I was 22. A recruiter from Abercrombie stopped me in the mall.
She was friendly — that was the company's whole style back then. She said she loved my look. Said they'd love for me to come in for a group interview. Said it like it had already been decided.
So I went. They sat us in a big open section, in a circle, and asked us to talk about what we were most proud of. Before any of that started, there was a meet-and-greet. The recruiter ran up to me, smiling, said she was so glad I came.
Then she said, "You're wearing the same hat. Let me see your hair."
She lifted my hat off.
Paused.
Said: "Oh."
Then she put the hat back on my head.
I never got a call after that.
It wasn't the job. Abercrombie wasn't my dream.
It was the look on her face. That tiny "oh" — not cruel, just disappointed, like she'd been told something different than what she found. The way she put the hat back on instead of just walking me to the circle. How polite the rest of the day was, knowing I'd already been disqualified.
I drove home with the windows up. I was 22 years old and I had just been told, without a word, that whatever I had to offer the world wasn't going to come through the front door.
And the truth is, I'd already been at war with my hair for a long time before that day.
I was the guy who counted the strands on his pillow every morning. The guy who pulled his hand back from his head in the shower and watched what came with it. The guy who spent an hour in front of the mirror trying to fluff and angle and spray hair into looking like there was more of it than there was. The guy who learned which side of the room had the soft light and which side did not. The guy who eventually gave up and shaved it all off — not because he wanted to, but because losing it on his terms felt better than watching it leave on its own.
Most men reading this know exactly what I'm describing. The strangers whose eyes drift up to your hairline before they ever meet yours. The angle you've learned to hold for photos. The hat you don't take off, even when it's hot. The way the bathroom mirror stopped being a place you looked and started being a place you avoided.
You've been managing it. Just like I was.
For 20 years, that company was my answer.
First as a client. Then as a model. Then as an employee. Eventually as senior leadership.
I stayed because at the time, the level of service was extraordinary. We genuinely cared about our clients. I cared. The team I worked with cared. The CEO cared. We knew — because most of us had lived it — that we weren't selling hair. We were selling someone the chance to walk back into their own life.
I believed in the mission. I believed in what we were building. For most of those years, that belief was earned every single day.
The CEO who built that culture was ousted. The board replaced him with someone from the travel industry. Someone who didn't know hair, didn't know hair loss, didn't know the men who walked through our doors and what was actually happening in their lives when they sat in our chairs.
He brought his own people in — travel-industry executives who knew nothing about any of it. And then I sat on conference calls where the people leading them spoke about our clients in a way I will never forget. Like they were inconveniences. Like they were a margin to be optimized.
The hair quality dropped. Visibly. Dramatically.
The visit consistency fell apart. Standards I'd helped build — the standards I'd promised clients on day one — quietly disappeared.
The stylists started quitting. They couldn't take being asked to lie to their clients anymore. They couldn't watch men they'd cared for over years get treated like ATMs. The ones who tried to stay got squeezed until they broke.
I watched the soul leave the company.
I'd been a client through all of it. I watched the experience I used to be proud of become the experience I'd warn my friends away from. I watched a $400 service feel like a $40 service. I watched men I loved — men I'd brought in personally — come back and ask me, quietly, what had happened.
But the moment I knew was Tina.
Tina has been doing this work for over twenty years. She is, in plain terms, one of the best in the country at what she does. And I watched her get worn down. I watched the company that should have been protecting her treat her like she was the problem. I watched her care for clients harder than the company cared for any of us.
When I saw what they were doing to Tina, I knew. There had to be a better way.
Not for me. I was fine. I'd survived the system.
But for Tina. For every stylist like her. And for every man who deserved better than what that company had become.
I'm a follower of Christ. So is Skyler. We don't bring that up because we want to make a sale — we bring it up because it's the foundation underneath everything Monarch is and does.
For me, every decision — personal, professional, every single one — has to glorify God. That's not a marketing line. That's the actual filter. When we set our prices, we ran them past that filter. When we decided to stay month-to-month instead of locking men into long-term commitments, that filter. When we turned down operational shortcuts that would have cost clients trust, that filter.
We believe a business can be premium and honest. Profitable and reverent. Excellent and kind. We don't think those are in tension. We think the best companies in the world prove they aren't.
You won't get a sermon when you sit in our chair. You won't get a verse on your invoice. What you'll get is the lived expression of two men trying to run a business the way they believe they were called to run it — with care for the people in front of them, honesty about what we can and can't do, and the kind of consistency that comes from knowing who you serve.
Faith-led, in the only way it counts: through the operation, not over the top of it.
Run by people who've sat in the chair.
Built around the stylist who's still the best at what she does.
Priced honestly. Delivered consistently. Operated with reverence.
For men. By men who know.
If any of this resonated —