About Our Barbershop

Established in 2009, Bolt creates community by providing dudes a third place (after highly defined roles played at home and work/school) to hang and just be themselves. Bolt’s fun loving monkey business is perhaps best portrayed through “People Hate Us on Yelp”, our social media campaign which features excerpts from Bolt’s own worst reviews as advertising fodder. Previously, Mohawk spent 25 years chasing cheese around the corporate world in high responsibility/low authority marketing and general management positions with Procter & Gamble, Coty, Novartis, and Royal Numico. Mohawk is a Wharton AMP Alumni, serves on the Yelp Small Business Advisory Council, and speaks occasionally at USC’s Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies about Entrepreneurial-ism..

Mohawk’s love for the barbershop started at age 15. Mohawk enjoyed cutting his own and friends hair and also spending time in barbershops. An extension of his own social circle, the barbershop was a place he could always go just to hang out and be himself, without the often constraining definitions of role carried from home and work/school. As Mohawk inched up the corporate ladder in a marketing and management career with big consumer goods companies, he took on more and more responsibility, but less and less authority. He was posted in exotic locales including Paris, Lisbon, Warsaw, & Amsterdam, and got fired about every 18 months forcing him to move often as the cheese was moved for him. As his career progressed without fulfillment, his happiness deteriorated. Mohawk craved the entrepreneurial risks of a start-up, finally taking the “plunge” in January, 2008 when his employer (Royal Numico Baby Food) was purchased by Danone. Mohawk chose to stay close to his career experience in his first entrepreneurial endeavor, leveraging his recent global baby food experience as Chief Marketing Officer by investing in a small Culver City based Organic Baby Food Start Up.

That experience, although unsuccessful, proved life changing. Mohawk realized he needed to run his own show, not invest in another show. He also realized it was time to stop ignoring a burning desire he had had since his early corporate days at P&G to open a barbershop. With the economy spiraling and the baby food start up out of cash, Mohawk decided it was time to start running towards his 30 year passion of barbering, instead of running away from it.

Mohawk enrolled at The Real Barbers College in Anaheim in August 2008 to obtain the training required to open his first barbershop. Besides his role as Founder & Spokesperson for BOLT BARBERS, Mohawk Matt takes an active barbering role as Chief Barber.