22 MEN’S GROOMING


Concepts for new men’s grooming products


Colin Sanders - Colin’s Cosmetic Consultancy, UK


I started my career in the cosmetic industry in 1983. A few days in I got my first project, which was to reformulate a shaving stick. It was not the biggest project, but it did lead my manager to make a prediction. He said that unlike him, I would probably be spending half my time formulating products for men rather than women. He quoted some statistics which I believed, even though he probably made them up on the spot – 95% of cosmetic and personal care products were bought by women. But that was obviously going to change in the gender fluid world of the 1980s. After all, a lot of male pop stars were wearing mascara. But it turned out that even Robert Smith of


The Cure did not buy enough to significantly impact the sales figures. Women continued to buy cosmetics. People continued to predict that men were about to start buying cosmetics. Marketing people continued to pay attention to female consumers and more or less ignore men. After a while I came to regard the arrival of a


significant male grooming sector as one of those predictions that everyone believed but that would never come true. A bit like the jet packs we were all supposed to be travelling around with by the year 2000. But time rolled on and in the mid noughties it


began to look like the age of male grooming was finally upon us. The strongest evidence was online in the form of male grooming blogs. Women had started beauty blogs more or less as soon as blogs started to be a thing, and they rapidly became a huge part of the social media universe. Men were not quite as quick off the mark. But by the end of the decade I was aware of quite a few and even read some of them. I wrote a quick blog post drawing attention to the three best ones. I did a bit of a teasing tweet saying that I had been looking at male grooming blogs, but not naming them. As I expected, people instantly asked me which ones I was talking about. All the people asking me were women.


I had a quick look at the comments sections


of my favoured male grooming bloggers and discovered that the majority of the comments were left by women. I mentioned this to some marketing folks who cheerfully confirmed that the majority of sales of male grooming products were made to women, purchasing the products on behalf of men. They told me that they had started out consumer testing packaging concepts on men, but that it had been a total waste of time. As had mixed panels. If you want to sell male products you have to pitch them first to women. That at


PERSONAL CARE September 2021


are now much fewer and the fashion for prominent facial fungus seems to have waned somewhat. But I feel that it has had the effect of legitimising more broadly based male brands. The one that seems to have become established is Bulldog. I was sceptical of its chances when it first came out 12 years ago. It now has a modest but stable presence on big supermarket planograms. Men’s skincare has 65 listings on Sainsbury’s website at time of writing over 10 brands. General moisturisers are split into 5 subcategories, with a total of 154 products spread over 20 brands. Needless to say, the promotion of general products is automatically geared towards the female consumer. So, the skin care market is still pretty much one


where the needs of possessors of y chromosomes do not get much of the action, but there is at least some kind of men’s product market. You still need a pretty strong nerve to launch a product aimed at men, and you would still be wise to take into account what the men’s partners are likely to be thinking. But if you are happy to accept that your product is much more likely to end up as a niche rather than a blockbuster then it can make sense. I think male grooming is likely to be here to


least was the thinking 15 years ago. Having said that, there was one sector that


suddenly seemed to buck this trend. The hipster beard fashion of the early 2010s spawned a lot of specialist products. Beard oil was the hero product of this slice of the market. The innovator was probably the Percy Nobleman brand, which had distinctly male orientated marketing. Percy Nobleman was not just the brand name, but also the name of an adventurous cartoon character who gave the brand its personality. This claimed to be, and for all I know may well have been, the first graphic novel to be published on Instagram. This was back in the days when Instagram was new enough to feel “zeitgeisty”. Percy Nobleman was the leading edge of


a wave of beard oil brands of varying levels of sophistication that flooded onto the market in the early twenty teens. Many were very basic indeed. All you needed were some brown bottles, a blend of some oils -possibly purchased from a catering wholesaler – and some artwork you could print out on your deskjet and you were away. The whole sector was very blokey with brand names such as Thatchface, Viking and the one I found a bit scary in the context, Cut Throat Stanley. Beard oil brands were generally easy come, easy go. Few have lasted very long. New entrants


stay. The trend is for things to get more diverse and the days when everyone wore the same clothes, watched the same media and had the same length of hair are long gone. But while that means that the male grooming sector is likely going to grow, it does not mean that it will produce any big instantly recognisable brands. It is more likely to be a large number of brands all of which are going to be pretty niche and pretty specialised. For us people in the industry, it means we


are going to need product concepts, packaging and formulations that cater to very specific and generally quite small market sectors. I predict we will see products for sports players, music lovers, travellers and other categories that men identify with rather than simply targeting males. I am not sure how formulators will meet this challenge, but I am sure we will think of something. Here are a few of my ideas for product


formulations that are particularly suitable for incorporating into brands aimed at men:


Jungle explorer deodorant The aim here is to blend in with the environment so you do not scare the rare species you are trying to film. This could be an opportunity to use a non-aluminium-based antiperspirant, maybe silver and perhaps combined with activated charcoal for total smell elimination. It would also


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