A note from the founder on Beardsman Oil Co’s relaunch
If you’ve been with us since the early days, you’ve earned an explanation. Not an apology — I don’t think I owe anyone that for the years it took to get back here — but the truth, laid out plainly, the way I’d want it told to me.
The Beginning
Beardsman started in 2009 the way most real things start: small, and by hand. I was making product to order, one bottle at a time, filling requests as they came in. No warehouse, no staff, no illusions — just a guy who knew how to build things properly, applying that to beard oil instead of cabinetry.
It grew. Eventually it grew enough that “by hand, one at a time” wasn’t a business model anymore — it was a bottleneck. So I built a production shop. Brought on employees. Turned a kitchen-table operation into something that could actually keep up with demand. That’s the version of Beardsman a lot of you remember.
Along the way, this company took me places I never expected. I drove the entire East Coast and beyond, setting up at conventions and beard competitions, meeting thousands of people — most of it in service of fundraisers, giving someone a hand up when they needed one. I sat across from dozens of other small companies doing the same kind of work, and every one of them shaped who I am now, whether they knew it or not. That community is a real part of what Beardsman is, not a footnote to it.
What Happened in Between
Life doesn’t ask permission before it rearranges your plans. A divorce forced the shop closed — not because the product failed or the customers left, but because you can’t run a production operation while your life is being dismantled around you. I moved. Then moved again. The kind of years where you’re rebuilding the foundation instead of building anything on top of it.
In 2019, I tried a soft relaunch — smaller, leaner, meant to be a bridge back to full production. It ran through Etsy. What I didn’t know until customers started asking where their orders were is that Etsy simply wasn’t sending a portion of those orders through to me. People paid. I never saw the order. I found out the way you’d expect — after the trust was already damaged. That failure wasn’t a product problem or a fulfillment problem. It was a platform quietly failing the people on both ends of it, and I take responsibility for not catching it sooner.
I finally landed somewhere solid. And then someone I love got sick — a serious diagnosis, the kind that reorganizes every priority you thought you had. From 2024 until recently, Beardsman sat exactly where it needed to sit: last. Not abandoned. Just correctly ordered against what mattered more. I don’t regret that choice and I’d make it again.
Where We Are Now
She’s doing better. Genuinely, visibly better — and for the first time in longer than I’d like to admit, I have the bandwidth to give this company the attention it always deserved and rarely got in full.
This relaunch isn’t a comeback story dressed up for marketing. It’s just what happens when the more important things stop demanding everything you have, and you get to go back to the thing you built with your hands because you wanted to.
I’m bringing back Buy a Bar, Donate a Bar — full swing this time, with soap going out to homeless shelters across the country instead of just the ones I could reach by hand. I’m excited to see familiar names again, hopefully familiar faces too, at the conventions and competitions we get back to. And I’m excited, for the first time in a long time, to be sharing this adventure with someone.
Thank you for waiting. Thank you for still being here. Let’s get back to it.
— Jason, Founder, Beardsman Oil Co, Est. 2009