During my early days of product innovation, I was handling a men's grooming brand, a significant player in face care (moisturizers, face washes) and body care (body moisturizers). It was a "male" line of an iconic moisturizing brand, primarily catering to the Southeast Asian markets of Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines and India for face care and parts of Africa and the US for body care.
A natural extension for a male grooming face care brand was into shaving products, primarily shaving foams and post-shave moisturizers. Our natural strength in moisturizing would allow for us to build "moisturizing" shaving foams, which also seemed like a natural need in the market.
Should have been a "smooth" ride, right? Except it left us with a few painful cuts.
THE CONTEXT
In designing a shaving foam superior in moisturizing, we needed to create a formulation that delivered this skin benefit in a product that would be naturally either shaved or rinsed off the face. Think about it - the moisturizing benefit needed to stay on the skin AFTER the foam was scraped off by a razor. Not the easiest thing to deliver.
The only way this could happen was through "thinning" the foaming experience; i.e creating a "non foaming" shaving cream that would ensure that the moisturizing agents would remain on skin, post shave.
This also fit with the production capabilities the factories had - We created face washes and moisturizers. Face washes foam a little bit, not a lot. Certainly, nowhere close to a shaving foam. By going with a "non lathering/foaming" shaving cream, we could leverage on our existing production capabilities to make this product, keeping costs down and hence being able to enter with a competitive price point in the market.
Superior moisturizing in a shaving cream. Low production costs due to utilization of existing capacity. It seemed like we were onto a good thing.
THE MISTAKE
Men like their shaving experience to have foam. Lather. The feeling of taking off the foam is a visual and "touch" validation of a proper shave.
A non-foaming shaving cream just didn't have the same experience. It didn't feel like a complete shave.
In multiple different blind tests across the key markets, our product prototype came back inferior to the leading shaving brand, the one whose name starts with G.
We kept learning and kept tweaking. We took the feedback of the "skin feel" as a signal to make it lather just a little more but we didn't acknowledge the fact that the basic limitation of not being able to produce a "foaming/lathering" shaving cream was the actual issue.
The project went on for a little over a year, with multiple product formulation tweaks but it never came out even parity in a blind test. The "shaving" line extension was eventually shelved.
THE LEARNING
1. Some category truths are not worth questioning - More than 80% of the shaving foam market was within the "foaming" experience. The remaining 20% were just premium line extensions from established brands. Men like their shaving experience to be foamy. Even as a well-known male grooming brand entering the new category of "shaving products", we needed to respect this category truth and humly accept that we didn't have the production capability internally.
2. Be clinical in interpreting the data - One could argue that we interpreted success in "non foaming creams" from other brands as a signpost of possibility. The truth was that all of these were established brands who already had a "hero, revenue driving" shaving foam variant. No single competitor had just the "non foaming" creams. We looked at the glass half full, when actually we should have seen the line that separated the full and the empty.
Thankfully the product wasn't launched. So one could actually call it a "close shave".
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