We recently connected with Ryan Taylor and have shared our conversation below.

Ryan , appreciate you joining us today. One of the most important things small businesses can do, in our view, is to serve underserved communities that are ignored by giant corporations who often are just creating mass-market, one-size-fits-all solutions. Talk to us about how you serve an underserved community.

There’s been a trend over the past decade or so in barbering of sort of virtue signaling with our houseless friends. You’ll see a barber with 20k followers on instagram go out to a camp with a camera crew and set up and do some dramatic makeover on someone and do a flashy edit with sad music and blast it all over social media for their followers. Then the attention is all over the barber for how amazing they are for being selfless and serving. Which- service is absolutely a beautiful thing and necessary and amazing, we need to shift our attention off the back pats and more on community organization. We have been meeting monthly to serve camps since before east end barber opened. I’ve made good friends out there, known people that have died, seen people grow up and start coming to our barber shop! And little to none of this documented on social media except to push for other barbers to come out. There is a major systemic breakdown in our country with our houseless folks, many have untreated addiction issues, many have mental health issues with no resources, and some just want some peace. But many of them face violence,rape, and overdoses daily. There needs to be more attention on this and less attention on those of us serving.

Ryan , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I started messing around with barbering around 11 or 12. My brothers and I ponied up on a pair of clippers to cut each others hair, at the time my Mom was buzzing us in the backyard with the dog clippers- real La Porte style. It was either that or go to curl up n dye. For my brothers it was just fun fun goofy time, for me it was instant infatuation. I wanted to learn more about it, I wanted to dig my heels in, and try out different fades. So I gave some crappy fades to some friends for awhile. See at the time everything else in life felt like work except cutting hair and playing music. So I paid attention to that. I wasn’t mechanically inclined like my brothers or Dad, I wasn’t a handy man naturally, but I could get into this. Now everyone in my family worked in plants, I wanted to avoid that at all costs. So after high school I went to college, kept on playing in punk and hardcore bands, and worked various jobs. I changed my major every so often in between touring the country and mexico a few times before having a life changing moment that made me realize I could expire any day now. So I decided I would go to barber school, give it a shot for at least 1 year, see how it took. My first year in I made more money than I had ever made with more schedule flexibility than I had ever had. That first year I had worked in a shop with some friends, and began tucking away tip money to eventually open my own thing. Down the line I opened up a shop with a couple owners from cutthroat on the east end of downtown. I immediately fell in love with the neighborhood, its 15 minutes from where I grew up. A couple years in the other owners accepted a buy out and I changed the name to east end barber and we made the house a home. Our goal on a daily basis with east end is to always make it as fun and as inviting as possible. To make it a hub for the neighborhood, while making sure the customers and barbers are all treated with an equal amount of respect. Family over everything.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

We have a unique line of aftershave, pomade, beard balm, beard wash, and beard oil. Its all small batch, and all made in house in houston by our barber Edwin Carson. Edwin has his own pomade company pomps not dead. Edwin rules.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

I keep in touch with clients by listening twice as much as I speak. I’m a barber. They have stuff to get off their chests. Many of them only have that 30-45 min slot in their day where they get to vent or simply have someone else to bounce ideas off of. That’s what I’m here. 70% listening, 30% haircut

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.eastendbarber.net
• Instagram: eastendbarber
• Facebook: eastendbarber
• Twitter: eastendbarber

Image Credits
photo by mark champion