Victoria Eisner: Co-Founder & CEO of Hair Cultivated

Episode 804

On today’s episode, we welcome Victoria Eisner, Co-Founder and CEO of Hair Cultivated and the original founder of Glamsquad — the trailblazing on-demand beauty service that transformed how women access professional hair, makeup, and nail care. Known for building brands that sit at the intersection of luxury, science, and technology, Victoria is once again stepping into white space — this time to address an issue impacting millions of women: hair loss.
After redefining convenience in beauty with Glamsquad, Victoria turned her focus toward a category that has long lacked both innovation and empathy. With Hair Cultivated, she is bridging beauty and medicine through a premium, clinically proven prescription hair regrowth system designed specifically for women. Co-founded alongside a physician, the brand pairs powerful ingredients with elegant, easy-to-use formulations — creating a more elevated, discreet path to real results while helping normalize a conversation many women have felt forced to navigate quietly.
In this episode, Victoria shares the personal inspiration behind Hair Cultivated, what she learned founding and scaling Glamsquad, and how those lessons shaped her approach to building again. We discuss identifying untapped opportunity, earning consumer trust in health-driven categories, and designing products that support both confidence and wellbeing. A great conversation for founders, innovators, and anyone inspired to build brands that truly change how people feel.

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be, we just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. 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. Let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin 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 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 that. 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, amazing what you’re doing. So for listeners who are just discovering Hair Cultivated. How do you describe the brand and what it what makes it fundamentally different from other hair growth solutions that are out there?

Victoria Eisner 2:31
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 hims or hers, that aren’t really made for the luxury beauty customer, somebody 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.

Kara Goldin 3:39
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?

Victoria Eisner 3:57
Yeah, absolutely. So both me and my co founder, Dr Kara man gistu, 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 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. It 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, but truly, I felt like, if I can. Greg, 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.

Kara Goldin 5:12
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 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.

Victoria Eisner 5:58
So it’s definitely that’s, 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 quite well known for, you know, if they have genetic Kara loss, they take extra steps to act preventatively. However, 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. So, you know, one out of eight Americans is on a GLP one, you know, you could use diet and exercise, but that’s definitely gonna be better. Everyone’s using at least retinol, Botox, you know, you name it, why not apply these medical advances to your hair growth?

Kara Goldin 7:40
So tell us about the formulation, like, what makes it both clinically proven and also toxic free.

Victoria Eisner 7:48
So we took out all of the materials that are really drawing to your scalp we want to and really cause a lot of hair breakage. Because if you want to grow air 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 it’s like the same type of ingredient as NIR all 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 hair loss. We use dutasteride in some of our products, so that’s a really elevated DHT blocker. And then we use latanoprost, which is the key ingredient in Latif. I think that’s all the ingredients us, 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 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.

Kara Goldin 9:50
Yeah, definitely. And when, when you look at building Hair Cultivated, it’s different than your previous experience at Glen. Squad. That’s a 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, is the key thing that maybe you know now that you’re a second time founder, that you’ll do a little bit differently.

Victoria Eisner 10:19
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 and also giving people access to something that they may not have access to like this level of medicine, and we really see a lot of people, especially in our Tiktok community, who are 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 that make a make a big difference to them and 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 and and getting, like a more digital community involved,

Kara Goldin 11:36
and it’s all D to C, right? The the model that you have now, yeah,

Victoria Eisner 11:42
it’s all D to C, 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 hair stylists, 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.

Kara Goldin 12:23
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.

Victoria Eisner 12:33
So we have four SKUs. We have two kinds of pill and two kinds of serum. The difference is the serum a serum. One serum has due to asteroid, 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 of vitamins. We use a really low dose of everything, so it’s almost like a micro dose. So you don’t have have to suffer any kind of side effects with oral minoxidil, which, on a larger dose, the side effect is, is not too great, and 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.

Kara Goldin 13:31
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, 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, but what have you seen that’s kind of surprised you and and growing Hair Cultivated

Victoria Eisner 14:22
the biggest thing that surprises me is the 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. 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,

Kara Goldin 15:11
and how long does it take, typically, when, obviously, this is all different amongst people, but how, 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?

Victoria Eisner 15:31
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 the 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 thin, quite thinning hair in, like the back on the crown, where I grew, you know, some hair, and I didn’t even know that that was thinning. So it’s really great to to have that hair growth.

Kara Goldin 16:39
No It definitely, for sure, when you think about success, and you know, you obviously saw that with glam squad, it just grew enormously. You’re such a figure behind that brand and and what glam squad had been able to accomplish. I know that that doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s 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, it’s a newer brand. It’s almost like you went all the way 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 in 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?

Victoria Eisner 17:47
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 and the more people talk about you. But when you can really get somebody to give you great feedback, even even the bad things are just problems to solve or things you can do better on. So anytime, I think, always listening to your customer is the biggest secret, and it’s not that hard to do.

Kara Goldin 18:46
So the space that you’ve entered, and frankly, glam squad was sort of far and away the most well known of of the in their industry. But when I look at the space, 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?

Victoria Eisner 19:38
I 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 last. Level at which you serve the customer, and I don’t think the the luxury beauty customer, and especially, especially women are being well served in the hair growth category. That’s my thesis here. And having tried, quite literally, every fabulous hair product, skin care product, every kind of cosmetic and and beauty product in the world, I was very underwhelmed by all the hair growth stuff. I 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 would really gravitate to something that like elevates the entire experience. As we mentioned before, it’s really embarrassing to have hair loss, and 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.

Kara Goldin 21:48
Yeah, definitely, definitely. 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.

Victoria Eisner 22:03
So I’ve gone to several scalps 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, like getting a massage and your hair washed all at the same time. I don’t know. It’s, it’s, it’s the best,

Kara Goldin 22:26
yeah, and somebody was telling me that, especially as almost like, prep for doing something like Hair Cultivated. Would you agree?

Victoria Eisner 22:36
Yeah, definitely. And after you do something like that, you kind of like, notice your you have a lot more volume. Like, your hair is, like, happier.

Kara Goldin 22:47
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 just another great, great company and Victoria Eisner, co founder and CEO of Hair Cultivated, 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 Goldin 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 Goldin, 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, best selling book, undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building hint we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening, and goodbye for now.

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