804 Victoria Eisner: Co-Founder & CEO of Hair Cultivated

0:00Kara Goldin:I am unwilling to give up, but I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don't get knocked out. So your only choice should be, go focus on what you can control. Hi everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin Show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world's greatest leaders. We'll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can't wait to get started. Let's go. Today's episode is brought to you by Pebble, the platform that's redefining what it means to hire globally.

0:48Kara Goldin:Quick question, have you ever tried hiring someone in another country? I have. And let me tell you, things get complicated fast. Different contracts, different payroll rules, compliance questions, tax surprises, and suddenly you're stitching together five different tools just to onboard one person. That's exactly why Pebble exists. Pebble is an AI-powered global HR platform built for founders, operators, and HR leaders who are hiring teams around the world. It helps you hire, pay, and manage talent in over 185 countries with onboarding that can happen in minutes. Instead of juggling separate systems for contracts, benefits, payroll, and compliance, Pebble brings everything into one place with built-in guidance and real local expertise supporting you behind the scenes.

1:42Kara Goldin:What stands out to me is how much clarity Pebble brings. Global hiring can look simple at first until the fees and complexities stack up. Pebble gives you upfront, all in costs and structure so you can scale your team without feeling like you suddenly need to become an HR or compliance expert. Ready to start working with Pebble today? The new standard discounted pricing of$3.99 USD per month per employee helps contain the costs. Go to highpebl.hi to get a free estimate. That's highpebl.ai for free estimate. Support for today's episode comes from Fora, a modern travel agency built for people who love to plan travel and help others travel well.

2:35Kara Goldin:You know the type, the person who actually enjoys planning vacations. The one who compares hotels for fun, finds the best routes in restaurants, and somehow always knows where to stay. If that sounds like you, there's a good chance you've already been doing the work of a travel advisor, whether you've called it that or not. That's where FORA comes in. FORA helps you turn your love of travel planning into a flexible, meaningful source of income. With best-in-class training, powerful booking technology, and a global community of experienced advisors, FORA gives you everything you need to build a travel business on your terms, alongside your job, your family, or whatever else you're balancing.

3:22Kara Goldin:As a FORA advisor, you get access to more than 7 ,000 preferred travel partners, from iconic luxury brands to boutique gems. That means VIP perks for your clients, things like room upgrades, resort credits, and late checkout. The kind of elevated experiences most travelers never get on their own. And every hotel, cruise, or experience you book earns you a commission. Getting started can be as simple as planning trips for people you already know. Some people scroll travel inspiration, others bring it to life. If you've ever thought, I could do this, now's the time. Become a Fora Advisor today at ForaTravel.com slash Kara Golden.

4:08Kara Goldin:That's F-O-R-A Travel.com slash Kara Golden. And make sure you tell them we sent you. ForaTravel.com slash Kara Golden. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Golden Show. So excited to have my fellow founder on the podcast, a serial founder, I should say, Victoria Eisner, who is the co-founder and CEO of Hair Cultivated. And if you have not heard about this fairly new brand, you definitely need to pay attention. Victoria is also the co-founder of another incredible, one of my favorite brands that I've used many times, Glam Squad. And we had met years ago. Glam Squad is the, of course, on-demand beauty service that forever changed how women access professional hair, makeup, and nail care.

5:05Kara Goldin:Now, Victoria has jumped into kind of what happens before you end up having a service like Glam Squad. So, Hair Cultivated is absolutely incredible. Victoria is bringing a premium, clinically proven, prescription-based approach to hair regrowth, bridging the gap between beauty and medicine. And I cannot wait to hear all of what she's doing in building a category-driven company that is really focused on hair loss, but is also making just hair more part of the wellness conversation overall. So very, very thrilled to have her here with us today. So welcome. So good to see you. Yes. Today's episode is brought to you by Pebble, the platform that's redefining what it means to hire globally.

6:03Kara Goldin:Quick question. Have you ever tried hiring someone in another country? I have. And let me tell you, things get complicated fast. different contracts, different payroll rules, compliance questions, tax surprises, and suddenly you're stitching together five different tools just to onboard one person. That's exactly why Pebble exists. Pebble is an AI-powered global HR platform built for founders, operators, and HR leaders who are hiring teams around the world. It helps you hire, pay, and manage talent in over 185 countries with onboarding that can happen in minutes. Instead of juggling separate systems for contracts, benefits, payroll, and compliance, Pebble brings everything into one place with built-in guidance and real local expertise supporting you behind the scenes.

6:57Kara Goldin:What stands out to me is how much clarity Pebble brings. Global hiring can look simple at first until the fees and complexities stack up, Pebble gives you upfront, all in costs and structure, so you can scale your team without feeling like you suddenly need to become an HR or compliance expert. Ready to start working with Pebble today? The new standard discounted pricing of$3.99 USD per month per employee helps contain the costs. Go to highpebl.hi to get a free estimate. That's highpebl.ai for free estimate. Support for today's episode comes from Fora, a modern travel agency built for people who love to plan travel and help others travel well.

7:49Kara Goldin:You know the type, the person who actually enjoys planning vacations, the one who compares hotels for fun, finds the best routes in restaurants, and somehow always knows where to stay. If that sounds like you, there's a good chance you've already been doing the work of a travel advisor, whether you've called it that or not. That's where FORA comes in. FORA helps you turn your love of travel planning into a flexible, meaningful source of income. With best-in-class training, powerful booking technology, and a global community of experienced advisors, 4A gives you everything you need to build a travel business on your terms, alongside your job, your family, or whatever else you're balancing.

8:36Kara Goldin:As a 4A advisor, you get access to more than 7 ,000 preferred travel partners from iconic luxury brands to boutique gems. That means VIP perks for your clients, things like room upgrades, resort credits, and late checkout. The kind of elevated experiences most travelers never get on their own. And every hotel, cruise, or experience you book earns you a commission. Getting started can be as simple as planning trips for people you already know. Some people scroll travel inspiration, others bring it to life. If you've ever thought, I could do this, now's the time. Become a Fora Advisor today at ForaTravel.com slash Kara Golden.

9:22Kara Goldin:That's F-O-R-A travel.com slash Kara Golden. And make sure you tell them we sent you. ForaTravel.com slash Kara Golden. Amazing what you're doing. So for listeners who are just discovering Hair Cultivated, how do you describe the brand and what makes it fundamentally different from other hair growth solutions that are out there? So Hair Cultivated is luxury clinical hair growth, and that means we mix beauty with medicine. So we're using all of the best prescription ingredients plus peptides and a mix, and we use also beauty bases. So the feeling of the product feels amazing. There's a lot of other products that are really medical in the field, like Rogaine or HIMSS or HERS that aren't really made for the luxury beauty customer.

10:20Somebody who's used all the best products, who cares about the length of their hair, who cares about the health of their hair. We don't use any toxins. We don't use alcohols. We don't use propylene glycols and we mix the best ingredients that activate each other and are really synergistic to create amazing hair growth. But sensorially, it also feels great to put on. It feels like, you know, something you would put on your face. So it's like we are really playing on the skinification of scalp.

10:55Kara Goldin:It is such a great product. So congratulations. Very, very exciting. So was this a personal situation for you where you felt like hair loss was obviously something that you didn't want, but also something that you were experiencing? Yeah, absolutely. So both me and my co-founder, Dr. Kira Angistu, are both hair loss sufferers. I've experienced hair loss from quite a number of causes since I've been 14 years old. so you know after 28 years of having hair loss it's a lot and um you know I have an incredible growth from the product so you can see here and here and there's a lot here in the back too they aren't layers that I cut that's just regrowth but I love it and it's a very painful experience to have hair loss.

11:55It feels like your body is attacking you. It really attacks your confidence. So it was a problem near and dear to my heart. And I have always, you know, tried to hide it and felt, you know, very sad about it. But truly, I felt like if I can bring, I found an incredible solution by partnering with a doctor. And I thought if I can bring this to the masses, I can help a lot of people and also make them feel really good about themselves.

12:30Kara Goldin:I think it's such a great, when I was reintroduced to you, when I heard that you were starting, co-founding this company and really what you had come from and what you helped build at Glam Squad, It totally made sense. I was reading a statistic that hair loss affects nearly 40 % of women by age 50, yet it's still not widely discussed. Why do you think it's a conversation that really has lagged behind reality, I guess, because it is so common and, you know, it's something that people feel ashamed by when it happens? so it's definitely that i mean you hit the nail on the head it's incredibly embarrassing to talk about nobody wants to admit it and you know a lot of people try and cover it up or just live in denial there's a lot of hair loss especially among women is reversible but guys are are quite well known for, you know, if they have genetic hair loss, they take extra steps to act preventatively.

13:47However, women are really not in that same boat. And I think that's partially because the current solutions out there are really meant for men and really meant for people who don't care about using really great beauty products. They cause a lot of breakage. They cause a lot of dryness in your hair. Maybe you can grow like a nice inch of hair. They're drippy, they're greasy, they're oily, they're yucky to use. And you have to really be consistent with the products to get good results. And, you know, that's what we really set out to do. And the other thing is, is like everyone is using different kinds of medical treatments to up level their beauty.

14:34So, you know, one out of eight Americans is on a GLP-1. You know, you could use diet and exercise, but that's definitely going to be better. Everyone's using at least retinol, Botox, you know, you name it. Why not apply these medical advances to your hair growth?

14:57Kara Goldin:So tell us about the formulation. Like what makes it both clinically proven and also toxic-free? So we took out all of the materials that are really drying to your scalp. We want to and really cause a lot of hair breakage. Because if you want to grow hair and you want to grow long hair, breakage is your enemy. So we really worked on producing a formula that felt really good, that worked within your routine. And we use all sorts of different kind of medical ingredients, including minoxidil, tretinoin, which activates minoxidil, non-responders into responders. ketoconazole which is the same type of uh it's like the same type of ingredient as nizerol ad shampoo so if you have a scalp condition it helps get rid of that scalp condition like dandruff which might be blocking your follicles or on the other hand it's also like a dht blocker so people can also have hormonal causes to hear loss we use dutasteride in um some of our products so that's a really elevated DHT blocker.

16:11And then we use latanoprost, which is the key ingredient in latisse. I think that's all the ingredients. Plus, we use a mixture of peptides and vitamins, and it's really supportive for the scalp environment to be ultra healthy. And, you know, it exfoliates it, the tretinoin causes cell turnover. So it's kind of like giving your scalp that extra love it needs so it can really produce and flourish the hair. The name comes from, it's Hair Cultivated. So the cultivated was kind of like your hair is the garden on your head and you have to, you know, make sure the water is right and you're giving it the right plant food and the soil is perfect and all of the things are really working together synergistically to provide the best growth environment.

17:06Kara Goldin:Yeah, definitely. And when you look at building hair cultivated, it's different than your previous experience at Glam Squad. That's primarily a service. This is physical goods. What are the key things that you would look at? How do you view them as different? I mean, I guess is the key thing that maybe you know now that you're a second-time founder, that you'll do a little bit differently? I think the key things that are, I mean, it's definitely a different kind of business. I think this is really fun and rewarding because we're helping people with a deeper problem and also giving people access to something that they may not have access to, like this level of medicine.

18:00And we really see a lot of people, especially in our TikTok community, who really gravitate to hearing from doctors and hearing from experts. And you can kind of tell that people just aren't getting that level of attention from their own doctors for problems that really are near and dear to them or that make a big difference to them. And so I think that's something that's different. And another thing that I'm approaching very differently this time is just there's so much more in the digital landscape as far as creators and getting like a more digital community involved.

18:53Kara Goldin:And it's all D2C, right? The model that you have now? Yeah, it's all D2C, but we're hoping to also distribute through what we like to call like your scalp first responders. So both maybe med spas and some doctors, but also your hairstylists, which I have quite a large network of, because these are the people who you tell that you're having hair loss or hair thinning to first. or sometimes they discover it for you. I know that's happened to me where I've gone in and they said, oh, you have like a bald spot back here. And I was mortified, but I'm like, what do I do next? And they didn't really have a lot to offer me.

19:40Kara Goldin:So Hair Cultivated, do you have, how many SKUs do you have? And sort of, can you explain the difference between the different products? Sure, so we have four SKUs. We have two kinds of pill and two kinds of serum. the difference is the serum uh one serum has dutasteride one doesn't so one is more like an extra strength version one doesn't and then men can use the serum as well as women but our pill is appropriately dosed for women one is just oral minoxidil with peptides and vitamins and the other one is oral minoxidil plus dutasteride, peptides and vitamins. We use a really low dose of everything.

20:25So it's almost like a micro dose. So you don't have to suffer any kind of side effects with oral minoxidil, which on a larger dose, the side effect is not too great. You grow extra hair maybe on your face. So we do not want that. It's appropriately dosed for women. We did not want that at all.

20:48Kara Goldin:Yeah, definitely. And what have you seen, I guess, in growing the company so far that has surprised you the most? And again, like it's, you know, it's a different before you had grown a service, right? Now it's a lot of physical goods. You're dealing in the same industry, sort of, but it's almost before they go and get their hair done. Or maybe they've been getting their hair done by Glam Squad, but this is almost a everybody wants the healthiest hair possible that looks terrific. And you're helping to make that happen, which is amazing, right? It's like, who doesn't want that? But what have you seen that's kind of surprised you in growing hair cultivated?

21:38The biggest thing that surprises me is the customer's love of the brand. Truly, we are really just at the very infancy stage of our company, but the customers are really excited and feel very taken care of and are excited to have a partner with them in hair growth that is relatable, that speaks to beauty, as well as using the medical advances. And also that kind of holds your hand as far as telling you about other things that you could be doing to progress your health and your care growth.

22:27Kara Goldin:And how long does it take typically when obviously this is all different amongst people, but how long does it take once people get their hair cultivated kit and then they start taking it? When should they start seeing some kind of results? so we say if you're paying close attention and really tracking it you'll notice results about a month and a half in and other people will notice results about three months in so here takes a while to grow but and three months is really the standard but if you are really carefully tracking you could see results sooner and it's truly amazing as far as product I didn't I was kind of afraid to take a pill for it I've taken you know other like vitamins for hair for sure but that like I have real hair growth problems and real hair loss so I needed something a little bit stronger and I was surprised because my hair really thickened up And also, I had places that I had quite thinning hair in the back on the crown where I grew some hair and I didn't even know that that was thinning.

23:51So it's really great to have that hair growth.

23:57Kara Goldin:No, definitely, for sure. When you think about success, and you obviously saw that with Glam Squad, it just grew enormously. You're such a figure behind that brand and what Glam Squad had been able to accomplish. I know that that doesn't happen overnight. And it takes a lot of hand-holding and almost caring for the brand like it's a child, right? And cultivating it and understanding your consumer and all of those things. How do you view this for Hair Cultivated? Because it's a newer brand. It's almost like you went all the way to the top and then you decided, I'm going to go back down to the bottom and I'm going to go build again, which is so awesome, right?

24:53Kara Goldin:In a little bit different category. But I guess, what do you know about building a brand that sort of helps you build this brand today? I think the biggest thing is to really listen to your customer and to really meet them where they are, understand what they're saying to you, and try and do your best job to be their, you know, best friend along the way. Because truly, the customer is your boss. The more sales you get, the happier you are. And the more people talk about you. But when you can really get somebody to give you great feedback, even the bad things, are just problems to solve or things you can do better on.

25:54So I think always listening to your customer is the biggest secret, and it's not that hard to do.

26:04Kara Goldin:So the space that you've entered, and frankly, Glam Squad was sort of far and away the most well-known in their industry. But when I look at the space, you know, you've mentioned them, but there's lots of competition, right? And I think sometimes it's so hard as a founder because you see a new brand launch and they have more money to spend on marketing or whatever. But I'm sure you've seen that many of those companies end up crashing and burning or something happens, they get acquired and then they change a formula and it's totally different. But how do you stay grounded and focused on what you're doing when competition is always going to keep cropping up?

26:55I think having competitors is really good. And I do think we are, yes, there are other hair growth brands, but there were other places you could get a blowout when it came to Glam Squad. So I think you just have to think there's always going to be competition. and the way you set yourself apart is the level at which you serve the customer. And I don't think the luxury beauty customer and especially women are being well served in the hair growth category. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's my thesis here. And having tried quite literally every fabulous hair product, skincare product, every kind of cosmetic and beauty product in the world, I was very underwhelmed by all the hair growth stuff.

27:55I did not like it and I did not want to use it. So I think there are plenty of other women like me out there. And that was the same thesis I had with Glam Squad was there's plenty of other women like me that find it really challenging to get ready and in an elegant way and in an amazing way, but also fit it in your schedule. Yeah. So like the main thing I know is like, this is a big problem. And there's plenty, like, yeah, there are solutions, but they're dated. They aren't that pleasant to use. And I think people would really gravitate to something that elevates the entire experience. As we mentioned before, it's really embarrassing to have hair loss.

28:50And it's even more embarrassing, frankly, to purchase the men's minoxidil, which is what any dermatologist will tell you to do. Purchase the men's kind and use it and have it feel disgusting on your head. Yeah, definitely.

29:06Kara Goldin:Have you seen, just talking about trends in the industry, the, I think it's Korean washes that they've done. Have you seen these in different different cities have it. Yeah. So I've gone to several scalp spas. I am very into it. I absolutely love it. There is one in West Hollywood that's amazing. I think it's an excellent experience. It's basically like getting a massage and your hair washed all at the same time. I don't know. It's the best. Yeah. And somebody was telling me that especially as almost like prep for doing something like hair cultivated. Would you agree? Yeah, definitely. And after you do something like that, you kind of like notice you have a lot more volume, like your hair is like happier.

30:03Kara Goldin:I love that. I love that so much. Well, Victoria, thank you so much for joining today. It's so good to see you. And I am so in awe with what you did at Glam Squad, but also what you're doing with Hair Cultivated. You are definitely solving problems again by bringing science, elegance, and real results to women's hair health. And I'm really, really thrilled that you decided to do this. So for everyone listening, be sure to check out Hair Cultivated, follow along on social and connect with Victoria on LinkedIn as well. Hair Cultivated is just another great, great company. And Victoria Eisner, co-founder and CEO of Hair Cultivated.

30:54Kara Goldin:Thank you so much for coming on. I'll have all the info in the show notes too, but really appreciate it. Thank you, Kara. Absolutely. Thanks again for listening to the Kara Golden Show. If you would, please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit. And of course, feel free to subscribe so you don't miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Golden. I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me. And if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal bestselling book Undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building Hint.

31:43Kara Goldin:We are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening and goodbye for now.