Local Beard Honest Review: My Chattanooga Barber’s Lineup

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For a bigger guy, the beard is structural. It is load-bearing face work. The right one adds angle where your face wants to go round, and the wrong one turns you into a beach ball with sideburns. I know this because I spent years on the wrong side of it before I ever sat in Matt Patty’s chair.

That was 2022. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d walked into Chapel Barber the same year Matt sold his first beard company. Four years of beard maintenance later, he’s back at it. The brand is called Local Beard, the products sit on a shelf at the shop and online at localbeard.com, and I’ve been using them.

So this is my Local Beard honest review of his lineup. It’s also the story of why I’d write about a guy running a small business in Chattanooga instead of chasing whatever beard brand is trending on TikTok this week. Short version: when the man who has been shaping your beard for four years starts selling the products he’s been recommending that whole time, writing about him is not a hard call.

Disclosure: I am not getting paid, comped, or otherwise compensated for this post. Matt is my barber. I pay full price for haircuts at Chapel Barber and full price for the Local Beard products I’ve bought. I’m writing this because the products work and the shop is worth knowing about.

Why does it matter who cuts your beard?

Here’s the thing nobody tells you. Puberty handles growing a beard. Growing a nice one, the kind that gets you a “good beard” in a meeting instead of “are you alright,” is a different sport. Any guy with functional follicles can quit shaving for six weeks and call himself bearded. Growing one that looks intentional takes shape work, maintenance, and a barber who actually has an opinion about your face.

If you’re not a bigger guy, you might not clock how much the beard does for your face shape. For the rest of us it isn’t decorative, it’s framing. A round face needs the beard to add some angle and length at the chin. A wide jaw needs trimming that doesn’t pull the whole thing wider. Get it wrong and you read as a different shape of person. (Same logic, different domain: I burned through a chair a year before I found one built for a bigger frame.) Get it right and people quit suggesting you “lose a little around the face.”

Every cheap barber I went to before Matt treated the beard as an afterthought. “Want me to clean up the neck?” was the whole conversation. They’d trim to whatever length the guard happened to be set at, and I’d get home, look in the mirror, and find the beard now too short on the sides and too round at the bottom. Which made my face rounder. That was my range for a while.

Matt was the first one who looked at my face for a few seconds before he picked anything up. Then he asked questions. How long do I want it reading at the chin. Stronger line under the cheekbone, or a softer fade. Is the mustache getting in my way when I eat. Boring questions. But they’re the right ones, and the result shows it.

Meet Matt: 17 Years Cutting Hair, Now Back in Product

Here’s the part I didn’t know until I started this post and asked around.

Matt has been cutting hair for 17 years. In 2017 he founded Chattanooga Beard Co., a small grooming brand that ran about five years and landed on local TV (NewsChannel 9 covered them in “Made In Our Hometown”). In 2022 he sold it and opened Chapel Barber + Beard Supply, the shop I started going to that same year.

For a while after the sale, Matt was barber-only. The product side was somebody else’s problem.

Now he’s back with Local Beard, alongside a few partners. It’s a unified brand built on Matt’s original formulas, sold most visibly at the shop where he cuts beards all day, every day, mine included. The recipes have been refined over almost a decade. The man behind them watches them work on real customers, in real time.

That’s a tighter founder-to-customer loop than basically any beard brand I’ve ever seen.

My Local Beard Review: The Products I Actually Use

I’ve been running his oil, butter, balm, wash, and conditioner. The wash and conditioner share a section below because I use them as a pair. Here’s where I land on each.

Local Beard Midnight Toker beard oil (1 oz) and beard butter (2 oz) on a granite bathroom counter

Beard Oil (Midnight Toker, 1 oz)

The oil is what I reach for most. Midnight Toker is amber and sandalwood, and it’s the scent my wife actually likes. Her opinions on cologne have only sharpened over the years, so an unprompted “that smells good” from her is not nothing. It’s warm without being sweet, present without being aggressive, and it fades to a soft skin-level scent by mid-afternoon. That’s the right curve. I don’t want my beard announcing itself when I walk into a room. I want it to be a thing people notice when they get close.

For a fuller face, the oil does the job: it softens the wiry hair that pushes out toward the corners of the jaw, which is exactly where you don’t want texture sticking out. The 1 oz / 30 ml bottle lasts longer than I expected. A few drops in the palm, worked through with your fingers, covers a full beard.

Beard Butter (Midnight Toker, 2 oz)

The butter is shea and mango butter based, with beeswax, sweet almond, avocado, castor, and coconut oils worked in. The beeswax is the tell. It’s why this behaves more like a soft balm than a true butter: it melts on contact, goes on without flaking, and gives you a little natural hold that pure butters can’t. The 2 oz tin runs $18 on the site.

For a bigger guy with a fuller beard, the butter finishes what the oil can’t. A bit of hold, so the beard sits the way Matt shaped it last time I was in the chair, and enough weight that the volume doesn’t fluff out and add visual width to the face. I underestimated this for years, if I’m being honest. A fuller beard left alone fluffs outward as it grows, which fights the angular line you want on a rounder face. The butter pulls it back in.

Beard Balm

The balm has more structure than the butter, so stronger hold. I use it less. Maybe twice a week, on days I want the beard reading sharper, usually before a video call where I won’t be the slimmest face in the gallery and I want the beard doing as much shape work as it can. (See: working from home, the WFH ergonomics rules I do follow, and the parts of WFH life that have nothing to do with chairs.)

The balm is also where you can feel these are real barber-formulated products. The hold is structured but not crunchy. No helmet, no flake, no point in the day where you touch the beard and feel a film. It does the hold-product job, then it gets out of the way.

Beard Wash and Beard Conditioner: the surprise of the lineup

Local Beard Beard Wash and Beard Conditioner bottles in a shower caddy

Here’s the part I didn’t expect to write. The Beard Wash makes my beard tingle. Not a “did I just rub pepper on my face” tingle. A “this is doing something” tingle. It’s that low-grade cooling you get from a properly menthol-adjacent shampoo, and it tells you the wash is actually reaching the skin under the beard, which is the spot that gets neglected most.

Now, am I supposed to use beard products on my head? Probably not. I do it anyway. I run the wash and the conditioner on my hair too. The conditioner is sold for beards, but my hair likes it fine. Part of that is I’m cheap and don’t want a shower full of bottles, and part of it is that the formulas are doing the same work either way: clean the skin, condition the hair, don’t strip the natural oils. If your shower is already crowded, the wash-and-conditioner pair pulls double duty as a head-and-beard kit.

This was the biggest surprise of the lineup, and it’s the pair I’d point a first-time Local Beard customer toward.

Pricing and Where to Get It

Free shipping at localbeard.com on orders over $49. The beard butter is $18 for the 2 oz tin per the brand’s site. The oil, balm, wash, and conditioner are on the site at their own price tiers, which I’m not going to quote here. The product page is the source of truth, and I’d rather not be wrong about a number I didn’t recheck five minutes before publishing.

If you’re around Chattanooga, the products are on the shelf at Chapel Barber + Beard Supply, which is the more interesting move anyway. You get the products and you get to ask Matt or one of the other barbers what they’d recommend for your face shape. Worth the trip.

Chapel Barber + Beard Supply (Chattanooga, TN)

The Bigger Reason This Post Exists

I write a lot of product reviews here. Most are about big-name brands where I’m one of a thousand voices. This is the first one I’ve written about a small local business, and it was the easiest one I’ve written all year, because the story behind the products is the kind of thing a national brand can’t fake.

Matt has been formulating these recipes since 2017. He sold the first version of the company and stuck with the work he actually wants to do, which is cutting hair and shaping beards face by face in a small Chattanooga shop. Now he’s back in product, with a brand that physically lives at the same shop. That’s a level of “this person stands behind what they make” you can’t buy with a marketing budget.

If you’re a bigger guy who’s never found a barber that takes the face-shape question seriously, and you’re within driving range of Chattanooga, go see Matt. If you’re not in range but you want to back the kind of independent operation that keeps a town’s main street from turning into chain-store filler, the products are at localbeard.com.

I’m not your barber. But mine just started another beard company, and I think you should know about it.

Have you found a barber who actually understands your face shape, or are you still cycling through whoever’s open at the chain place? Drop your story in the comments. If you’ve already tried Local Beard, tell me your scent.

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