A Well-Groomed Business

I was ahead of my time.

Almost 20 years ago, I started getting facials at Elodie Salon, then located in Mazza Gallerie in Chevy Chase. I sat in the reception area in as manly a slouch as I could muster, paging through Vogue as women came and went.

When my esthetician, a lovely woman named Mimi, came to the reception area to retrieve me, I tried to jump up before she could say my name. I would run the gauntlet through the reception area without looking anyone in the eye. I felt like the other (all female) patrons wondered what I was doing there.

I eventually got over being embarrassed about getting facials, although I have cut back because of the cost. I could buy a few shares of blue-chip stock for what a facial costs.

But entrepreneurs Michael Gilman and Pirooz Sarshar have built a profitable little business called the Grooming Lounge around insecure guys like me.

Starting with a Web site, and later with a store on L Street Northwest, just up the block from my office, and another in Tysons Corner, the Grooming Lounge caters to guys who want to tackle unmentionable stuff like nose hair or eye bags without entering a woman's salon or approaching a brightly lit counter at Bloomingdale's.

It isn't the business that the two men expected to pursue.

Gilman, 38, and business partner Sarshar, 37, grew up in the salon business and met at industry shows. Gilman's grandfather started Davidson Beauty Supply in the District 80 years ago, and Sarshar began cutting hair under his hairstylist mother when he was 14.

They both liked nice clothes and good grooming, and their friends were always peppering them with questions about moisturizers, eye creams and hair gels.

In 2000, they paid a Philadelphia couple $3,500 to start a Web site called http://groominglounge.com, which would be a retail site for products. Gilman and Sarshar wrote the copy. They bartered grooming products for the Web site photographs.

The site was run out of Gilman's basement near the U.S. Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, and it did a tidy little business, producing revenue of about $50,000 a year on about a half-dozen orders a day.

Then they latched onto a much more promising niche: "the embarrassed male."