Salvar Bjornsson: Changing Hair Transplant and Hair Restoration Services for Better

Born in Reykjavic, the capital city of Iceland, Salvar Bjornsson’s life revolved around martial arts from a very young age. As a national-level karate champion, Salvar enjoyed traveling with the national team. However, life had other plans for him.

At a very young age, Salvar needed surgery to remove a tumor that he had developed in his lower back. Although the doctors were successful in removing the benign tumor, it put an abrupt end to Salvar’s sporting career. With a slow recovery process, he was left looking for new challenges, which eventually laid the foundation for a publishing house, a marketing agency, a boxing club, clothing stores, and a real-estate agency selling international properties.

Salvar then moved to England and pursued his master’s degree in marketing and a master’s and doctorate in business administration. This study period helped him link his business experience with academia in a much more formal way.

Treating Hairloss

Like millions of people worldwide, Salvar started experiencing hair loss at a very early age. His hairline started receding by the age of 19. As in most cases, it was a genetic thing, and most of the men in his family had the issue of going bald at a young age. During this period, he received several suggestions, and the most common advice was simply to learn to live with it. However, that was not an option for Salvar. He tried several remedies and treatments with no luck, but he kept investigating and educating himself while looking for options that could solve his problems. Later in 2005, after years of research, Salvar finally went ahead and had a hair transplant surgery to restore his receding hairline.

Armed with his personal experience, Salvar eventually founded Vinci Hair Clinic, which specializes in treating balding, hair thinning, alopecia, and scarring to the scalp from old hair transplants. The hair clinic originally started its journey with two clinics, one in Malaga, Spain, and the second in London, England. Initially, Salvar divided his time between these two locations and attracted several great physicians and technicians. At the same point of time, he also traveled the planet looking for the best products, techniques, and services to beat hair loss in any possible way.

Most Effective Treatment of Hairloss

Salvar states, “Besides hair transplants and MSP, there are also excellent non-surgical options like mesotherapy and Platelet-rich Plasma ( -PRP) that we carry out in our clinics. These treatments help stop hair loss in its tracks and can often reverse it without the need for surgical interventions.”

He explains that Follicular Unit Extraction was the game changer in hair transplant surgery. Presently considered the gold standard in hair transplant, the FUE technique first faced great resistance from the medical community and thus gained traction slowly. The initial results were not what we see today, and it was a huge learning curve for the clinic and its team to master the technique. Once mastered, the hair clinic replaced the old FUT technique with the new revolutionary FUE technique, which delivers a less invasive and simpler process with minimal scarring and realistic results.

Greatest Accomplishment and Failure

Salvar believes his greatest achievement is helping to make hair transplants and hair restoration services mainstream. He says, “We have played a major role in removing the stigma from male aesthetic treatments by showcasing our work with the world’s strongest man, together with UFC and boxing champions, alongside your average Joe. Now, having hair transplants is accepted as a “normal” procedure.”

Just before the pandemic, Vinci Hair Clinic launched an aesthetic brand, which failed to succeed. Salvar believes this was a lesson on how they can’t control many factors regardless of their planning or hard work.

Preparing for the Future

As a very client-oriented organization, everything Vinci Hair Clinic does is entirely customized for the client. There is a variety of considerations that comes into play before the hair clinic designs a long-term plan for its clients. The clinic doesn’t want to fix one problem today, just to create another one after a few years.

Presently spread across 13 nations, Vinci Hair Clinic is expanding very quickly. The hair clinic has plans to open a few new locations this year and intends to further accelerate the growth in the coming years by utilizing strategic partnerships and franchising. Salvar states, “The hair loss industry is growing at an extremely fast pace and is projected to reach USD 9,89 billion by 2026, and we are in a unique position as one of the most established clinics in the industry. What is different about us is that we have been an international clinic from day one. We started with two clinics, so the focus from day one was set on a business that could be scaled.“