Pieces of the story of Beardsgaard have been told through our original website (this is the 2nd incarnation, and we lost much in the great migration), through social media, in things photographed but never posted, and in things that live only in our memories. This is not the short story, though we kept it remarkably short for how much has happened.

This is for those who want to know the whole story of how a little family-owned, wildly specific barbershop down by the river in Batavia became Beardsgaard: the shop, the Apothecary, the Realm, the catastrophic setbacks, the ridiculous luck, the dorks who started it all, and all the wonderful humans they could not have done any of it without.

CHAPTER 1: THE SEED AND THE SPARK

2011 - 2014

2011 • THE LEGENDS BEGIN

Long long ago, Natalie was just a regular old barber working at a shop in Wicker Park and gaining quite a reputation for her beard work. Enough that the Chicago Sun Times came calling to run a feature article.

Around this time, she had started minorly stalking some of her barbering heroes from across the pond on the internet, somehow luring them into the shop she worked in at the time. They say you shouldn't meet your heroes. Lies. They're wonderful people.

Then in 2012, shortly after they got married, Tyler decided that Natalie's career looked pretty rad, actually, and started barber school. Once he was killing it at his first shop, she started a business plan. And although Natalie is the writer of the pair, one drunken night Tyler pulled the name Beardsgaard out of the air like grabbing a bolt of lightning. Still don't quite know where it came from, but it obviously stuck.

As we were building the idea of Beardsgaard, Natalie reached out to the legendary Bloody Butcher of Schorem (also known as Bertus) to ask about the one piece of advice he would give someone opening their own shop. "Build a place you love to be. Everything else will come from that." So we did.

JUNE 2014
BUILDING BEARDSGAARD

One of Natalie's clients had decided to invest in the making of Beardsgaard, so the Andersons went looking for a place to call their shoppey home, found a new place to live here in the Fox River Valley with our 5 year old, and signed a lease. And then investor client disappeared with a month to go until opening. That set us back a little bit, but we kept saying "if we can get the doors open, this is gonna work." So we put together an Indiegogo fundraising campaign, opened a couple of credit cards to cover the rest, stretched every dollar in our savings, and did just that.

CHAPTER 2: THE EARLY DAYS

SEPTEMBER 2014
BEARDSGAARD OPENS

When we opened on September 9th, 2014, we had dudes waiting outside already, our first day was packed, and we were fully booked for the first week. By Saturday we had to reach out to a friend to come help us out on the front desk, the phone wouldn't stop ringing. By December we had found our first barber, and the shop was really feeling like a team. Or a sitcom, at least.

SEPTEMBER 2015
RIVER PEAK APOTHECARY LAUNCHES

Over our first year we had been building the product offerings on our shelves with a dream of becoming a destination shop for men's grooming products, but we had been crafting the idea of something a little more specific.

We wanted to make beard oils crafted with more thought and specificity than the standard fare, made entirely with natural scents, using the tenets of natural perfumery.

By this time we had started referring to the idea of Beardsgaard as "The Realm," which spun out into a fantasy map of our own devising. So not only did we want to make our scents from natural ingredients, we wanted them to smell like the fantasy locations in the Realm of Beardsgaard we were imagineering with scent.

All our own original formulas, the absolute highest quality natural ingredients, all designed and made in house, by Natalie the Blademaiden herself.

CHAPTER 3: RIDING THE WAVE

2016 - 2022

2016
THE GREAT REUZEL SCUMBASSADOR ADVENTURE

Natalie had run across Schorem Barbier from Rotterdam on Facebook the same year they opened and exploded onto the worldwide barbering scene, and was lucky enough to meet Leen and Bertus when they were in Chicago inking the deal that would lead to their product line Reuzel Pomade launching to the world.

So when Reuzel pomade put out a call to build their first international education team, asking barbers from around North America to make a video of them talking product, talking hair and cutting it the Reuzel way, Blademaiden jumped at the opportunity.

Hundreds of submissions later, 20 barbers were chosen to come together for a week long gauntlet of intensive training that was also a job interview. 12 of us made it through and became the first class of Reuzel Scumbassador educators. Working for Reuzel was one of the biggest honors of Blademaiden's career, and although the growth it brought to Beardsgaard would lead to her stepping back to tend to the shop a year and a half later, Reuzel and all of the people she met there will always be family.

That Reuzel audition video is also what exploded us onto the internet, and started a tidal wave that we would do our best to keep up with until, oh, about March of 2020 if you knowwhatwemean.

SUMMER 2017
THE GREAT BARBER WAVE

The shop had been growing so much that Beardsgaard was starting to get inquiries from barbers across the country looking to move to Batavia and work here, which is absolutely mind blowing, we made all this up, who let we goobers be in charge of things for real. Hiring barbers from other states is harder than you might expect, state licensing requirements are different everywhere, you have to get your license transferred to Illinois, none of it is fast or easy.

But in the summer of 2017 we brought on three barbers from three different states. To do it, we needed to expand our hours to 11 hour days, 6 days a week, which meant shifts and additional shopkeep hires. We started adding benefits like health insurance, and the admin work got HEAVY. During this time this little family business with two employees expanded to 14 on the payroll. It's kind of like learning to drive while building a car on the Autobahn.

2017 & 2018
BEST OF THE FOX WINNER

Voted on by the fine folks of the Fox River Valley, this award meant the world to us.

OCTOBER 2017
CAPTAIN FAWCETT BOOK SIGNING

Captain Fawcett and the legend behind it, Richie Finney, were putting together a book called the Gentleman's Guide to Grooming, a guide and retrospective on traditional barbering, grooming and men's style. Amongst the modern barbers from around the world that were profiled here was Natalie the Blademaiden and let us tell you, to be featured on pages alongside the legends in this book is an absolute trip and an honor.

SEPTEMBER 2018
BUILDING THE APOTHECARY

Most don't know that 117 and 119 South Batavia Avenue are technically one building divided down the middle, with apartments on top. We don't own this building, we lease, but in 2018 the space to the south became available for the first time in decades. That half had carpet and drop ceilings hiding the original tin ceiling, and a weird rabbit warren of doctor's office exam rooms that all got gutted before we moved into this blank space of a cave.

At this time Beardsgaard had so many employees, there was nowhere good to take a break, eat lunch, laundry being in the basement was terrible, we were outgrowing the apartment we had leased to make our Apothecary products, we needed more space. And so we jumped on this one, dedicating the back half to Beardsgaard and the front half to production space.

MARCH 2019
STATION WALL REMODEL

When we first moved into Beardsgaard there were some old farmhouse tables in the basement we repurposed for our stations, but we had no storage space, no uniformity, only one shampoo sink, lighting was tricky in this big cave of a space, and the electrical systems were completely haunted. With as big as the shop was by then, we needed a PROPER setup.

So we put together another Indiegogo fundraising campaign, designed a station wall to suit the modern day needs of the shop, and done did the thing.

MAY 2019
APOTHECARY SOFT OPENING

We DIY-ed the fuck out of the space next door to Beardsgaard, with funds gathered as we went, a real bootstrap situation. It took a while, but eventually we decided to also sell our Apothecary products out of the space where they were made, opening the doors to the public on production days, even though it wasn't quite a full on "store" yet.

NOVEMBER 2019
NATIONAL BEARD & MOUSTACHE CHAMPIONSHIPS

Earlier in 2019 we were contacted and then visited by some of the big dogs of Beard Team USA to ask Beardsmith to be a judge and Blademaiden to be the guest barber at the National Beard & Moustache Championships. We don't often shut down the shop on a weekend, but for this one we absolutely did, and brought the whole team along for the madness and majesty. What an absolutely surreal experience, and a highlight of all of our careers.

JANUARY 2020
RIVER PEAK APOTHECARY STOREFRONT OPENS

With all this room over at 119 and with the huge remodeling of the space done, we decided to expand the Apothecary into a magical gift shop. We began to fill it with all sorts of things that got our inner elves and hobbits and Gollums excited, and flung open our doors in January of 2020. And then, as Bo Burnham said about his return to comedy at this same time, "...the funniest thing happened..."

CHAPTER 4: THE APOCALYPSE & AFTERMATH

2020 - 2022

MARCH 2020 - JUNE 2020
CLOSED FOR THE PANDEMIC

We have always said that barbershops are a recession-proof business, because hair never stops growing, but we didn't account for a global pandemic. It felt to so many like the world was ending, there was no roadmap for any of it.

Three months of being closed is something a lot of businesses couldn't survive, but with the incredible ingenuity of Gwen, Natalie's sister/our operations manager at the time, somehow we did. Boy the holiday retail campaign for 2020 got weird, we went with apocalypse character archetypes.

JULY 2020 - NOVEMBER 2021
NEVER ENDING CONSTRUCTION OUTSIDE OUR DOOR

We reopened to an almost unimaginable new landscape in a beard-focused barbershop, doing everything in our power to balance keeping employees and clients safe with everyone being able to make enough of a living to keep the doors open.

And then a previously-planned water main replacement project on 31 started up. They ripped up the entirety of the street. They ripped up the whole front sidewalk with holes big enough to swallow cars right in front of our doors, with the only option for customers to enter being through the back doors (quite a journey for the brand new Apothecary, past the laundry, lunchroom, bathroom and production area).

Just when we thought it was over, a number of the businesses on the block found water pouring into their basements, because something went wrong and whoops there goes the sidewalk again. Pretty sure the sidewalk got dug up six+ times in over a year before it was all finally done. But by then...

JANUARY 2021
APOTHECARY STOREFRONT CLOSES

A little gift shop, even one that makes many of its own goods, has a hard time surviving in a brick and mortar space. One that has three months open, three months closed and then is hidden behind a wall of construction over a year, there's no surviving that, at least not in the same form.

Just before and during the pandemic we had a few Beardsgaard employees who were moving to distant shores or moving on to their next chapters, and we realized that damn, our original business plan had 4 total barbers, not 14 employees. One business, one storefront in a maintenance-heavy 1800's building, not two. 40 hours per week, not nearly 90.

We were exhausted and burnt out, but we realized something in between our original dreams and the explosion into the land beyond our wildest dreams was the right path.

5 stations, 5 barbers, 5 days per week. Two businesses under one roof. So for a long time when folks moved on to their next ports of call, we didn't rehire, allowing the shop to finally get to a size and pace that was more sustainable. And because we made a well-timed call that may have been fate, we now have a bakery next door. Huzzah!

CHAPTER 5: THE REALM REBORN

2022 - PRESENT

SUMMER 2022
SHOP LIFE KIND OF RETURNS TO NORMAL

Masks were finally coming off after a long winter and spring of lots of illness still going around, and life was feeling almost normal again. We were developing the most across-the-board talented and experienced team of barbers we have ever been lucky enough to work with, and life was feeling pretty good.

SEPTEMBER 2024
BEARDSGAARD'S 10 YEAR ANNIVERSARY
SEPTEMBER 2025
RIVER PEAK APOTHECARY'S 10 YEAR ANNIVERSARY

When you open a small business, you hear over and over again how 80% of them end in their first year. Of those who make it, 50% won't make it to year 5. Only about 30% of them make it to 10.

This dream that sprouted in Batavia and has been watered by the community and everyone that has ever worked here has grown two small businesses that beat the odds in so many ways.

Because a nerdy, beard-centric barbershop allll the way out here where the cornfields start? Too niche, we were told. Would never work. But we knew, the nerds were here. They're everywhere. The dudes wanting to look like the best versions of themselves, bearded or clean shaven were here too. They're everywhere.

"Build a place you love to be. Everything else will come from that." Turns out that's all there is to it. And then you just have to not fuck it up.