Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 1, 1992 TAG: 9202010332
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LARRY McSHANE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
HIRSUTE, AND HAPPIER
At age 26, he was 30 pounds overweight, painfully shy, recently divorced, living with his sister and - worst of all - he was bald. Hair-anoia kept this guy home Saturday nights, fearful he'd be in over his head on the singles scene.But life got better: He got a hair replacement. And he started a business, a hair replacement business. And business got better when he delivered this simple message: "I'm not only the Hair Club president. I'm also a client."
He's 50 now, and life couldn't be better for Sy Sperling. The man who brought hair replacement off of the back pages of dubious magazines and onto late night television presides over an empire that's spreading like a new head of hair.
"I can't go anywhere without everybody coming up to me. I'm one of the most recognized men in America right now - probably more recognized than Lee Iacocca," Sperling said recently, as hirsute in his Manhattan office at 3 p.m. as he looks on ESPN at 3 a.m.
Iacocca's a favorite in the board room; Sperling's the darling of stand-up comedians and men affected by the (hairline) recession. Go ahead and laugh, Sy says. He's not thin-skinned, and the jokes are good for business.
"It's free publicity. Leno said something recently: `I think Sy Sperling has more power at the Hair Club for Men than Gorbachev does in the Soviet Union.' It's great stuff," says Sperling. "It's humorous. We'll take it."
He's also taking his business all across America. New branches opened last year in Phoenix, Denver, Kansas City, Indianapolis and St. Louis, bringing the total to 40 cities. Two more are poised to start business in California, another two in Florida.
Sperling's system of hair replacement involves attaching human hair to the existing, healthy hair on a man's scalp. The whole process takes eight to 12 weeks and costs $2,000 to $3,500.
It's a dream come true for the plumber's son from the South Bronx, an underachiever turned entrepreneur.
It was 1968 when Sy stopped selling swimming pools and started selling hair, opening a cramped office around the corner from the current Hair Club headquarters, which occupies four floors on Madison Avenue.
Slowly but surely, business expanded. In 1982, it exploded when Sy personalized his message to masses.
"When we went on the air with my commercial, we got the best response ever," Sperling says. "The phones were off the hook. We got 10,000 calls the first month we went on the air with it - unbelievable response!"
Sperling never doubted he would make it big. "I knew there were 30 million bald men. I looked at the other alternatives - transplants, toupees." Both those choices bothered Sy, especially the latter.
"The younger man would be very reluctant to wear a toupee, because if he's intimate with a woman, how does he explain taking it off at night and putting it on a head block? `Excuse me, I wanna get my hair'?" Sperling says. "It didn't take too much to convince me not to go with a toupee."
So he went with weaving, and the rest is hair-story.
Sperling acknowledges his trademarked process is not meant for every Tom, Dick or hairless Harry: "If you do a guy's hair, and it looks good, you have a friend for life. Conversely, if it doesn't work for him, we're gonna give him some kind of financial settlement."
Fortunately, 95 percent of the clients are pleased with their new looks, he says. The Better Business Bureau gives him a satisfactory rating and says it arbitrates any unresolved disputes.
Of course, it hasn't been all smiles. Sperling's come under fire for his campaign to cover America's thinning tops. Richard Sandomir, author of "Bald Like Me," vocally advocates the natural look and decries Sperling as "the Spuds McKenzie of hair replacement."
But the debonaire Sy says he provides the same service as your family dentist - sort of.
"If your lost your front teeth, you can chew with your back teeth, but yet you still want to cap your front teeth. Why? Because you had teeth there before, and you feel awkward with missing teeth," he explains.
"If you have a full head of hair, and all of a sudden you went bald, you'd have missing hair."