The competition among shaving subscription clubs is heating up—especially as more brands that originally shot to success with products geared toward male consumers are finally coming back around with new products designed specifically for women.
The latest entry is Flamingo, which is the first brand to launch out of Harry’s Labs, a new innovation group within Harry’s Inc., a popular brand for men’s personal care, grooming, and shaving supplies.
Flamingo is lead by Allie Melnick and Brittania Boey, who have both worked at and used Harry’s since the company launched in 2013. Melnick and Boey are hardly alone when it comes to women using shaving products that have been marketed toward men. Given the appealing price (and no pink tax) as well as the ease of delivery with a flexible subscription model, it’s not hard to see why many women have been signing up for services like Harry’s, Dollar Shave Club, or Gillette. Even Dollar Shave Club founder Michael Dubin said at an AdWeek conference in early October that “a meaningful percentage” of the Unilever-owned brand’s clientele is female.
More than a million women have signed up and subscribed to Harry’s alone, according to Flamingo’s founders.
“We used and fell in love with the products for ourselves,” Melnick tells Fortune, about the path from Harry’s to Flamingo. “While we loved having so many loyal female customers, we knew we could use our expertise and resources to create a suite of products designed specifically for the ways women actually use them—like on their legs, underarms, and bikini lines to name a few.”
Flamingo says it “embraces women’s natural bodies (bumps, dry skin, body hair, and all), dispelling the myth of ‘feminine perfection,’ creating a judgment-free space made for education and candid conversation, where nothing’s taboo.”
Of course, Flamingo is not the first entry to this market. Startups like Billie, Angel Shave Club, and 99 Cent Razor, among others, are also hoping to cash in on an opportunity that was seemingly missed for so long.
But it is that insider experience at Harry’s that Flamingo’s founders stress as the tipping point for their brand. In creating Flamingo, we spent years speaking to hundreds of women to truly understand their needs and preferences in hair removal and designed every aspect of our product suite with those needs in mind.
“In creating Flamingo, we spent years speaking to hundreds of women to truly understand their needs and preferences in hair removal and designed every aspect of our product suite with those needs in mind,” Boey says.
Flamingo razors, as Boey describes, have the same blade technology as Harry’s—with five German-engineered blades—but are ergonomically designed for all the unique areas that women shave, with rounded edges, a weighted handle, and extra grip. The handles are designed and shaped to fit naturally into a woman’s hand, making it easier to control and more comfortable to hold. As for the shaving gel, Flamingo developed a proprietary formulation meant to comfort skin during and after shaving.
Additional products available for purchase online at launch include a dual-action body lotion for exfoliating and moisturizing as well as at-home body and face waxing kits with step-by-step guidebooks and no warming required.
Right now, there are 14 people who work full-time on the Flamingo team. Because the company is coming out of Harry’s Labs, Flamingo has access to technology, data analytics, and manufacturing resources within the larger Harry’s umbrella while letting the core team focus on design, engineering, and customer service.
