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...undisputed masters of the mustache movement are Movember, a group started in 2003 by a bet between several Australian friends who missed out on the mustache's brief golden age in the '70s and '80s, when icons like Burt Reynolds and Tom Selleck sported impressive growth above their upper lip. They laid some ground-rules - everyone started clean-shaven and had the entire month to grow the best mustache they could. They pledged to use the effort to raise funds for prostate cancer research...
...That first group included Adam Garone, now the global CEO of Movember. Garone says the men quickly realized they had stumbled upon a serendipitous pairing. Women had October and the pink ribbon to represent the fight against breast cancer - men could have November and the mustache. By the second year, Movember had 450 participants in Australia and raised $55,000 toward prostate cancer research. By 2008, Movember had more than 170,000 participants worldwide and had raised nearly $30 million for prostate and testicular cancer research...
...helps make Movember the ultimate viral campaign, dubbing the Mo Bros "walking billboards" for their cause. This allows the organization to operate on a razor-thin margin, spending next to no money on marketing. It's impressive considering the average age of the Movember participants is 31, an age group not known for being charitably inclined. "When you don't normally rock a mustache, people ask you about it and it opens up conversations," Garone says. "A large part [of our success] is through this incremental word of mouth...
...Movember will be expanding into five more countries this year, giving the group growers in 10 countries, including the U.S. That gives it a big advantage over its smaller but scrappier rival, Mustaches for Kids, which began in Los Angeles in 1998 and now has about 1,000 members across the country...
...serious case of mustache envy" for Movember's organization and scale, but thinks there's room for his organization to grow too. "It's an open-source model - I'd like us to have a toolkit where anyone who would like to do this could start a group," he says. Unlike Movember, Mustaches for Kids has 30 to 40 relatively autonomous chapters; each chooses which month to grow their mustaches in (many choose November) and takes responsibility for collecting and distributing funds raised...