Men are increasingly buying their own skincare and grooming products, but Hale founder Sam Burke says many beauty retailers still offer a shopping experience designed primarily around women. “The major problem in this space right now is that men often don’t know what they’re looking for,” he told Inside Retail. “They don’t know how to validate between what’s marketing and what will be a truly effective product. We want to have the options reduced to a curated few, and to make our s
r selection from there.”
Hale aims to address this gap. Its DTC site offers an easy-to-navigate shopping experience organized around different hair and skin archetypes. Depending on a shopper’s stated needs, the site uses labels such as “The Architect” and “The Protector” to recommend a routine typically consisting of two or three products. Its hair and skin assessment also provides detailed guidance on which ingredients customers should seek out or avoid.
The opportunity is significant. According to research firm Fortune Business Insights, the global men’s personal care market reached an estimated $44.72 billion in 2025 and is expected to reach nearly $49 billion this year. The market is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 9.24 per cent, reaching $99.09 billion by 2034.
At legacy players Sephora and Ulta Beauty, men account for roughly 23 per cent and 20 per cent of website traffic, respectively. Burke believes Hale can turn this growing but underserved group into more confident, regular beauty customers.
From biomedical engineering to entrepreneurship
Like many brand founders before him, Burke did not follow a conventional path toward launching his own CPG brand.
Long before Hale, Burke studied biomedical and mechanical engineering at Colorado State University, developing ideas for improving the mental health industry through patented technology.
“I was studying biomedical and mechanical engineering and already knew that I wasn’t going to be a good engineer because my brain is a little too chaotic for that field,” he recalled.
“At the time, I was working in a neuroscience research lab, studying brain aging causes, like dementia, and trying to figure out how to delay its onset. That research led me to my first startup, where I was focusing on non-drug alternatives for things like ADHD, anxiety and depression.”
Burke raised a “small” amount of money to build a clinical device for use in people’s homes to help treat mental health symptoms. He also tried to patent the device. However, he lacked the experience required to build a business of this nature, and the project fell apart soon after it started.
Burke then sought mentorship from a founder with a strong reputation in the consumer sector. He learned about Andy Dunn, the co-founder and former CEO of menswear brand Bonobos, through Dunn’s memoir, Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind.
The book details Dunn’s experience building Bonobos while privately managing bipolar I disorder, a topic that resonated with Burke given his field of research.
“I fell in love with the vulnerability that he [Dunn] expressed around his mental health struggles while he was building his company, and shot him an Instagram DM. I was like, ‘Hey, here’s my background and here’s what I’m interested in. I’d love to do some free work for you.’”
Dunn hired Burke as one of the first employees at Pie, his social networking and community-centered startup.
Burke joined as operations lead and rose to become senior manager of strategy, finance and operations, before eventually becoming the company’s chief of staff.
Along the way, Burke set up Pie’s first growth engine, helping the app acquire 50,000 users in four months. The company later raised more than $11.5 million in a Series A funding round from key investors including Forerunner Ventures and Origin Ventures.
Burke said the experience gave him both the inspiration and the skills to build and run his own business. These ranged from developing a pitch deck to learning how to manage money and pitch to investors.
Dunn was also one of Hale’s first major investors and remains a trusted advisor to Burke.
How did Hale come about?
Like many other founders, Burke developed the idea for his business from a personal interest.
“I had already been paying attention to the beauty space because I was a consumer interested in pretty high-quality skin and haircare products because I had bad acne and worse hair when I was in high school and college,” said Burke.
While researching the industry from the perspective of male consumers, Burke noticed a shift beginning to take place.
He explained that for much of the past 60 years, men were not really “in charge” of buying their own products. Instead, they left purchases to women in their lives, such as wives or mothers, or simply used products they received as gifts.
Around the start of 2025, this began to change, with 60–80 per cent of young men purchasing these products themselves. Burke saw this as a major inflection point in a decades-old industry.
Rather than build his own haircare brand or another type of beauty business, Burke decided to create a marketplace that brought a selection of brands under one roof in an accessible and easily understood manner.
“I pitched this idea to Dunn for a Sephora for men-style entity, for a market that’s still in its infancy. And the way that we can mature it is by building a company that can control what the expected shopping experience looks like on the customer side, but then also set the quality standard for new and emerging brands on the business side,” Burke explained.
Building The Hale League to attract brands
Burke told Inside Retail that his team did not have tens of millions of dollars to invest individually in or acquire the high-quality brands it wanted to stock on Hale’s platform.
“To make sure that we were attracting the right brands to us, we created a way for us to be able to invest in these brands in kind.”
Before officially launching Hale this summer, Burke created The Hale League, a partner ecosystem that connects founders with a curated network of infrastructure providers offering preferred rates and access to services such as formulation, toxicology testing and packaging.
After submitting an application outlining their brand and hero SKUs, successful founders can choose from more than 70 individual services provided by over a dozen of the industry’s service partners.
It is a quid pro quo system: R&D teams teams find new clients; emerging founders can more efficiently access the support they need to grow their businesses; and Hale steadily expands its roster of up-and-coming beauty labels.
Hale’s core assortment currently includes over 60 emerging brands across categories such as skincare, haircare, body care, beard care, oral care and fragrance. They include Highland Hair, Jack Henry, Noun Naturals, Mudita Earth, Brightside Style and Apostle.
Burke said Hale has assembled a range of brands designed to meet male consumers’ needs across different hair textures, skin tones and types, and other individual traits.
What’s next in store for Hale?
In addition to building Hale’s roster of brands, Burke and his team are developing a curator program for the platform.
Rather than following a traditional influencer model, Hale will work with a select group of barbers, stylists, content creators, clinicians and other respected figures in the men’s grooming space.
Shoppers will receive product recommendations from trusted sources, whether they are someone with medical training or a recognizable or reputable industry figure. The curators will also earn a commission.
Burke explained that two main factors shape Hale’s approach to selecting and recommending products.
The first is whether a brand is clinically proven to help. Every product on Hale undergoes a standardized filtering process, with the platform’s entire catalog analyzed and approved by its medical advisory board of surgeons and dermatologists.
The second is whether a product works for people with the customer’s hair or skin type.
By working with a wide range of curators, Hale makes it more likely that customers will find recommendations from people who look like them or have similar needs, helping them feel more comfortable making a purchase.
Burke noted that once a consumer buys a product they like, it becomes easier to turn them into a regular customer.
Over the next few years, Burke plans to take Hale beyond the internet with branded brick-and-mortar stores and kiosks in places such as fitness centers and airports. These are locations where Hale’s typical shopper – a man aged between 25 and 34 – is likely to encounter the brand organically.
Building a new definition of masculinity in the beauty industry
Burke described the current men’s grooming market as the “Wild West” and said he was excited by the prospect of building a lasting, generational retailer. He wants Hale to serve the new form of masculinity embraced by many younger millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha men.
“I don’t want to fall into this toxic masculinity culture that is all about ‘looksmaxxing’ or peptide injections. The majority of men don’t align with these two polar groups [the type that ‘looksmaxxes’ and the type who views grooming as an ‘unmanly’ habit]. What’s missing is a space in the middle to be vulnerable about what you need, physically and mentally,” said Burke.
Burke credited Dunn with modeling the vulnerability he believes modern masculinity should embrace.
“He’s one of the most vulnerable people I’ve ever met, and his leadership directly reflected that. I’ve always tried to align myself with this idea that modern masculinity isn’t gross. It’s about vulnerability, sophistication and a more open approach to life and how you handle things.”
Further reading: Tomorrow-Today Beauty’s Indianna Roehrich discusses building a brand with community
