Shave Club

The Financial Times, Saturday, October 29, 2005

Back in February 2004 an online satirical magazine called the Onion announced a new five-blade razor system by Gillette. “What part of this don’t you understand?” ran the mock interview. “If two blades is good, and three blades is better, obviously five blades would make us the best xxxxing razor that ever existed.” It would be launched with the slogan... “You’ll be so smooth, I could snort lines off your chin.”

Last month, commerce mimicked comedy and Gillette announced the Fusion - a razor with five blades, due for American distribution next year. The slogan will be a disappointing... “The Future Of Shaving”.

Now if there’s an Onion journalist wondering whether he invented shaving’s next big thing, he’s the least of Gillette’s problems. Because there are some people who believe that what we are seeing right now is a very different kind of men’s shaving revolution, organised and directed by a disparate group of American, Canadian and British professionals, using the internet as a tool for disruption and dissent. Let’s call it Shave Club. And the first rule of Shave Club is: old equals good.

The movement tipped over into the mainstream earlier this year when an American television journalist called Corey Greenberg used his technology slot on NBC’s Today show to demonstrate what he’d learned about old-fashioned razors, creams and brushes. Millions watched Greenberg sweep a table of modern gels, foams and razors into a giant dustbin. Greenberg’s live shave provoked an unprecedented response. Working men, tired with their morning slice and dice, demanded further information. Greenberg posted a detailed article, which remains a buzz item on the social bookmarking sites and has been linked to and quoted widely. (It’s now the foundation for a blog - Shaving With Occam’s Razor - in which he analyses his daily shave.) Very quickly, Trumpers shaving cream was flying from the shelves. Old razors - considered junk metal just a fortnight earlier - were fetching premium prices on ebay.

But what the viewers didn’t know was that Greenberg was already a Shave Club inductee. Everything he taught he’d learnt on a raggedy collection of blogs, internet forums and discussion sites where engineers, economists, lawyers and doctors gather, late into the night, to share shave tips, compare blades and argue technique with a passion hard to believe. What Greenberg did contribute is the term “shavegeek”, now part of an underground lexicon that includes “the three Ts” (high-end British shave companies Trumpers, Taylors and Truefitt & Hill), “DEs” (old-fashioned double-edge razors) and “faceturbation” (the habit of stroking one’s face throughout the day in admiration of a perfect morning shave).

The movement’s slightly controversial king of shaves is a charismatic Texan called Charles A. Roberts - a wetshaving philosopher whose series of twelve essays, Shaving Graces, goes well beyond putting blade to stubble and encompasses conservative social commentary, man’s relationship with war and the squalor of Corporate America. Roberts’s own HydroLast products turn wetshaving into a precise science, and men have been known to board planes to attend the one-to-one shaving lessons he conducts at his shop in Austin. Roberts, whose “Method Shaving” involves a giant brush, high quality cream and surgical-sharp Japanese “Feather” blade, is in no doubt whatsoever that this is the very beginning of a sea-change:

“There’s been a very dramatic escalation of interest. I opened up the very first wet shavers forum. I took it down about six months later, but six more popped up after that. And I’m told that now there’s one opening every single day.”

The philosophical core of Shave Club is a belief that a close, pain-free shave is achievable only with a badger brush and cream, and a single-blade razor (some use cut-throat, some old-fashioned double-edge, some favour an obsolete “Schick Injector” system won competitively on Ebay). Modern multi-blade cartridges are viewed with suspicion: aggressive, face-tearing rows of poor-quality blades that go blunt quickly but cost ten times the best quality generic “razor blade”, accompanied by foams laced with topical numbing agents.

But the forums aren’t only political. There’s a social-nostalgic element, too: a nostalgia for the days of the barber shop shave, a need to connect with loved and respected fathers and grandfathers, whose brushes and razors a few have inherited.

But men like to dissect, to categorise and compare and obsess. The shaving forums get strange and a little frightening. Photographs of shaving brushes and frothy creams get uploaded and downloaded like porn. Vintage razors are tweaked and modified like cars. Arguments crop up spontaneously... little conflagrations that burn bright and then out after somebody apologises or backs down. I ask Roberts... isn’t it all just a little weird?

“I think you’ve got four or five importers, and each has their brands. And there’s a lot of sniping between their votaries on the boards. These followers, they’re kind of like the Guelfs and the Ghibellines in Renaissance Italy, the way they go at it. If they’re given enough latitude they’ll take it to the streets.”

According to Ben Glazier, of London venerable shaving institution Trumpers (where demand for barber shop shaves is at its highest since the invention of the cartridge razor), it’s no wonder men take it seriously:

“Imagine the transformation of their lives. After 15 years of a burning face and blood on their collar, they learn there’s a better way of doing this. It transforms every morning of their lives.”

Charles Roberts also makes the serious point that this is the democratising, disruptive ability of the internet at its most basic. Gillette is a giant corporation and it can put a product in every supermarket in the world, but it can’t stop the dissatisfied from meeting online and discussing alternatives. The message has already seeped through to the men’s magazines, and, through them, to a portion of consumers. Robert Johnston, of barbershop and specialist shaving good retailer The Gentleman’s Shop, reports a 300% increased in demand for double-edge razors following Greenberg’s television appearance:

“We sell three double-edge razors for every Mach 3. Merkur, the German manufacturers, can’t keep up with demand.”

Learning to shave with an old-fashioned razor isn’t for the feint of heart or uncertain of hand. And nobody seriously foresees the death of the cartridge in the near future. But Roberts, for one, is determined that this revolution will, at least, be televised:

“I’m working on a wetshaving DVD. Because I can teach you how to do this thing properly; and then you can’t improve on it. When you get done, your face is like a light bulb. I mean there’s nothing on it at all. It’s perfect.” Linton Chiswick

A collection of Shave Club links can be found here.