Hunter & Gunn barbershop marks five years of trimming locks and giving back

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This article was published 20/10/2017 (2369 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Five years ago, Jeremy Regan left behind the world of high-priced hair salons and hasn’t looked back.

“I was at a fairly high-end salon and was charging $55 for a haircut, and that was five years ago,” the founder of Hunter and Gunn said. “If you were to add $2 or $3 a year, I’d probably be up to about $65, $75. For a haircut?”

On a shoestring budget — something that coincidentally gave his shop a hip, retro vibe — he leased space at the corner of Broadway and Balmoral Street and cut his price to $25.

It’s a formula that works. By donating $1 from every cut and a portion of product sales to local, non-profit organizations, his shop has surpassed $75,000 in donations, which he estimates translates into 65,000 haircuts over five years, or an average of 35 per day. He just raised the price for the first time, to $26.

More importantly, his shop is booked solid, days in advance.

It’s allowed him to continue to thrive despite the influx of retro barbershop chains and the opening of sole proprietor shops that emulate his formula. He doesn’t begrudge the competition.

“Look, we’ve got 750,000 or 800,000 people. There’s plenty of cake for everyone.”

Shearing locks wasn’t always in his plans. Like many in their late teens and early 20s, he toyed with the idea of making it big in music. Like a lot of musicians, it wasn’t paying the bills. “I think I lost money on that.”

Nor was an arts and commerce education a good fit, after four years of university. “The conversation with my parents — ‘I want to be a hairstylist’ — wasn’t one I was looking forward to. But once I got good at it and was cutting my mom’s hair, she was pretty proud.”

Personality is the key to success in hairstyling. “You really need to be comfortable talking to people. If you have any kind of social anxiety, you aren’t going to last very long.”

Today, Regan is looking forward, waiting for the right time to expand his business to other locations, with that same budget-price strategy that’s worked in West Broadway.

“I don’t think I’d ever be like it’s $40 in River Heights, $30 in Transcona and $25 in West Broadway. It would be the same price.”

Yet even at bargain prices, Regan said his stylists are paid about the same money as if they worked in a $55 salon. Keeping costs low and making it up on volume allows him to keep his chair-rental rates low.

To mark five years in business, Hunter & Gunn is about to launch its own private label hair product line called Heart Grooming. Applying the principles of the shop’s commitment to the community, Regan says “that if successful, Heart Grooming will have an effect globally that will make Hunter & Gunn’s donations locally look like a pittance.”

More interestingly, being shopped around television networks right now is a pilot for a program he touts as a barber’s equivalent to Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations.

In the pilot, due for release to MTS TV subscribers in early November, he found some character barbers in Neepawa and Brandon. If the series is picked up, he plans to travel the world telling interesting stories where the barbershop is the entry point for engaging with real characters.

“In India, they have these street barbers who literally set up a chair right on the street and give you a cut,” he said. “There’s the township barbers in South Africa where these townships have progressed from apartheid and now are these really social places with music and art.

“There’s this guy in China who cuts hair with his eyes closed. He’s got some kind of Zen-like thing going on.”

Chris Charney, senior writer and partner at Winnipeg’s Farpoint Films, said the trailer is almost ready to hit the circuit and get shopped around for a network.

“It would be great to explore barbers around the world and see what they do and how they do it,” Charney said, adding Regan’s experience at the chair makes him a good host. “He’s got a good presence, and I think it’s all those years in the barbershop. They’re natural storytellers, and they’re used to hearing other people’s stories.”

kelly.taylor@freepress.mb.ca