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SAN FRANCISCO — Beth Schnitzer was sipping champagne by the bar and glancing at a baseball game on the big high-definition TV. John Gartland was relaxing with a pint of beer on a black leather sofa. Kumi Walker was moving furniture around to prepare for a March Madness party later that evening.

Right next to him, Adam Kennedy was getting a really sharp haircut.

"The haircut's great, the atmosphere's great, the conversation's great, and the people hanging out here are great," said Kennedy, who joined his friend Gartland for a beer when the haircut was done.

Bar? Barbershop?

Or both?

MR. — which opened last month in San Francisco's Financial District — is an unusual startup that combines upscale men's barbering with a bar and lounge.

Conceived by two 28-year-old Stanford business school grads, MR. is not your corner clip joint. Instead of individual haircuts, it sells monthly memberships for men, like a health club. It's open until 10 p.m. for drinking and socializing by both men and women.

Co-owners Kumi Walker and Sean Heywood envision the shop as the first in a chain that will spread to cities such as Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York and Chicago.

And they benchmark themselves not against other hair salons but against giant hospitality brands such as Four Seasons hotels or Starbucks.

"If this were just about one barbershop, it would be a loss for both of us," Walker said.

"We didn't go to Stanford to own a barbershop," agreed Heywood. "We went to Stanford to learn about creating a brand."

Walker and Heywood aren't the first entrepreneurs to try an upscale, branded approach to men's grooming. The Art of Shaving opened in 1996 and today has 20 retail stores that each year sell more than $25 million of expensive shaving paraphernalia such as $250 razor-and-brush sets.

But no one has yet created the kind of large market for expensive men's haircuts that Starbucks did for expensive cups of coffee.

"This is an untapped area," said Marianne Dougherty, editor in chief of American Salon magazine. "People are still thinking about how to get men in (to salons) and how to get them to spend more money."

MR. differs from other upscale men's salons in several ways. One is its founders' backgrounds.

Rather than coming out of the beauty industry, Walker and Heywood worked at high-powered financial firms such as Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs and the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. after meeting as undergraduates at Brown University.

The two friends realized they wanted more autonomy than they could expect in corporate America. They came up with the idea of opening a barbershop — but a barbershop reinvented for the 21st century. Then they went to business school to prepare themselves.

"Whether you are Republican or Democrat, East Coast or West Coast, white, black or Latino, every individual gets a haircut," Heywood said. "We realized it's something most men are pretty underwhelmed with."

Walker and Heywood envisioned something more fashionable than Supercuts but not as female-focused as the typical hair salon.

Memberships start at $65 per month for a haircut and a follow-up trim — giving patrons an incentive to come in regularly and providing Walker and Haywood with a steady income stream.

The bar and lounge will also be key to turning a profit. So far, MR.'s bar and lounge seem to have taken off more quickly than its barbering services.