It can be easy to miss a trend, even one right in front of your face, until you stumble upon an important cultural artifact, sometimes buried in the most arcane place.
Proctor & Gamble issued its quarterly earnings reports in late October, and they were very bullish in almost all corners of the conglomerate. The weakest part of the company? Gillette shaving products. Go back one more quarter, and it’s dire. P&G wrote down the value of Gillette’s brand by $8 billion.
When the nation’s leading razor-blade seller is tanking, you know something is going on.
Part of the pain is self-inflicted. Early in 2019, Gillette decided to run ads against “toxic masculinity” that seemed like a naked pander to the woke police. That harmed the brand and led to a downward trajectory.
But Gillette’s competitors are also struggling. Dollar Shave Club, a creative, low-cost subscription-based startup aimed directly at challenging Gillette and Schick, skyrocketed for a few years after its 2012 debut but has seen sales flatline since 2016, when it was bought for $1 billion by Unilever.
There’s something bigger going on. You can see it if you look back at the transcript of the earnings call after P&G’s August quarterly statement — or for that matter, if you go to your local independent coffee shop. “Lower shaving frequency has reduced the size of the developed blades and razor’s market,” P&G executive Jon Moeller said earlier this year.
Beards started becoming more and more popular in the middle of the last decade, along with tattered jeans and flannel shirts. The trend became so dominant that in April 2016, the Wall Street Journal asked, “Is the Beard Trend Over?” (Maybe that suggestion helped convince Unilever to drop that cool billion on the Dollar Shave Club.)
Gillette’s data suggest not.
World Series MVP Stephen Strasburg sports a full beard. The leading male pop star of the day, Ed Sheeran, keeps his face covered in fine ginger strands. The most headline-grabbing congressmen in each party, Dan Crenshaw and Joe Cunningham, are bearded.
The Wall Street Journal reported this year that “YouTube says 2018 was the largest year to date for uploads of videos related to ‘beards’ and ‘beard grooming.'”
A century ago, the lack of good razors explained the ubiquity of beards. Today, it seems, the pervasiveness of beards is bad news for the razors.
