A Dublin teenager spent about €500 making a sea-salt hair spray for a school project; 6 years later his brand has grown into a €200,000 business

Gavin Hefferon was a transition year student at St Andrew's College in Dublin in 2019 when he created a sea salt spray as part of a school business project, inspired by the wind-blown hairstyles worn by surfers. The initial investment was around €500, which covered basic packaging costs. Six years later, that same spray remains the best-selling product in his company's range. Hefferon left UCD, where he had been studying sustainability alongside business and economics, after one term to focus on the business full-time, once monthly sales reached around €1,000. The company, Poseidon Hair, turned over €272,000 last year and has since expanded to more than a dozen products, with the United States as its largest market, followed by Ireland, the UK and the rest of the EU.From €500 school project to €272,000 businessAccording to the Irish Times, Hefferon's path to entrepreneurship wasn't entirely straightforward. After leaving school, he enrolled at UCD to study sustainability alongside business and economics, but university life never quite clicked. By the end of his first term, sales of the sea spray were already ticking along at around €1,000 a month, and he decided to leave his course behind and commit to Poseidon full-time. As he put it himself, "I quickly discovered I was better at sales than studying."Hefferon lined up a subcontractor to manufacture the product and secured a fulfilment centre in Northern Ireland to manage distribution, and within months sales began climbing steadily. What started as an initial outlay of roughly €500, covering little more than basic packaging, has since grown into a business that turned over €272,000 in the past year alone, with the United States now its largest market, followed by Ireland, the UK and the rest of the EU.How Hefferon built Poseidon around hair-styling educationWhat sets Poseidon apart, according to Hefferon, isn't just the products themselves but the philosophy behind them. Rather than simply handing customers a jar or bottle and leaving them to work things out, he built the brand around teaching people how to actually use it. The idea grew directly out of conversations he was having in barbershops and online, where young men kept asking the same question: how to get more volume and movement in your hair, with no clear guidance available anywhere on the market.That gap led Hefferon to start filming tutorials that broke styling techniques down step by step, then designing products specifically to match what he was teaching. The range has since expanded well beyond the original spray to include a grooming clay, texture powder, moulding cream, hairspray, shampoo and conditioner, with further additions planned for 2026. While the core customer base sits between 16 and 24 years old, the appeal has stretched beyond that age group.How social media helped Poseidon reach customersToday, Poseidon remains a lean operation, run largely by Hefferon himself from Dublin, with just one part-time marketing professional helping to manage social media and email campaigns. TikTok and Instagram continue to serve as the company's main route to customers, and Hefferon keeps up a steady rhythm of daily videos and weekly styling tutorials, along with directly answering customer questions, an approach he intends to keep going for as long as he can manage it.Hefferon is pursuing a €150,000 funding round that would allow him to hire a chief marketing officer, ramp up production and widen the company's sales channels, including a push into pharmacies and expanded retail listings beyond its current presence on Amazon and in various barber shops. He credits the New Frontiers programme at TU Tallaght, along with mentoring from the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown local enterprise office, with sharpening his understanding of his own business, though he readily admits that scaling a proven concept remains the hardest part of the journey, and the reason he's now taking an online course to build his e-commerce.Catch the latest World News and Live updates. Download the TOI app.