Channeling your grief after the loss of a loved one into a multimillion-dollar business sounds like something out of a fairy tale, but it is the life story of Jonathan Gerow, the co-founder of Gerow Hair Ink, a scalp micropigmentation (SMP) company. He found inspiration from bereavement and, with that, built his business.

In his younger years in Rochester, New York, Gerow was interested in art and music, following in the footsteps of his parents, who were passionate about both art and music. He taught himself how to play the guitar and became an accomplished artist in school. Around that time, his mom was diagnosed with cancer. Gerow watched helplessly as cancer took a toll on her body, and she lost her hair due to chemotherapy.

“After mom passed on, I decided to get into scalp micropigmentation to find a way of helping people who lost their hair either due to chemotherapy or other reasons,” he says.

Gerow then left for Birmingham, England, to learn more about SMP. After his training, he returned to New York and partnered with Erik Roberto, a renowned barber in New York, to start Gerow Hair Ink. 

“What the SMP professionals at that time were doing was more of shading, but at Gerow Hair Ink we wanted to do something different, something that that would be more realistic and hard to differentiate from real hair,” Gerow explains.

They came up with a revolutionary and proprietary organic-based pigment to be injected into the scalp during SMP, resulting in thousands of tiny dots that resemble real hair follicles. This gives the illusion of a fuller head of hair, restoring confidence and self-esteem in clients who had lost theirs due to baldness, alopecia, scars, chemotherapy, and thinning hair.

Gerow Hair Ink’s custom SMP procedure is so popular that they hold training sessions to teach others how SMP works and how they can start their own SMP business. The trainees learn everything from the blending of the pigment to hairline design, penetration depth during the procedure, and density recreation. 

The information on the various procedures offered by Gerow Hair Ink and their training courses can be found on their website.