The Business Behind Facial Hair
On October 31, men across the country will scrape a razor against their face one final time before plunging into November. Participants in men’s health advocacy campaigns like “Movember” and “No-Shave November” grow out their facial hair to raise money and awareness for issues like prostate cancer, testicular cancer, suicide, and other men’s issues.
Businesses across the country have made it their mission to make men well-groomed.
Gillette, the razor company, sold for $54 billion in 2005. On a smaller level, barbershops offer straight-edge shaves, while luxury shaving stores occupy malls around the country. Regardless of November trends, facial hair has become more popular and socially acceptable in the past decade or so.
Razors and shaving cream were once something every man had to purchase. Businesses have been forced to adapt. After a wide range of mergers and acquisitions and pivots, the men’s hygiene industry looks different than it did just a few years ago.
Cutting Edge Changes
In a corner shop at ritzy Scottsdale Fashion Square Mall (where you can often find Rolls Royces in the parking garages), Delton Ortiz, a salesman and straight-razor master for The Art of Shaving works through his list of customers, all of whom set appointments and pay $45 for a gentlemanly spa treatment.
The store sells luxury shaving equipment: straight razors, creams, brushes, pre-shave oil, and aftershave, some of which costs as much as $15 per ounce. Founded in 1996, The Art of Shaving filled its niche well for quite some time.
In the last several years, as facial hair became more popular and socially acceptable, they started to notice a slight decline. Ortiz says they’ve had to pivot their business model slightly to stay afloat. Rather than focusing on how to remove hair from faces, they now simply focus on the face as a whole.
Beard oil. Stubble balm. Electronic exfoliating brushes. $33-an-ounce cologne. They adapted to meet the changing culture, and have so far been successful.
Robert Lopez, the general manager of The Art of Shaving at Chandler Fashion Center says it’ll be a normal holiday season for his store - extra employees, and improved sales figures.
“I’m booked with (job) interviews” for the rest of the day, said Lopez. He’s planning to hire several temporary employees to help with an expectedly busy holiday shopping season.
Less upscale, but unequivocally more popular is the Dollar Shave Club, which sends subscribers monthly hygiene product deliveries. They started offering razors at a better price than supermarkets, delivered right to the customer’s door.
Dollar Shave Club was a hit, attracting more than two million members and being valued at more than $615 million in their first three years. They too had to shift their business model in 2015. Much like The Art of Shaving, they moved from men’s hair removal to men’s hair care, introducing shampoo products and a men’s health magazine. It worked: Unilever bought them for more than $1 billion in 2016.
Shave and a haircut...400 bits
V’s Barbershop & Shoeshine in Downtown Phoenix is the kind of place our grandfathers would get their shaves and haircuts. It emits a quintessentially masculine smell: a potpourri of shaving oil, cologne, Kiwi shoe polish...if it were 1960, you could probably add cigar smoke.
Its throwback feel isn’t just a look, though. They don’t need to adapt their business to appeal to bushy-faced millennials. In fact, the millennials adapted to V’s. Before beards became trendy, only older, wealthier men would come in for shaves, said Joe Juarez, a barber at V’s. But now that millennials are earning their own money, and growing their own beards, they’re coming in for service. Juarez says he handles about five full shaves a week, and that, surprisingly, the popularity of facial hair has actually improved his business.
“Either way, they still shave,” he said. “A lot of people come in and get it maintained more, so they either shave it or line it up.”
Many of his younger customers prefer a clean, professional appearance - while keeping their beards. They’re willing to pay for the luxury treatment they can find at V’s. And for the price they pay, Juarez doesn’t take any shortcuts. A full, straight-razor shave and haircut costs $50 (400 bits, to harken back to the old tune) at V’s.
According to their corporate statistics, they average more than 13,000 of these shaves a year, more than any other franchise-based barbershop company in the United States. That’s about $400,000 annually in shaves alone.
For a long time, the traditional barbershop was going away,” said Juarez. But when people realized they could get a more authentic and traditional experience at his shop, rather than the cookie-cutter treatment at a corporate chain, places like V’s flourished.
“We’re improving...because of millennials,” he said. No-Shave November is actually good for business, says Juarez: more people with beards means more lineups and cleanups. In fact, he regularly gives shaves to active observants of the tradition. “I have one to two regular customers with testicular cancer,” he said. They actively participate in No-Shave November and bring awareness of it to other customers.
