How Gillette Embraced the Beard to Win Over Scruffy Millennials
Photographer: Breakfast for Dinner for Bloomberg Businessweek
By Thomas Buckley, Published on May 13, 2022
Our work for Gillette was featured in Bloomberg. Check it out here if you missed it:
“At 7 a.m., five days a week, about 70 men badge into an industrial complex in Reading, on the western outskirts of London. A technician leads them down a hallway to cubicles, where they shave in front of mirrors mounted with high-definition cameras.
On the other side of the mirrors, Gillette’s team of blade sommeliers—trained to describe the smoothness of the glide, the stubbornness of the stubble, the pace at which the foam rinses off, and the sound the steel makes when it guillotines hair—debate the effectiveness of razors in development. If they want a closer look at the coarseness of a shaver’s hair or the exact angle at which it bolts from the follicle, a microscope can produce a 3D rendering of each whisker accurate to 5 micrometers. It’s the only instrument of its kind, and it took the company five years to develop with a military contractor that also designs simulators for fighter pilots.
“You’re really working out the mechanical aspect of just removing the hair, but you’re also looking at where the follicle, hair, skin, and sebum are all coming together,” says Joia Spooner-Fleming, a vice president for research and development at Procter & Gamble Co., which owns Gillette. “It’s kind of like Jerusalem.”
The Reading complex, a grid of white corridors that lead to fiefdoms such as Lubrication or Face Imaging, is where Gillette plots the future of manscaping. Its razors are used in about 1 billion shaves every morning, making Gillette by far the biggest brand in the $56 billion global male grooming industry. But the facility is also a reminder of better times.
Gillette’s longtime slogan was that its shaving products were “the best a man can get.” But this supposed the brand was selling something a man wants. And that’s been less the case for a new generation of men who don’t see being cleanshaven as a masculine ideal and who have cheaper alternatives when they want to address their stubble. Worldwide, more than half of men now sport beards, including two-thirds of millennial men, says Gary Coombe, chief executive officer of P&G’s grooming arm. “The truth is, my father has a beard and my son has a beard, and here I am running the world’s biggest shaving company,” he says. “It’s an embarrassment.”
Reimagining Gillette for the modern man is one of the toughest challenges in the consumer-goods industry
Through most of the past decade, Gillette’s approach to this phenomenon was to wait it out. Despite P&G’s scale, which offers unparalleled insights into consumer behavior, the groupthink among marketers at its grooming division was that facial hair would be a short-lived trend. That stoicism proved catastrophic. Gillette was selling an aging line of products to a shrinking audience instead of innovating in lockstep with the lumberjack-chic look prevailing among actors, athletes, musicians, cover models, online influencers, baristas, bartenders, and, oh, almost any man from Shoreditch in London to Silver Lake in Los Angeles regardless of how the crow flies.
To offset the dwindling sales of blades and razors, Gillette raised prices, which padded its balance sheet but alienated consumers. Men flocked to cheaper alternatives with more millennial sensibilities, such as Dollar Shave Club Inc. and Harry’s Inc., which thrived in part thanks to their subscription-based business models.
In 2019, with Gillette’s revenue cratering, P&G wrote down the value of the brand by $8 billion. A pandemic during which adults have questioned the need to wear pants on Zoom calls, let alone worry about a 5 o’clock shadow, hasn’t helped things.
Today, Gillette is trying to attract younger consumers with a two-pronged approach. In 2020 it rolled out a line of face washes, shave gels, combs, waxes, oils, and beard-friendly razors named for founder King C. Gillette. The products are a major strategic shift for a company previously known for rebuking unshaven employees, criticizing bearded visitors at its Boston headquarters, and demonizing facial hair as an unemployable character trait in ads.
At the same time the company wants to make shaving cool again. It’s designing futuristic razors at the Reading site aimed at affluent men under its new GilletteLabs line. This includes a $170 lightsaber-esque number with a heated blade to mimic the feeling of a hot towel—a limited edition collaboration with Bugatti, the luxury carmaker. (“The high-end razor fully embodies Bugatti’s philosophy of quality, precision, and power,” Bugatti’s website reads.) Another GilletteLabs invention, introduced earlier this year, exfoliates while it shaves.
Reimagining Gillette for the modern man is one of the toughest challenges in the consumer-goods industry. In the past companies of P&G’s size simply would have swallowed up disrupters. But a millennial predilection for small-batch brands over mass-market products of the boomer age and regulatory concerns about sprawling footprints are seeing the old guard increasingly forced to compete with the new. In 2020 the Federal Trade Commission blocked Edgewell Personal Care Co.—the world’s second-largest shaving company, with brands such as Schick and Wilkinson Sword—from buying Harry’s. And last year P&G reversed course on acquiring Billie, a razor startup focused on women, after the FTC sued to stop the deal.
“To survive, big brands now have to build that niche in-house, cultivate a loyal consumer base, and provide value in a way they haven’t before,” says Gaurav Kalwani, a beauty and personal-care analyst for Euromonitor International Ltd., a market research company. “The success of King C. Gillette and GilletteLabs will be a litmus test of whether that’s possible.”
In 1901, Wisconsin bottle cap salesman King Camp Gillette founded American Safety Razor Co. Back then, shaving was a ritual at a local barber or performed at home with a straight razor that required regular stropping. Although his disposable blades, introduced in 1903, proved popular for their convenience, Gillette’s major break came in 1918: Sales tripled after Uncle Sam contracted with the company, by then renamed Gillette Safety Razor Co., to issue shaving kits to soldiers and sailors fighting in World War I. King Camp lost control of Gillette in 1930 when it was revealed that he’d overstated profits during a proposed merger with a rival, AutoStrop. AutoStrop proceeded with the deal in exchange for a controlling interest in the company, which retained its founder’s name.
During the Great Depression, Gillette seized on the crisis with an ad depicting a bestubbled man somberly telling his wife that he didn’t land the job. “The slightest growth of stubble is a handicap,” the ad read. “Of course you can’t shave your way to independence, but a fresh, immaculate appearance will help.” Around this time, the quality of Gillette’s products waned, letting competitors such as Schick catch up. But Gillette got a boost during World War II, when the US War Production Board ordered it to dedicate all razor and most blade production to supplying the armed forces. According to Gordon McKibben’s book Cutting Edge: Gillette’s Journey to Global Leadership, the company also made copies of German razor blades for Army secret agents venturing behind enemy lines so their equipment wouldn’t compromise their identity.
By 1961, Gillette produced 7 out of every 10 blades sold globally. They were mostly made of carbon steel, but then UK rival Wilkinson Sword introduced a stainless-steel blade, which was marketed as staying sharp three times longer. This caught Gillette by surprise and thus began one of the greatest consumer-product arms races of all time. Gillette came up with a copycat stainless-steel product. Soon after, France’s Société Bic SA released the first disposable razor. Gillette matched with a disposable of its own. In 1964 it had a stunning engineering breakthrough, by toiletry standards anyway: A Gillette researcher experimenting with parallel blades discovered the hysteresis effect. This happens as the first blade pulls up a hair from a follicle before cutting it and the second blade cuts the hair even shorter before it retracts.
Gillette introduced the first twin-blade razor, the Trac II, to great fanfare. In 1975, Saturday Night Live parodied it in an ad for a triple-blade razor, the Triple-Trac, with the slogan “Because you’ll believe anything.” Of course, a triple-blade razor became a reality in 1998 when Gillette introduced the Mach3 after spending five years and $750 million on stealth development. Backed by 50 patents and a $300 million television ad campaign featuring fighter jets breaking the sound barrier, the Mach3 became the best-selling razor in North America and Europe six months after it went on sale. MadTV spoofed it in an ad for a razor with 20 blades (“the 8th blade sends an electronic pulse to the center of the brain, which destroys the part of the brain responsible for hair growth and four other non-essential functions”).
Not to be outdone, Schick soon introduced the four-blade Quattro. Gillette mounted a legal battle against Schick, alleging that the razor stole Gillette’s patented “progressive blade geometry.” The companies eventually reached a settlement for an undisclosed sum.
In 2005, P&G announced it was acquiring Gillette for $57 billion. It was a controversial deal that many outsiders viewed as a get-rich-quick ploy executed by Gillette management at the expense of shareholders, some of whom unsuccessfully campaigned for a higher price. Not long before the acquisition announcement, the Onion had poked fun at Gillette with an article headlined, “F--- Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades.” On cue, in 2006, Gillette once again spat parody in the face and introduced an actual five-blade razor, the Fusion. By 2008 it reached $1 billion in sales, faster than any P&G product ever had. By 2010 the Fusion had become the world’s best-selling razor. That year, Bob McDonald, then P&G’s CEO, boasted to investors that he couldn’t manufacture Fusion ProGlide blades (a thinner update to the original) fast enough to meet demand. But tastes were changing.
In January 2010, New York magazine ran an obituary for actor Jon Hamm’s beard, which he’d shaved off between roles, attributing its demise to “America’s general uncomfortableness with facial hair.” But America seemed to get over it. Ben Affleck, George Clooney, Jason Derulo, James Harden, Kit Harington, LeBron James, Jared Leto, Dev Patel, Joaquin Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, Paul Rudd, and many other famous men proudly wore beards. Lloyd Blankfein, then CEO of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., even brought the beard to Wall Street, despite his decision to grow one fueling speculation that he was close to leaving the job.
Gillette executives were in disbelief. The brand, a major sponsor of pro sports, watched as players it paid to advertise its razors began growing beards—including David Beckham, Roger Federer, and Alex Ovechkin, none of whom Gillette had thought to legally bind to staying cleanshaven. To deal with the fallout, the company invited media to headquarters for ceremonial postseason shaves with athletes such as quarterback Tom Brady. (Some pro athletes don’t shave during the playoffs, lest they jinx their championship run.) Coombe, who at the time ran P&G’s European division, says the thinking behind the stunt was that maybe it would help “the psyche of the population” change. It did not.
Sales of the Fusion ProGlide deteriorated and with it the strategy of hooking more blades to razors and raising prices. In the early 2010s much of the progress in the shaving business came from upstarts. Dollar Shave Club undercut prices and built customer loyalty with a $1-per-month subscription model. In an ad, co-founder Michael Dubin questioned why men would spend $20 a month on razors for $19 of it to go to Federer and asked if razors needed “a vibrating handle, a flashlight, a backscratcher, and 10 blades.” Paul Polman, who spent 27 years at P&G before becoming CEO of Unilever Plc, bought Dollar Shave Club for $1 billion in 2016 in a challenge to his former employer’s stranglehold on the industry.
Gillette’s response to all of this was to sue. First it sued Harry’s, claiming patent infringement. (The case was dismissed within a week.) Then it brought a case against Shavelogic Inc., a company co-founded by former Gillette executives, claiming theft of trade secrets. (That one was also dismissed.) And then it sued Dollar Shave Club, also claiming patent infringement. (An undisclosed settlement was reached.) None of these disputes addressed complaints that Gillette’s products were simply too expensive, and a Gillette Shave Club subscription service failed to attract many sign-ups. In a blog post in 2017, amid languishing sales, Gillette apologized to its customers for the high cost of its blades and ultimately cut prices.
Nelson Peltz, the goateed billionaire investor and founder of activist hedge fund Trian Fund Management LP, was incensed at Gillette’s weak response. He built a $3.5 billion stake in P&G and won a seat on the board. “I spoke to a lot of the ex-Gillette guys, and you know what they said? If Dollar Shave Club and Larry’s or Harry’s or whoever the other guy is were around when they were running Gillette, they would have put a group of them together, 5 or 10 guys in a room, and said, ‘How do we put these guys out of business now?’ ” Peltz said on CNBC after disclosing his investment. “That’s what should have happened years ago. Didn’t happen.”
When Coombe took over in 2018, Gillette’s strategists were still brainstorming how to persuade men to shave again—or, worse, trying to convince themselves that facial hair was merely a fad. P&G wrote down the value of Gillette, and Coombe began plotting a new course: The company would be inclusive of facial hair for the first time. “I mean, who could defend the position of saying we’ve got to keep doing what we’re doing?” Coombe says. “Because it wasn’t working.”
Even as the pandemic upended grooming habits, total sales of King C. Gillette have reached $200 million
About 100 days after Coombe was put in charge, he had a talk with top managers about the future. It was absurd, some said, for Gillette to alienate affluent, urban, millennial men, many of whom now resembled Gillette’s mustachioed founder. King Camp’s lip hair would’ve needed combing, waxing, and styling. Who better to help with that?
Many of Coombe’s marketers said the strategy wouldn’t work given the values the brand traditionally had stood for. “You don’t have to go back many years in Gillette’s history when, if you came to the world shaving headquarters in Boston, and you were a supplier, advertising agency, or whoever you might be, even a reporter, and you came with a beard, you would not be welcome,” Coombe says. But after surveying its target demographic, Gillette realized that its puritanical image was an internal construct. Many of the younger men it interviewed had never heard of the brand. And so the secret development of a line of grooming products began.
It started with P&G trying to define modern-day masculinity. The company noted in marketing research that “men have been wearing beards—long, flowing numbers—for a lot longer than they haven’t been. Famous and powerful men, even gods, were rarely depicted without them.” It also analyzed changes in gender fluidity, dating culture, and how shifts in men’s and women’s roles at home and in the workplace had obscured the divide between the sexes.
Who’s behind the beard? (From left, top) Brad Pitt, James Harden, Jon Hamm, Jason Derulo, Justin Trudeau. (middle) Idris Elba, Riz Ahmed, David Beckham, Lloyd Blankfein, Keanu Reeves. (bottom) Andrew Garfield, Jake Gyllenhaal, Dev Patel, George Clooney, Zac Efron.
How to capture social evolution in, say, a beard oil, required focus grouping. According to an internal P&G presentation, the products could “no longer rely on your father’s—or grandfather’s—bergamot, oakmoss, and geranium fougère.” The conclusion was that the scents needed to be “a celebration of male luxury,” says Zerlina Dubois, a perfumer who’s worked for P&G for more than three decades. Dubois describes male luxury as part smell, part scene: “Dark wood, images of a mahogany library lit in one corner by a ray of sunlight. Bring in a teak tray, spread upon it a few leaves of rich tobacco, add vanilla bourbon, set out a bit of patchouli oil, balance the dark with pictures of a breeze next to handfuls of fresh lavender, ginger for effervescence, caramel for mouthwatering indulgence.”
One of Gillette’s key findings was that men with facial hair still shave. The team worked on a razor engineered to target the neckline, which has two blades divided by a soft bridge that Gillette says reduces ingrown hairs. “Probably about 1% of the population never shaves, and you can see those guys—they don’t look like everybody else,” says Randall Lemoine, a vice president in the grooming division who led the development of what would eventually be called the King C. Gillette line of products.
Lemoine, Coombe, and other executives tried the razor, as well as the balms and oils, on themselves after letting their beards grow out. “It turned out to be one of the most powerful communications of a new strategy that I’d ever done,” Coombe says. “You can stand up there with a PowerPoint slide and talk about it. But walk through the world shaving headquarters with a beard, and you’re the CEO? People notice.”
The products hit the market in 2020 with vintage-looking navy and copper branding that recalls the colors the company used at its founding. They’ve been a huge hit: Even as the pandemic upended grooming habits, total sales have reached $200 million. According to the company, about a third of all facial-hair-care products sold in Europe are now King C. Gillette, and it’s selling well in Asia and the Middle East, too. The line is still new, says Euromonitor’s Kalwani, “so it might be a little soon to tell” whether customers will be loyal, but the sleek packaging has effectively promoted a sense of sophistication, he adds.
King C. Gillette helped P&G’s grooming division increase revenue by 6%, to $6.4 billion, in 2021 from the previous year and end almost a decade of annual declines. Other successes supported the turnaround, including sales of Braun electric shavers and Gillette’s Venus line for women. A Venus razor introduced last summer that has blades to prevent irritation while shaving pubic hair proved so successful that P&G couldn’t manufacture it fast enough to meet demand. Ads for the razor were released on Instagram and YouTube with a song that includes the line “There’s nothing diabolical about this little follicle.”
Still, for all the success of the new combs, oils, emollients, and waxes, nothing would benefit Gillette more than men returning to a cleanshaven look. Selling razors and replacement blades provides a more solid long-term boost to the bottom line than selling the occasional tin of wax to a hipster millennial styling his mustache.
To that end, the aim of GilletteLabs is to revive the shaving routine by associating it with scientific breakthroughs, premium components, and a lot of neon marketing. “I think it’s their way of saying, ‘We’re constantly innovating,’ ” says Andrea Ferdinando Leggieri, who tracks grooming trends for Bloomberg Intelligence. “It’s about stepping up the shaving experience for those who can afford it.” Gillette introduced the first Labs product, a $150, non-Bugatti-branded version of that heated razor, at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show. Some online reviews call it a game changer. Others note the effect could be replicated by running a blade under hot water.
In February the company ran a Super Bowl ad for the first time in 16 years to introduce a new five-blade razor from GilletteLabs. It has an exfoliating bar to remove dirt and debris, so the proposition is that men won’t need to wash before lathering. The ad featured a cleanshaven actor, and Gillette set up an outdoor roller rink in Santa Monica, Calif.—roughly a half-hour’s drive from SoFi Stadium, where the game was being played—saying in social media posts that it was “bringing to life the smooth, quick, and easy experience” of its new razor with the help of roller-skating influencers. (Yes, there are roller-skating influencers.) The $20 gunmetal gray handle comes with a magnetic stand and has a lifetime guarantee. A refill pack of four GilletteLabs blades costs $25, the most expensive of any currently on the market. One P&G executive promised a UK trade publication that it will be “the last razor you’ll ever need.” —With Devin Leonard and Gerald Porter Jr.”
