after the haircut grew out.
It worked because the brand was never only about hair. Blind Barber became a kind of cultural clubhouse, the sort of name that partners with athletes like Bryce Harper and turns each new location into a destination rather than a storefront. The grooming line rode that goodwill, bought by people who wanted a piece of the room even when they could not get to it in person.
Named like a bottle behind the bar
The 90 Proof Pomade, twenty-four dollars, a water-based paste with a strong hold, a matte finish and a tonka-bean scent. The name is the whole brand in two words: a grooming product that remembers it came from a barbershop with a cocktail bar in the back.
Blind Barber, in five moments
The arc
- 2010Jeff Laub, Adam Kirschenbaum, Josh Boyd and Matt Breen open the first Blind Barber in New York's East Village, a barbershop in front and a hidden cocktail bar in back.
- The nameSpeakeasies were once called blind pigs and blind tigers, so a barbershop with a bar behind it became Blind Barber.
- 2012They bottle the spirit of the shop into a grooming line, products named after liquor proofs, made first for their own barbers and customers.
- ExpansionBlind Barber grows to shops in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami Beach and Philadelphia, plus a grooming and fragrance line sold direct.
- TodayMore than a decade in, the grooming line lives on Shopify alongside the shops, still selling the proof-named pomades that started it.
Building the room first was the gamble that nearly undid them and the thing that saved them. A brand made of physical rooms is fragile in a way a website is not, and the closures and the shutdown proved it. But because they had bottled the feeling of the room into something you could buy and take home, there was still a Blind Barber to come back to when the doors were locked. The chair and the cart now carry the same brand, and the cart is the part that does not have to close. The trick was never the haircut or the cocktail. It was making people belong somewhere, then giving them a way to keep belonging from anywhere.
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