Ask someone dealing with thinning hair what they’ve tried, and you’ll often get a list. A serum from an ad. A supplement a friend recommended. Something with a scalp applicator that lived under the sink after week three. Maybe a device. The list usually ends the same way — a shrug, and some version of none of it did anything.
Evan Zhao, co-founder and CEO of RE:YOU, considers shrugging the category’s central problem. Not the science, which he thinks is advancing. The accumulated skepticism of people who’ve been sold badly enough, often enough, to stop listening.
It’s a self-inflicted wound. Years of overstated claims, unverifiable percentages, and photography that flatters rather than documents have produced a market where the customer’s default assumption is that nothing works. Zhao’s frustration with the industry started here: he saw marketing built to extract money from people at a vulnerable moment, and he saw the long-term cost getting passed to everyone in the space, including the companies doing real work.
The dynamic hits differently depending on who you are. Women dealing with thinning have historically been the primary target of the category’s least honest marketing, and they’ve also had the fewest options genuinely designed for them. Men have a longer-established set of treatments but a comparable experience of inflated promises around everything adjacent to them. Both groups arrive at a new product carrying the same baggage.
Rebuilding that trust is slower and less glamorous than it sounds. Zhao’s position is that it requires companies to do things that hurt in the short term: state realistic timelines instead of aspirational ones, say clearly what a product doesn’t do, and be explicit about who it isn’t right for. Every one of those choices costs conversions. That’s precisely why so few brands make them.
RE:YOU is positioned around that bet — a biotech haircare brand rooted in molecular discovery, with the research treated as the substance of the offering rather than its packaging. More at getreyou.com.
There’s a practical consequence to the skepticism that gets overlooked. People who’ve been disappointed repeatedly tend to abandon regimens early, sometimes before any product could reasonably show a result. The distrust becomes self-confirming: they quit at week six, conclude it failed, and add another entry to the list. A category that has taught its customers to expect nothing has also taught them not to stay long enough to find out.
Zhao’s argument is that this is fixable, but only by companies willing to be boring about it. Clear expectations. Honest timelines. Evidence someone outside the company could examine.
None of that is a marketing strategy in the conventional sense. It’s closer to the opposite. Whether a market this conditioned to hype can recognize restraint as a signal of quality is something no brand can determine on its own.
