These days, consumers can order a personalized hair regimen, curated beauty products and now, a treatment plan to stop hair loss.
Keeps is a startup focused on preventing men’s hair loss, rather than bringing hair back. The company went live on Jan. 16 and is an entirely online process.
Created by two ex-Google employees, Steven Gutentag and Demetri Karagas, Keeps’ goal is to get men the treatment they need, rather than encouraging them to take supplements or medications that don’t fit their lifestyle.
“We want to be a brand that’s really straightforward and helping you solve your problem and then getting you back to what you were doing,” Gutentag said.
Keeps is yet another company jumping into what some see as a niche space. But as companies like Birchbox, Form Beauty and StitchFix have shown, there’s a market for hyperpersonalization.
“Aside from more efficient targeting and complete attribution, developing a solid understanding of customers is the only way for brands to offer highly personalized shopping experiences, which will ultimately put them ahead of brands that don’t,” said Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, CEO and founder of ad-tech company Drawbridge.
To get started on a Keeps treatment plan, you can head to the website, answer a few questions, submit a few photos of yourself and then wait for a board-certified teledoctor to review your case. Once the review is in, you can look at the specific treatment plan the doctor recommends for you, purchase it and then wait for the products to come to your door.
Keeps works with teledoctors in 30 states and Eagle Pharmacy, a mail-order pharmacy. According to Keeps, 85 percent of the population will be able to talk to a doctor in their state. If they end up being in the 15 percent that can’t, they can still pick a treatment plan and give it to their primary care doctor to write a prescription and send it to the pharmacy. Keeps treatment plans are not covered by insurance.
So what’s in the treatment plan? Two different FDA-approved products (that come in bottles with the Keeps logo): Minoxidil, an over-the-counter topical solution that sells for $10 a month, and Finasteride, a daily pill that costs $25 a month. Depending on your situation, you can be told to use both treatments or just one.
Gutentag thinks this type of structure will help men stick to a plan to prevent hair loss and wash away all the other products that promise to do the same.
“Getting a guy to do one of these two things every day is not super easy and building a habit around it,” Gutentag said. “You need a product that’s going to work for you.”
