Mountaineer Brand: American Made Beard, Body and Bald Head Care
Go grab whatever bottle is sitting in your shower right now and flip it over. We will wait.
Chances are you cannot pronounce half the ingredient list, and the fine print at the bottom points somewhere a very long flight away. That is just the normal state of the personal care aisle, and it is exactly the thing Mountaineer Brand set out to fix from a kitchen in West Virginia back in 2013.
It started with a fall beard and a tight budget
Eric Young is a West Virginia native and a father of three. In 2013 he did what a lot of guys do when the weather turns: he stopped shaving and let a fall beard come in.
Then he went looking for something to keep it from feeling like a scouring pad. What he found were tiny bottles with big prices, and he could not make the math work as a dad with three kids. So he did the West Virginia thing and figured out how to make it himself, using nothing but natural ingredients.
Friends started asking what he was putting on his face. He started mixing small batches for them. Word kept traveling, and pretty soon a favor for buddies had turned into a company.
Then it got personal
There is a heavier chapter in this story, and it is the one that explains why the ingredient list matters so much to this company.
Eric lost his first wife to cancer. That kind of loss makes a person start reading labels, and once he started reading he could not stop noticing how many synthetic chemicals we rub into our skin every single morning without a second thought.
His own words on it are about as plain as it gets:
I made it my mission to create safe, all-natural alternatives that people could trust.
That is not marketing copy bolted on after the fact. That is the reason the company exists.
Made in Martinsburg, West Virginia
Here is where Mountaineer Brand separates itself from a whole lot of brands that talk a good game about natural grooming.
They actually make the stuff. In house. In Martinsburg, West Virginia.
No white label supplier overseas, no mystery contract manufacturer filling bottles with someone else's formula and slapping a mountain logo on the front. The batches are mixed fresh, daily, by people in West Virginia, because the company is small enough and stubborn enough to keep it that way. You are not buying inventory that sat on a pallet in a warehouse for eight months.
Eric built the line as a nod to what West Virginians have always done well. This is a state with a long history of blacksmithing, moonshining, and passing down home remedies that worked long before anybody put them in a bottle. Mountaineer Brand is that tradition with a proper label on it.
Thirteen years and more than 150,000 customers later, the formula for the business has not changed much either.
Beard care that actually earns the shelf space
The beard line is still the heart of the operation, and it covers the whole routine rather than just selling you oil and wishing you luck.
- Natural Beard Oil at $16.99, the one that started everything
- Natural Beard Wash at $18.99, because regular shampoo strips a beard raw
- Natural Beard Conditioner at $18.99
- Beard Balm and a styling balm stick for taming the parts that want to go sideways
- Mustache Wax at $16.99
- Cactus bristle brushes and wooden combs, if you want to do the job right
They also bundle it. The beard kits run from a starter set up to the full arsenal, which is a friendlier way to buy in than guessing your way through six separate products.
The scents are the fun part
This is where the West Virginia thing really shows up. No "Ocean Breeze." No "Cool Blue Sport." Just honest combinations that smell like a place:
- Smokey Bourbon with bourbon, cypress and tobacco
- Timber with cedar, fir and eucalyptus
- Appalachia with orange, grapefruit and clove
- Mountain Fresh with mint, sage and patchouli
- Tundra with lime, sage and bergamot
- White Water with mint, cedar and musk
- Pine Tar for the traditionalists
- Bare for anybody who wants zero scent at all
The smart move is that the scents run across the whole catalog, so your soap, deodorant and beard oil can all agree with each other instead of fighting in a cloud around your head.
Body care and bald head care too
If you do not have a beard, they did not forget about you.
The body care line covers natural deodorant at $12.59, bar soap at $9.99, body wash at $14.99, body spray, lip balm, hand salve, and a muscle rub for the days your body files a complaint.
Then there is the bald head care line, which is a genuinely uncommon thing to find. A cleanser, an exfoliator, a moisturizer, a pH balancing toner, a detox mask, and a pre shave oil, most of it right around $14.99. A shaved head is exposed skin that catches sun, wind and razor burn all day long, and almost nobody makes products for it. These folks do.
The part your wallet will like
Nothing here costs what boutique grooming brands usually charge. Sixteen dollars for beard oil made by hand in West Virginia is a fair deal by any measure, and their stated goal has always been the finest all natural grooming products at a fair price. They back it with a no questions asked return policy, which is easy to offer when you actually trust what came out of your own mixing room.
We have written about American made grooming before, including Ozark Beard Company in Arkansas and Olde Country Soap in South Dakota, and we will keep doing it. Small domestic makers own this category in a way they do not own many others, and it is one of the easiest places to swap an import for something made by your neighbors.
So next time the beard oil runs dry or the deodorant gets down to that sad little nub, take a look at Mountaineer Brand first. You will get a better product, a shorter ingredient list, and a paycheck that stays in Martinsburg, West Virginia.
Just another great reason to buy American!