Barry Hand

Alarm­ingly there are few online Irish stores I would pur­chase from, this comes from being burned too often with high prices & slow deliv­ery — but one web­site has restored some faith to Irish e-tailers, step for­ward Chris O’Grady & Shav​ing​.ie

The age old art of shav­ing is alive and well, despite the strength of multi blade razors from Gillette & co I’m a recent con­vert to tra­di­tional wet shav­ing using a safety razor. I found myself becom­ing more and more dis­grun­tled while shav­ing, either through razor burn or just gen­eral dis­sat­is­fac­tion in the qual­ity of the shave itself. My inter­est was peaked over on the boards​.ie facial hair & hats forum and after much read­ing, and re-reading I decided to try a new setup with a safety razor.

Buy­ing the kit

Pur­chas­ing shav­ing gear as a first timer requires con­sid­er­able invest­ment, as starter kits will typ­i­cally cost around €50 and can eas­ily go much higher! Hav­ing decided on the type of razor, blades and some shav­ing soap — I was look­ing for, bas­ing advice from posters on boards​.ie but also other shav­ing com­mu­ni­ties like Bad­ger & Blade

I first spot­ted shav​ing​.ie from the boards​.ie forum with a sep­a­rate thread with some enthu­si­as­tic feed­back, but I held of mak­ing any pur­chase until after Christ­mas. Luck­ily for me I received a nice starter kit as a present, but I was on the look­out for some acces­sories like balms and soap — so I took the plunge and went with the below ( again another present but I shared my wish­list from shav​ing​.ie)

What are shav​ing​.ie doing right?

Deliv­ery was prompt and I’ve been really impressed with the qual­ity of the prod­ucts. Cru­cially shav​ing​.ie do 3 things which many Irish e-tailers ignore

1. Price is com­pet­i­tive to UK & Euro websites
2. Deliv­ery is quick
3. Cus­tomer ser­vice is top notch

One of the major put off’s buy­ing online from Irish web stores is that the price is usu­ally sig­nif­i­cantly more expen­sive than buy­ing from UK — although that is an issue not lim­ited to web stores as it hap­pens offline too. This is one of the key areas where shav​ing​.ie suc­cess, wet shav­ing is a rel­a­tively niche mar­ket and it’s dif­fi­cult to find high qual­ity prod­ucts in actual shops so pur­chas­ing online is an absolute necessity.

Oppor­tu­ni­ties?

While I wouldn’t expect a newly niche web­site to come out the blocks with the full mar­ket­ing play­book — it is com­mend­able that Chris is con­cen­trat­ing on ensur­ing his busi­ness is per­form­ing before focus­ing on gain­ing expo­sure. There are a cou­ple of quick wins here, Chris is already using feed­back over on boards​.ie, and has just started to tip toe into social media with a twit­ter account @shaving_ie but here are a few things I think would really work:

• Intro­duce video con­tent
  The web­site right now is heav­ily geared to those who are shav­ing afi­ciona­dos — the fact is that the major­ity of men use dis­pos­able multi blade razors. If Chris could put together some video con­tent on the ben­e­fits of tra­di­tional shav­ing as well as tech­niques, the web­site posi­tion­ing changes from some­where that you can buy shaing gear to some­where author­i­ta­tive on shav­ing. A quick look on youtube shows most wet shav­ing video’s to have at least 100,000 views

• Adding a blog
  There’s already a news fea­ture, but that’s a one way sys­tem — imple­ment­ing a shav­ing blog would allow a bet­ter flow between the busi­ness and cus­tomers. It would also make it eas­ier to add rich con­tent which would be shareable
• Dri­ving sales through newslet­ter
  Sim­ple to imple­ment, but adding a cal­en­dar of com­mu­ni­ca­tions to cus­tomers can really drive sales. It doesn’t have to be every week, but at least twice a month with an incen­tive to buy

I’m not sure what con­straints Chris is under, but I’d imag­ine he prob­a­bly doesn’t have the time, resource or money to imple­ment all my sug­ges­tions — but hope­fully some of them hap­pen in the future — I’m sure it would have a mas­sive impact on the com­mu­nity and ultimately…sales.

So if you’re fed up with poor qual­ity shaves and fancy a proper shav­ing setup — check out shav​ing​.ie!