Local Beard Honest Review: My Chattanooga Barber’s Lineup

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

This is my Local Beard honest review of his lineup. It’s also the story of why I’m writing about a guy who runs a small business in Chattanooga, when a more obvious move for a blog like this would be to chase whatever beard brand is trending on TikTok this week. Short version: when the guy who has been shaping your beard for four years starts selling the products he’s been recommending to you that whole time, it’s not a hard call to write about him.

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. Growing a beard is something puberty mostly handles for you. Growing a nice beard, the kind that makes people in meetings stop and say “good beard” instead of “are you alright,” is a different sport entirely. Any guy with functional follicles can stop 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 realize how much your beard does for your face shape. For the rest of us, the beard isn’t decorative. It’s structural. A round face needs the beard to add some angle and length at the chin. A wide jawline needs trimming that doesn’t make the face look wider. Get the beard wrong and you look like a different shape of person. (Same logic, different domain: I went through a chair a year before finding one that fit a bigger frame.) Get it right and people stop telling you that you should “lose a little around the face.”

Every cheap barber I’d been to before Matt treated my beard like an afterthought. They’d ask “want me to clean up the neck?” and that was the extent of the conversation. They’d trim it to whatever default length the guard on the clippers happened to be set at. Then I’d go home, look in the mirror, and realize the beard was now too short on the sides and too round at the bottom, which made my whole face look rounder. Picture a beach ball with sideburns. That was my range for a while.

Matt was the first barber I went to who started by looking at my face for a few seconds before he touched anything. Then he asked questions. How long do I want it to read at the chin. Do I want a stronger line under the cheekbone or a softer fade. Does the mustache feel like it’s getting in my way when I eat. Boring questions, but they’re the right ones, and the difference shows up in the result.

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

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

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

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

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

That is a tighter founder-to-customer loop than basically any beard brand I have ever seen.

My Local Beard Honest Review: The Products I Actually Use

I’ve been using his oil, butter, balm, wash, and conditioner. The wash and conditioner share a section below because I use them as a pair. Here’s what I think of 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 the product I reach for most. Midnight Toker is amber and sandalwood, and it’s the scent my wife actually likes. She has opinions about colognes that have grown stronger over the years, so an unprompted “that smells good” from her is not nothing. The scent is warm without being sweet, present without being aggressive. It fades down to a soft skin-level scent by mid-afternoon, which is the right curve. I do not want my beard to announce itself when I walk in a room. I want it to be a thing people notice when they get close.

For a fuller face, the oil does what you want it to do: it softens the wiry hair that tends to grow toward the corners of the jaw, which is exactly where you do not want texture sticking out. The 1 oz / 30 ml bottle lasts me longer than I expected. A few drops in the palm and worked through with fingers is plenty for 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 thing behaves more like a soft balm than a true butter: it melts on contact, goes on without flaking, and gives you a small amount of natural hold that pure butters can’t. The 2 oz tin is $18 on the site.

For a bigger guy with a fuller beard, the butter does the work the oil can’t quite finish: it gives you a small amount of hold so the beard sits the way Matt shaped it last time you were in the chair, and it adds enough weight to the hair that the volume doesn’t fluff out and add visual width to the face. This is the thing I underestimated for years. A fuller beard left to its own devices will fluff outward as it grows, which works against the angular line you want for a rounder face. The butter pulls it back in.

Beard Balm

The balm has more structure than the butter, which means stronger hold. I use it less often: probably twice a week, on the days I want the beard to read sharper, usually because I have a video call where I am not going to be the slimmest face in the gallery and want the beard doing as much shape work as possible. (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 tell these are real barber-formulated products. The hold is structured but not crunchy. There is no helmet feeling, no flake, no point in the day where you touch the beard and feel a film. It does what hold products are supposed to do and 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 is the part I did not expect to write. The Beard Wash makes my beard tingle. Not in a “did I just put pepper on my face” way. In a “this is doing something” way. It’s the same low-grade cooling tingle you’d get from a properly menthol-adjacent shampoo, and it tells you the wash is actually reaching the skin under the beard, which is the part that gets neglected the most.

I also use the wash and the conditioner on my hair, not just the beard. The conditioner is sold for beards, but it works on my head too, and my hair likes it. This is partly because I am cheap and don’t want to keep multiple bottles in the shower, and partly because the formulas are doing the same job: clean the skin, condition the hair, don’t strip the natural oils. If your shower is already crowded, the wash-and-conditioner pair can pull double duty as a head-and-beard kit.

This is the part of the lineup that surprised me the most, and 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 also on the site at their individual price tiers (which I won’t quote here because the product page is the source of truth and I don’t want to be wrong about a number I didn’t recheck five minutes before publishing).

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

Chapel Barber + Beard Supply (Chattanooga, TN)

The Bigger Reason This Post Exists

I write a lot of product reviews for this blog. Most of them are about big-name brands where I’m one of a thousand reviewers. This is the first one I’ve written about a small local business, and it’s 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 shop in Chattanooga. Now he’s back in the product business, with a brand that physically lives at the same shop. That is a level of “this person stands behind what they make” that you cannot replicate with marketing budget.

If you’re a bigger guy who’s never been able to find a barber who takes the face-shape question seriously, and you happen to be within driving range of Chattanooga, go see Matt. If you’re not in driving range but you want to support the kind of independent operation that makes a town’s main street feel like more than 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 available 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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