Creative Agency Red Antler Is a Cult-Brand Whisperer
In 2013, the patent for finasteride, the active ingredient in male-pattern-baldness medication Propecia, expired. This might seem an unlikely development to send ripples across the nimble, young world of startups, but within a couple of years, a handful of entrepreneurs were zeroing in on hair loss as a zone ripe for disruption. Among them were Steven Gutentag and Demetri Karagas, ex-Google employees who were losing their own hair.
Finasteride was there for the taking, but it had deeply entrenched associations with a host of unsexy things: emasculation, aging, infomercials, and even the president of the United States. (Sample headline from the past year: “Why I Would Never Take Propecia, President Trump’s Hair Growth Drug.”) As Gutentag and Karagas set about launching Keeps, a subscription service with finasteride- and minoxidil-based products, they knew they would have to reframe hair loss as a normal, preventable issue for young men, rather than a shameful inevitability for the middle aged. They needed, says Gutentag,
