2024 Is Not 2023

We have a family motto: “Bandholz's never give up.” I’d love to say I created this for my kids as they face adversity, but it’s more of a reminder to me.

Beardbrand is in its 12th year of business, and last year was one of those years when I had to tell myself not to give up. For the first time in our history, Beardbrand ended the year unprofitable. That isn’t supposed to happen. When you’re an established brand things are supposed to be easier, and you’re supposed to be growing. 2023 was the opposite.

In 2023, we were dealt a series of setbacks and challenges we had to overcome. Some were of our own doing, others were outside our control, and we needed to respond to the battle. I talked more about these in the Beardbrand Alliance, so feel free to catch up if you’re interested.

What is Beardbrand?

We need to ask ourselves through all these challenging times: why are we building this business?

There are a lot of different ways to build a business. Some do it for fame, some do it for humanity, and some do it for money. But we do it to make a life of our choosing.

Our core values are Freedom, Hunger, and Trust. Those values shape how we make decisions. At the end of the day, Beardbrand is here to do cool things with cool team members for cool customers — and do it in a sustainable way. That means I want to be doing this for the rest of my life — because it’s fun.

There are tradeoffs: maybe we don’t make a product that is accessible to everyone’s budgets, maybe we don’t grow as fast as we can, or maybe we launch products that only a few people enjoy. To me, that’s okay.

To my wife’s chagrin, I am a stubborn person. I believe it’s important to do things that matter, even if they don’t help the P&L or balance sheet. I’m the guy who wants to make a building more beautiful, even though it doesn’t add any more square footage. America is filled with products that are built without a soul and sold by companies that live by the consumerism mindset that more is always better.

That’s not how we think at Beardbrand. More isn’t better. Better is better. But also we accept that people have different ideas of what “better” means.

Moving Forward

The good news is that we survived 2023. We were able to fix many of the foundational issues and scale back to make the business sustainable again. There are some lagging issues we’re still wrapping up, but those will be resolved in short order (Styling Paste and Utility Bar re-stock, for example).

It’s easy to love a company when everything is rocking and rolling, but a lot of bandwagon fans will leave the theater when shit hits the fan. I want to thank our loyal customers who have not only stuck by us but have given us critical feedback, which helps us grow and improve. We’ve plugged the metaphorical holes in the boat of 2023, and in 2024, we plan to put some wind into our sails.

Beardbrand is a company that I love. I love the customers, I love the team, and I love the products. We’ve produced innovative products that align with our core beliefs. After many years in the industry, I’ve built some great relationships. Through some of those relationships, we’re looking at building and launching future collaborations.

If you want a sneak peek of future products and even to be a tester of prototypes, please join the Beardbrand Alliance. It’s a great group of people who represent our tagline of “Keep on Growing.”

I’m incredibly excited about the future permanent and limited edition products we’ll release. Thank you for being part of the journey, and Keep on Growing!

Eric Bandholz
Founder