Sy Sperling, founder of the Hair Club for Men, dies at 78
Sy Sperling, a businessman who helped bring the hair-loss industry into the mainstream with ubiquitous, self-effacing ads, died Wednesday at a hospital in Boca Raton, Florida. He was 78.
His death was confirmed by his publicist, Terri Lynn, who said it followed a lengthy illness.
Sperling achieved a kind of cult fame in the 1980s, as a late-night ad for his business, then called the Hair Club for Men, started playing on televisions around the country. The son of a plumber from the south Bronx, New York, he had no training as an actor and merely stood in a bland room, reciting memorized lines to the camera. But he added a winning kicker.
“Remember,” he said, about to hold up an old photo of his own bald pate. “I’mnot only the Hair Club president, but I’m also a client.”
Calls started pouring in from men interested in his hair-restoration salons, which offered various “weaving systems.” Sperling quickly became the face of male hair loss — however much sat on his head— and helped pave the way for a booming industry in male health and cosmetics.
Called the Infomercial King of late-night TV, he appeared in bits on “The Tonight Show” and “Saturday Night Live,” stepped into the ring at Wrestle-----
Mania, and made the rounds on talk shows and radio programs for years.
“Even to this day people stop me in the street,” he told The Wall Street Journal nearly 30 years after the ad first ran. “People perceive me as the guy next door. My speech is imperfect. My whole TV success had to dowith the fact that it was believable and that I was able to afford good TV time by going on late at night.”
Sperling was born June 25, 1941, and started his business out of personal need: He lost most of his hair by 25, leaving him feeling insecure. “I was really unhappy with my appearance,” he told The New York Times in 1993. “And it was destroying my self-confidence.”
With a hair weave, he told The Journal, he felt he could sleep, style his hair and go out on dates without confronting the question that comes with wearing a toupee: “How do you explain, I got to take my hair off now?”
So with about $5,000 and their credit cards, Sperling and his girlfriend at the time — a hairdresser — bought a defunct salon in Manhattan. There, they developed a hair-replacement systemthat used a very fine nylon mesh, adhesives and hair colored to match the customer’s.
He told The Times that he wanted to remove some of the stigma around baldness. “For years, men have felt funny even discussing it, much less trying to do something about it,” he said. “I think what I’ve done is remove some of the embarrassment associated with men wanting to improve their looks.”
The commercial that made his career first aired in 1982 and was inspired by titans of industry like Frank Perdue of Perdue Chicken and Victor Kiam of Remington Products, who started appearing in their own ads. “I said, ‘ If they could do it with chickens and electric shavers, I’ll do one for hair,’ “Sperling said in a 2007 documentary, “Roots: The Hair-Raising Story of a Guy Named Sy.”
Sperling’s success presaged a boom in male health businesses. Hair treatment Rogaine became available to men in 1988, doctors started prescribing erectile dysfunction drug Viagra a decade later, and today there is a wide and varied market for “hair wellness” treatments. Sperling’s company eventually dropped “For Men” from its name, as it grew to serve more women.
In 2000, Sperling sold his company to a privateequity firm for $45 million, and it was eventually acquired by Japanese company Aderans, which offers hair-loss treatments.
Sperling is survived by his wife, Susan; his daughter, Shari; his son, Andrew; and his sister, Rosalie Slute.