This New N.Y.C. Hair Growth Center Wants You to Treat Your Scalp Like a Garden
The first thing you notice about Michael Pollak and Steve Klebanow is that they both have great heads of hair. The second thing you notice is that they’re very open to discussing why they have great heads of hair.
Pollak and Klebanow are the cofounders and co-CEOs of Great Many, a New York City hair growth treatment center that opened on Tuesday. The space, located on the ground floor of a slick downtown apartment building, is a disarmingly comforting Millennial dreamscape: clean lines, blond wood paneling, concrete floors, and walls in a deep, cozy shade of green. There’s even a lounge with free snacks and drinks.
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“It’s so important for people to feel comfortable coming into a space,” Pollak tells Robb Report. “Especially when they’re coming in for something that might be more emotional. That’s what we tried to nail here: Somewhere where you don’t feel like you’re being poked and prodded, and instead, feel like you’re really taken care of.”
That care is available in a range of goods and services, which the partners describe as everything north of what you’d get in a hair salon and south of what you’d get in a hair transplant facility. Great Many offers medical consultations on the state of your scalp, PRP injections to promote growth and thickness, and prescriptions for the pills and topicals proven to attack a range of hair loss causes. A line of shampoo, conditioner, and serums that you can get over the counter—as well as the Rx goods—will be available in the store and on Great Many’s website this summer.
But it’s worth the trip to the physical space. Part of Pollak and Klebanow’s raison d’etre is to open up bigger discussions about ways to treat your hair.
“I knew the landscape that most average men my age knew,” Klebanow says of his own journey to figuring out how to keep his hair. “I didn’t know the full story. Now, I’m happy to say that although I still have a pronounced widow’s peak, I’m in a much better situation than I was a year ago. I’ve started taking the medications, I’m doing PRP, and I’m getting great results.”
The focus on PRP, or platelet-rich plasma injections, is based on the amount of clinical research that has been done on the service, whose main ingredient is derived from your own blood. At Great Many, a practitioner conducts the extraction, spinning, and injection entirely in the same treatment room so that there’s no confusion about whose plasma is whose.
What Pollak and Klebanow hope to achieve is a new phase in the cultural conversation about hair growth—something similar to the multi-pronged approach people now take with caring for their skin.
“Hair is a lot more like a plant,” Pollak says. “The soil has to be great, water has to be right, sunlight has to be right, food has to be right. You have to pay attention to all those things to optimize the growth of the plant. No one would ever be like, ‘I’m just gonna put it in soil for six months, and then maybe I’ll try to water it after that.’”
And they’re not stopping with New York. Although they haven’t yet announced future locations, the plan is that Great Many will in time serve a bigger audience. “In Michael’s plant analogy, there are components of that hair story that require interaction with a physical person,” Klebanow says. Which means they may soon be opening a space near you.
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