With the launch last month of the Azor, the “first British-designed, -engineered and -manufactured razor in a century”, the men’s grooming brand King of Shaves has moved from the “software” of lotions into the “hardware” of razors. The Azor (£4.99/$8) has, says King of Shaves, a “bonding technology”, complete with four blades (one better than Gillette’s macho-titled Mach 3), that allows pressure against the skin to be more evenly applied.
BaByliss boasts that its new I-Trim “face management tool” (£50/$82) (pictured) has 30 stubble length settings and an LED display that reveals just how much you are cutting off. Philips’ latest beard trimmer comes with an in-built vacuum cleaner, to keep that metrosexual bathroom spic and span. And next month Wahl, developers of grooming tools for NASA astronauts, will launch a lithium ion “grooming station” (£39/$65), using rechargeable battery technology borrowed from the mobile phone industry.
“Men are vain, and a few bells and whistles and good looks on a product do help sales,” says Ian Nuttall, managing director of Conair UK, owners of BaByliss. “Some brands have given a superficial gloss to make a product look new, but more are now pushing innovation.”
Great effort is invested in developing products that, as Philips’ grooming marketing manager David Hill puts it, offer “more than just extra flashing lights. The step changes for this market are few and far between – for all the slight advances, shaving is pretty much as it has been for years. But when changes come, they tend to lead to a huge uplift in sales.”
“Men are drawn to check out new technology,” says Matthew Smith, Wahl’s marketing director, “and, if they can see that advance offers more convenience – being able to rinse electric clippers under a tap, for example – they will consider buying.”
Especially in a downturn, during which improved appearance is equated with better employability. According to Philips – with Braun and Remington, one of the big three of the electrical grooming market – sales of beard trimmers are up 23 per cent year on year, with nose and ear trimmers (the latest using tubular blades or rotary cutters set inside a slotted tube to ensure safe slicing in a confined space) seeing sales up 40 per cent. The consumer electronics market researchers CFK report sales of shaving devices up 1.6 per cent year on year, from June 2008 to May 2009, representing some 1.8m extra units with a value of £86.4m; nose/ear trimmers have risen 14.6 per cent over the same period (672,000 more devices worth £4.5m).
And, if it is only occasionally that men think to trim their nostril hair or iron out the kinks, shaving is for most a daily ritual: the focus on shaving products is correspondespondingly important. Thus Philips is now working on products based on the philosophy that electric devices already offer as close a shave as they are likely to but that there is still room for them to provide a more pleasurable sensory experience, one akin to a professional wet shave.
At Gillette’s technical centre in Berkshire the company has, says communications manager Kristina Vanoosthuyze, gathered a team of physicists, polymer scientists and bio-chemists with “the sole purpose of understanding the science of shaving. We’re working at the atomic scale – the right alignment for a blade is down to half the width of a human hair, and putting that precision into a mass-market product is not easy.” To this end each year Gillette observes some 20,000 volunteers shave themselves in a bid to pick up tips.
“There is so much potential for innovation in male grooming products,” says Vanoosthuyze. “Some problems we have known about for decades – the way razor blades get clogged up, for example – but have only recently solved.”
“There has been a lot of pseudo-science in men’s grooming. But really it’s all about maximum simplicity and stream-lining,” says Tim Wright, commercial director of King of Shaves. “The Walkman used to have a nine-button graphic equalizer. Now the iPod has four buttons that do everything. We’ll see the same in male grooming: less doing more.”
