STOP GUESSING. START KNOWING.
THE ORIGIN STORY
I’m Kristen Barnett. I’m an East Coaster, descended from a long line of wild, male explorer types. I grew up believing the best way to live was to excel on every dimension, and competition ruled everything I did. That led me to study business and begin my career in New York at a management consulting firm. From there I moved into food tech and started a couple of companies. Then I hit rock bottom, found spirituality, and… here I am, living in California and building a tarot card publishing business. Go figure.
The type-A, blazer-wearing, straight-to-management-consulting Kristen of 2015 would probably spontaneously combust if she saw me now. She would never have guessed that my next venture would start with me reading tarot to a room of military veterans.
In November of 2024, I ended up doing exactly that. We were watching the Bills game, a normal Sunday, until it ended and my then-boyfriend, a former Black Hawk pilot turned abstract oil painter, urged me to pull out some tarot cards. It was part of his secret plan to get his best friend to open up. He'd watched me read cards with my family and seen how those conversations went, somehow both ridiculous and deep at the same time, and it stayed with him.
What happened next completely shocked me. These guys, some of whom served in Afghanistan together, had exactly the brand of stoicism you’d expect. Then they unleashed a wave of psychoanalysis and laughter, confronting each other and sharing deep truths like it was the most natural thing in the world.
The cards gave them permission. The whole thing was absurd enough to make them feel it was okay to let loose.
I went home that night and Googled “tarot cards for men.”
Nothing came up. A few Dungeons-and-Dragons-adjacent things, some stuff about the “divine masculine,” but nothing that would appeal to guys who had never pulled cards before. We’re visual creatures, and I knew the options available wouldn’t click.
So I registered the URL, grabbed the handles, and then sat on the concept of Tarot for Bros™ for a year and a half because I told myself it was too out there. I kept waiting for a better idea to come find me, but it didn’t. This was the idea.
WHY I WAS THE ONE TO BUILD IT
In New York I kept pace: I scaled multiple startups and pioneered new ideas in food and technology. For a while that was all-consuming and fulfilling.
Then, in 2022, my parents split and my own long-term relationship ended, and I could no longer push through on professional accolades alone. I had no operating system for extreme emotional upheaval, so I went searching for meaning. That search led me through astrology, YouTube tarot readers, and plant medicine, and out the other side with friends, laughter, community, and a belief that there is a bigger plan at play, even when it gets hard.
For the next few years I kept it out of sight, running two operating systems at once: polished professional on one side, quietly communing with the universe on the other. Turns out I don’t care anymore. These tools gave me real pathways for growth and healing, and I won’t dismiss them to protect my credibility.
This winter I moved to California, where people aren’t separating their inner lives from their outer ones. I’ve spent my career noticing things before they become undeniable, and what I’m noticing now is that the split between professional life and spiritual life is closing. People do the work (therapy, breathwork, even tarot) and show up to their jobs on Monday.
WOULD MEN EVEN BE INTO TAROT?
It turns out the data supported my intuition. The market for non-institutional spiritual stuff (tarot, astrology, crystals, energy work) is worth about $5.5 billion in the US, and it was built almost entirely by women, for women.
But the interesting thing is what doesn’t differ. Women are roughly twice as likely as men to say they buy into astrology or tarot. Yet when researchers ask about general existential doubt or spiritual concepts, the gender gap basically vanishes. Men are asking the same questions, but there’s been no market for them to broach the topic.
Meanwhile, men are leaving organized religion faster than anyone, and not replacing it with anything. The demand is there.
HOW IT ACTUALLY WORKS (NO FORTUNE TELLING INVOLVED)
Too many people see tarot as predicting the future, and dismiss it because they’re not a psychic. Some people do use cards to channel messages, but that’s not what this is. For me, tarot has been a way to read symbols that sharpens my intuition and my decision-making. The images evoke emotions and feelings I may not have access to just running around my life.
After a year of reading cards for men as market research, I’ve watched it do something specific to them, too. Ask a man an open-ended question about his life, and you can watch the shutters come down. Put a strange image in front of him and ask what he sees, and the floodgates open.
The card gives him something to react to instead of something to confess.
There’s a name for the mechanism underneath this. Psychologists call it Solomon’s Paradox: we’re all dramatically wiser about other people’s problems than our own. Put a little distance between a man and the thing he’s tangled in, and the wisdom has space to find him. I call it stepping into the observer role. I first ran into it through meditation: watching what comes up instead of reacting to it. A card pull is that, supercharged. The thing gets set on the table where he can finally see it.
This is not fortune telling. This is a field guide for the inner life, built for clarity, courage, and self-mastery.
THE ART & THE ARTIST
A tarot deck is, fundamentally, an art project. The art was never a decorative afterthought. It was the first real business decision, because the entire premise of the company lives or dies on it.
For a long time, the look of “spiritual” has kept people out of the room: the purple tapestries, the cosmic watercolors, the melting psychedelic type. It kept me out of those rooms for years. So we built something else. I spent hours meandering through antique stores on a road trip across America, collecting vintage military manuals, old Boy Scout guidebooks, and farmers’ almanacs, the visual language of things men have always trusted and used.
We call the result Esoteric Americana. Engraved, utilitarian, unmistakably American. To serve a new audience, you need a new aesthetic.
Of course, none of this works without the right hands on it. The deck is illustrated by hand, all 78 cards, by Parker S. Jackson, a former art director (Fox ADHD, later Giphy) whose credits include Jordan Peele’s Nope. He came to me through a brilliant creative director, Dersu Rhodes, and the whole thing was almost suspiciously serendipitous.
OUR MISSION
Our mission is to give men a tool to do the deep spiritual work, and to make spirituality accessible, fun, and creatively rich.
We hope it starts deep conversations, meaningful insights, and better decision-making, so that we can all build lives we love.
THE SHOP
The Standard Issue Deck
$33
78 cards and an instructional guidebook. Bro-code friendly. No incense or nonsense. Pre-orders ship December 4–11, 2026.
Tarot for Bros™ LLC is a Highest Good Ventures portfolio company.