When Brian Eastwood first went into lockdown, it was the first time in a long time that he stopped shaving. The 41-year-old used to spend five days a week at the office, and would rarely go 48 hours without using his Gillette Fusion razor.
“I grow facial hair quickly but not fully, so I kinda look a little suspect if I let it go for too long,” he said recently.
But the pandemic changed all that: Eastwood lost his job producing conferences in April 2020 and is now a freelance writer. Months of being home or in a mask meant he cared less about the state of his face. He’s lucky now if he shaves once a week, and even has to consciously place his razor and shaving cream on the bathroom counter before showering to remind himself to shave at all.
It’s safe to say beards were among the winners of the COVID-19 era. Now, with life gradually returning to normal, the world’s largest shaving company is trying to figure out what men’s faces will look like going forward.
Gillette, with its World Shaving Headquarters in South Boston, has come to embrace the beard.
In a well-timed move last year, Gillette released a new line of men’s grooming products named after the company’s founder, King C. Gillette, which includes a line of beard oils and balms. It’s one of many ways the shaving giant is now aiming to reposition itself.
“We’re no longer a wet shave business,” David Taylor, chief executive of Gillette corporate parent, Procter & Gamble, said in the company’s earnings call late last month. “We’re truly a grooming business.”
For generations, the clean-shaven man was ubiquitous, and Gillette had a seemingly-invincible business model keeping him that way. But in the past decade, facial hair has been creeping in like a five-o’clock shadow. The “continued societal shift to fewer shaves,” as Gillette put it in a 2018 earnings report, had become the brand’s existential challenge. Then the pandemic hit.
“Male blades and razors has been very challenging and it continues to be challenging,” said Gillette spokesman James Williams. “We saw people who may have been clean-shaving shaving a bit less, going a bit more time between shaves, growing stubble and then shaving it off.”
Long the price-setting leader in the global razor game, Gillette has been hacked away over the past decade by competitors offering discount blades. The switch in shaving habits posed an even greater obstacle. But now the company has been positioning that shift as an opportunity.
Along with its new King C. Gillette line, the company has stepped up in other ways. As barber shops were forced to close, P&G saw a 20 percent spike in sales at its Braun subsidiary, which sells beard trimmers. And while men shaved less during the pandemic, women kept it up. So Gillette has leaned into female products, launching a new line of intimate razors and light-based hair removal appliances that are driving up sales. Overall, organic sales of grooming products climbed 6 percent in the most recent quarter, and 5 percent overall for the year, which made up for the flat sales of men’s razors and blades.
“Grooming had a very strong year,” Taylor told analysts earlier this month. “As people return to working outside the home, I think that will benefit the category.”
Many men who have returned to the office say they’re now approaching grooming the same way they do their work schedules: as a sort of hybrid.
Mike Schiano, 29, has been showing up at work a few days a week just to get out of his small North End apartment, where he and his fiancee take turns using his dresser as a stand-up desk. He’s worn a beard for over a decade but used to shave his neck daily before the pandemic to keep things tidy. Now Schiano might go a day or two between shaves.
“It’s very calendar-driven,” he said. “If I’m not seeing clients and there’s no Zoom I’ll skip a day.”
Still, Schiano did upgrade his beard-care products while stuck at home, investing in a new buzzer and beard trimmer, and fancier shaving cream. A treat, he said, at a time when small luxuries were hard to find.
Larissa Jensen, a beauty industry adviser at NPD Group, says that the first half of this year has been good for sellers of high-end mens’ grooming products, which have seen a 15 percent spike in sales. “Some of these pandemic behaviors are going to stick,” she said, and expects to see more facial hair when — and if — the public returns to office life.
“You’re not going to have men showing up with these crazy quarantine beards, they’re going to keep it clean and presentable-looking,” she said. “This is where the trimmers and beard oils all come into play. I do believe it’s an opportunity. Gillette is shifting its focus, it’s smart and what they’re supposed to. To shift yourself to a place to where the consumer needs you. There’s an element of grooming yourself even when you have facial hair, sometimes even more so. Having a beard requires a lot more work.”
Still, Gillette has its work cut out for it with men like Eastwood, who is unsure if he will ever shave regularly again, and 50-year-old Larry Azer of Yarmouth, who hasn’t shaved since the beginning of the pandemic. That’s 74 weeks and counting.
“The only reason I had to really shave was because my job is somewhat public facing,” said Azer, a school finance manager. “I worked in an office environment so I kind of had to be presentable.”
And he doesn’t sound in a hurry to return to his old grooming habits.
“I hate to disappoint the good folks at Gillette,” Azer said. “But the beard gets washed with shampoo in the shower. I wouldn’t say it’s finely maintained.”
In the end, Gillette may have to settle for the kind of compromises that avid customers such as Justin O’Connor have made.
Ever since he grew his first whisker, the 68-year-old has followed the same daily routine: He gets up, hops in the shower, and drags a Gillette Mach 5 razor along his jaw. O’Connor works three part-time jobs and has kept up his shaving habit throughout the pandemic.
Except on Tuesdays.
That’s his day off, when O’Connor putters around the house, working on the garden with a bit of stubble. Upending his daily shaving routine felt awkward at first.
“But nobody was going to see me,” O’Connor said. “I think it was the pandemic that helped me come to the realization that we as a society are dressing down. The pandemic accelerated that, and I was like ‘Justin, you can be part of that.’”
Janelle Nanos can be reached at janelle.nanos@globe.com. Follow her @janellenanos.