A Ho Chi Minh City grooming chain has done something Vietnamese service brands rarely manage: it has crossed the border and stayed there. East West Barbershop (Đông Tây Barbershop) now runs more than 130 locations across Vietnam, Thailand, China, Uzbekistan and Europe, employing over 1,000 barbers, and the company has confirmed that international franchising — not domestic unit growth — is now its primary expansion strategy.
The announcement, made on 7 September 2026, frames the move in unusually explicit terms. The brand is not simply licensing a shopfront. It is exporting a trained labour pool alongside the operating system.
Founded in Vietnam in 2018 by Nguyễn Hoài Thanh, East West Barbershop spent its first years doing the unglamorous work that makes franchising possible at all: standardising service procedures, building a training pipeline and fixing quality tolerances across a network. The brand opened its first store in China in 2024, the point at which it stopped being a domestic chain with ambitions and became a cross-border operator.
It is now listed alongside Great Clips, TONI&GUY, QB House, Jawed Habib and Yongqi Beauty & Hair among the barbershop chains operating at meaningful international scale — a peer group that, until recently, contained no Vietnamese names at all.
The core concept is deliberately over-built for a haircut. East West Barbershop stores combine grooming with a lounge environment — children’s play areas, billiards, chess, piano, green space — and extend the service menu well beyond cutting and shampooing into treatments, styling, massage, nail care, shoe cleaning and smartphone sterilisation. Dwell time and ticket size rise together.
Alongside the flagship format, the brand operates compact convenience-format shops in residential clusters and shopping centres, priced for speed and frequency. That two-format structure is what makes the network portable: a master partner can lead with the experience store in a flagship district and infill with the compact format.
“This is an opportunity for Vietnamese service brands like ours to gradually enter global markets.” — Nguyễn Hoài Thanh, Chairman
Most service franchises fail abroad on staffing, not on concept. A master franchisee signs, builds a beautiful first unit, and then discovers that the local labour market cannot supply technicians trained to the brand’s standard — and that training them from scratch takes eighteen months the business plan never budgeted for.
East West Barbershop’s answer is to move the trained operator with the system. The company supports barbers with skills certification, legal processing for overseas work and practical relocation help. For a franchise partner, that converts the single hardest variable in a personal-services rollout into something the franchisor supplies. It is closer to how technical service franchises handle certification than to how a typical salon chain licenses a brand.
It also cuts against the usual direction of travel. Vietnam is normally the destination market — the country where international brands land, as our guide to franchising in Vietnam in 2026 sets out. A Vietnamese brand exporting a system and a workforce inverts that relationship.
Vietnam has produced a small but widening group of outbound franchisors. Pho24 carried Vietnamese food formats abroad; Viva Star Coffee reached a seventh overseas market in Malaysia; Phúc Tea took HappiTea into India under a master partnership. East West Barbershop extends that pattern out of food and into personal services, which is a harder export and a more defensible one — grooming demand is recession-resilient, weekly rather than occasional, and largely immune to delivery-platform disintermediation.
For operators in the Gulf and across Southeast Asia, the interesting question is fit. Men’s grooming in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Malaysia and Indonesia is a large, culturally established, high-frequency category that is still served overwhelmingly by unbranded independents. Concepts that arrive with a training engine, a proven multi-format model and a workforce solution are the ones that consolidate fragmented categories like that.
The brand has proved the model works in five markets and across very different consumer cultures — Thailand, China, Uzbekistan and Europe are not a single playbook. That is the evidence base a serious master franchisee should be asking to see before signing anywhere.
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