He served in the Air Force while attending college before finding work in sales and home improvement. He started his business out of personal need: He had lost most of his hair by the time he was 25, leaving him feeling insecure.

“I was really unhappy with my appearance,” he told The New York Times in 1993. “And it was destroying my self-confidence.”

With a hair weave, he told The Journal, he felt he could sleep, style his hair and go out on dates without confronting the question that comes with wearing a toupee: “How do you explain, I got to take my hair off now?”

So with about $5,000 and their credit cards, Mr. Sperling and his girlfriend at the time — a hairdresser — bought a defunct salon in Manhattan. There they developed a hair-replacement system that used a very fine nylon mesh, adhesives and hair colored to match the customer’s.

He told The Times that he wanted to remove some of the stigma around baldness.

“For years, men have felt funny even discussing it, much less trying to do something about it,” he said. “I think what I’ve done is remove some of the embarrassment associated with men wanting to improve their looks.”

The commercial that made his career first aired in 1982. It was inspired by titans of industry like Frank Perdue of Perdue Chicken and Victor Kiam of Remington Products, who started appearing in their own ads. “I said, ‘If they could do it with chickens and electric shavers, I’ll do one for hair,’” Mr. Sperling said in a 2007 documentary, “Roots: The Hair-Raising Story of a Guy Named Sy.”

But unlike those businessmen — or the executives of many corporations today — Mr. Sperling endorsed his own product with a personal appeal. “I personified the bald man who wanted to do something about his hair,” he said.