Archival Consumed: Sharps

A recently published book called ”The Male Mystique” offers a collection of ads from men’s magazines of the 60’s and 70’s. Among other things, it makes a convincing case that the marketer’s construction of manhood has been conflicted and simpleminded for a long time: macho oafs, shameless peacocks and the interchangeable ”groovy” chicks who love them fill out pitches for Bacchus after-shave, Score Liquid Hair Groom and something called Male Comfort Spray (which ”helps prevent perspiration discomfort, the kind only a man can get”).

That stuff, whatever it was, seems mercifully to have faded from the scene. Men’s grooming products are now a $1-billion-plus category, with a snowballing number of new offerings. But the marketing dichotomy lingers in the form of two caricatures of maleness: the ”Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” guy vs. the Maxim guy. Still, one new brand, a small New York startup called Sharps, seems almost explicitly designed as an attempt to find a third way. Though around only since last year, it has found its way into top-end retailers like Barneys and Fred Segal, as well as newish boutique barbershop chains like American Male. One of its most popular items, called Kid Glove Shave Gel, is a top seller at the Barneys in Beverly Hills. Through Sharps’s online store, it sells to customers in all but a handful of states, thanks to attention from magazines like InStyle and Men’s Health.

The first strategy to avoid ending up in some future collection of embarrassing advertisements has been humor. ”We thought we could have some fun with the category,” says Oliver Sweatman, a co-founder and former investment banker. ”People take themselves very, very seriously in this industry. We position ourselves as outcasts.” There is, for example, a goat’s visage on the shave-gel package, and the instructions include this step: ”Contemplate the goat.” Sharps’s growing offerings — after-shave, lip balm, moisturizer, deodorant, hair gel, etc. — is all stylishly and disarmingly packaged. (The hair pomade is called Mission: Control Guck-in-a-Puck and features a picture of a gap-toothed astronaut.)

This attitude — just short of a smirk — is the first thing mentioned by James Whittall, proprietor of an online store called MenEssentials.com. ”I see these products being positioned in a way that appeals to younger guys who don’t see themselves as fitting into the Hugo Boss-Calvin Klein category, who view themselves as risk takers, marginally countercultural,” he says. Alanna Delacrausaz, the men’s fragrance and grooming buyer for Barneys, calls it ”an amusing point of view for grooming, and I think guys respond to that.”

Jokes go only so far in selling five ounces of shave gel for $12, so there is a second strategy. Brands cultivate credibility and authenticity through association with a credible and authentic subculture — which is why skateboarders and playground basketballers are so popular with marketers. Sharps has chosen the subculture of . . . barbers. The company’s other founder, Larry Paul, has gone so far as to get a barber’s certificate. Among other things, this helped the formulation process: Kid Glove Shave Gel goes on clear because Paul’s barber-school experience taught the value of ”total whisker visibility.”

He also learned, he says, more about ”everyday guys” and argues for the barbershop as a throwback antidote to unisex salons. ”The everyday guy in America, he doesn’t necessarily identify with the whole beauty thing,” Paul says. ”The barbershop allows him to be a guy.” To those of us who grew up in small Texas towns where the barbershop allowed nothing but traumatic buzz cuts, he offers the assurance that the Sharps goal is to ”remix” the barbering and grooming idea to ”accommodate the modern-day guy.” This is why Sharps has associated itself with New York’s Triple Five Soul and recently demonstrated Kid Glove Shave Gel on attendees of an HBO screening of the new show ”Entourage” at the trendy Chelsea nightclub Crobar. None of this sounds like anything your grandfather’s barber would have done — but that’s kind of the point. The real insight here may be in the way that Sharps’s founders tend to avoid the word ”man.” Maybe the modern young male does not want to enter manhood at all — guyhood seems less complicated and a lot more fun.

[This installment of the Consumed column appeared in the July 25, 2004, New York Times Magazine; it was posted on this site some time much later, despite the fiddled-with time/date stamp.]