They sold out 12 cities in 90 minutes.
When the organisers of **Pints and Ponytails** — the pub-based workshop that teaches fathers to braid their daughters' hair — opened ticket sales for their first UK tour at 9am last Tuesday, the queue on the booking platform crashed three times before they'd reached 600 purchases.
By 10:30am, every date was gone.
Manchester. Birmingham. Edinburgh. Leeds. Bristol. Newcastle. Liverpool. Nottingham. Cardiff. Southampton. Belfast. Glasgow.
Twelve cities. Twelve sold-out events. And a waiting list currently sitting at more than **14,000 names**.
**What Started With 35 Dads in a London Pub**
The story began in late February, when *The Secret Lives of Dads* podcast — run by Mathew Lewis-Carter and Lawrence Price — held the first Pints and Ponytails event at a pub in London. The format was simple, deliberately unpretentious:
- A pub - 35 fathers, each with a doll's head to practise on - BraidMaidens professional instructors teaching the basics: three-strand plaits, French braids, ponytails, the specific tension and sectioning that fathers of daughters often quietly wish they knew - A cold pint - Two and a half hours
The footage from that evening was posted to Instagram Reels and TikTok. Within a week, it had accumulated **40 million views**. Comments described the room as "full of green flags." Hundreds of thousands of people tagged their dads, their partners, their brothers.
International media covered it. Three national breakfast TV shows in the UK ran segments. The BBC rang. And the requests started coming in — from parents, from pub landlords, from community groups — asking when it would come to their city.
The answer, it turns out, is now.
**The Tour**
The 12-city tour runs from April to September 2026. Each event uses the same format as the London original: a local pub, a maximum of 40 participants, BraidMaidens instructors, doll's head kits, and enough time to go from "I have no idea what I'm doing" to "I can do a French braid on an actual child."
Ticket prices are kept deliberately accessible — £35 per person, with a limited number of subsidised places allocated per event through a simple application process, so that cost isn't a barrier for families who want to come but can't easily absorb the fee.
The Edinburgh and Cardiff dates had the fastest sell-outs. The Newcastle event was gone in under four minutes.
**The International Response**
What Lewis-Carter and Price didn't expect was what came from beyond the UK.
Since the London event footage went viral, the Pints and Ponytails inbox has received messages from parents in **34 countries** — including the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Brazil, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea — asking when the concept will reach their city.
The organisers are currently in conversation with groups in New York, Sydney, and Amsterdam about licensing the format — allowing local organisers to run their own Pints and Ponytails events using the standardised curriculum, instructor materials, and the BraidMaidens teaching partnership.
"We genuinely didn't expect this," Price said in a post on the podcast's Instagram. "We thought we'd do a London thing, see if it worked, and then think about what's next. What's next appears to be the rest of the world."
**Why It Hit So Hard**
The 40 million views aren't just a number. They represent a particular hunger that the footage seemed to satisfy.
Hair care — the specific vocabulary of clips and bands and sections and tension, the weekly ritual of sitting behind a child and making something neat and beautiful from something chaotic — is a form of knowledge that moves between people, usually between women, in quiet domestic spaces. It is taught in kitchens, in front of mirrors, between mothers and daughters and aunts and older sisters.
Fathers often find themselves outside this transmission. Not excluded by design — excluded by the structure of how that knowledge has historically travelled.
Pints and Ponytails doesn't diagnose that problem. It just takes 35 men who are aware of it, puts them in a pub where they can be incompetent together without embarrassment, gives them the tools and instruction, and sends them home capable of doing something their daughters need.
That's the entire idea. It works because it's useful.
**From the Waiting List**
The 14,000 people currently on the waiting list will be offered priority booking when a second wave of UK tour dates is announced — which, given the response, is now described by organisers as "when, not if."
For those who can't wait for a local date, the Pints and Ponytails team has also launched a **free online tutorial series**, developed with BraidMaidens, covering the seven foundational braiding techniques. The series went live last weekend and has been watched more than **2 million times** in its first six days.
The link is in the bio, as they say.
And somewhere in a pub in Edinburgh, a room is being quietly booked, doll's heads are being ordered, and 40 dads who want to know how to do their daughter's hair are going to show up and find out.
*Sources: The Secret Lives of Dads podcast (Instagram, March 2026) · BraidMaidens · indy100.com · The Guardian · Good Good Good Week of March 14 2026*
