The Best Men's Razor of 2020 According to Customers
I remember the first time I tried a high quality razor blade in the late 1990s. It was a Gillette Mach 3 and it was a revelation compared to the simple single-bladed razors I had tried to shave with before. Times have changed though, with many systems now using five blades and possessing prices to go along with them.
It’s not all about technology though. There is still a market for inexpensive, disposable razors as well as traditional safety razors. With that in mind, we gathered up about 7,000 reviews (this time from Amazon, though we often use Google product reviews as well) of the leaders in various categories. We have the two traditional leading brands - Gillette and Schick - and two upstarts that claim to offer similar products for less money (Harry’s and Amazon’s Solimo). We also included a heavy, traditional double edge safety razor (Weishi) and a bulk-packed bargain blade as well, the aptly named “Disposable Twin Blade Razor at Bottom Pricing”.
Speaking of pricing, we also took note of list prices, since more than a few of these players do compete on price. Because each product comes with a different number of cartridges and other accessories, the price we list is the price per cartridge for a refill, sorted from most to least expensive below:
Gillette ProGlide Shield ($4.22)
Schick Hydro Sense ($3.63)
Harry's Razor for Men ($2.00)
Amazon Brand - Solimo 5-Blade MotionSphere Razor ($1.10)
Weishi Long Handle Butterfly Open Double Edge Safety Razor ($0.25)
Disposable Twin Blade Razor at Bottom Pricing ($0.17)
How the SupporTrends Platform Works
Composed of two primary components (AI / Machine Learning and Visualizations), our platform tackles several key components of feedback analysis simultaneously. By automatically gathering and structuring qualitative feedback as it comes in, we’re able to prepare the data in a manner that makes possible an almost unlimited number of structured data queries, right away.
And that’s where our analytics partner, Looker, comes in. It delivers real-time, intuitive analysis dashboards that encourage the exploration of fast-paced and dynamic data sets. On top of that, users can leverage Looker to target the most important data for their purpose and easily set up automated, customized alerts or reporting, all without leaving the SupporTrends environment!
With that in mind, we processed all available reviews (from the United States to maintain consistency) going back at least two years. For this batch, that works out to be about 360,000 words in addition to sentiment analysis, star ratings, dates, and other metadata. Why does this matter? Because, as described above, the SupporTrends platform can process, understand, and prepare detailed reports on this information as fast as it comes in.
For this particular batch of 6,800 of customer conversations, performing all of the above work plus delivering the responsive visualizations in our embedded Looker environment took just over two hours of machine time. It would have taken a human about 27 hours without sleep just to read the reviews, not to mention recording the important details. And after all that, this poor human would be left with a whole lot of notes, a large spreadsheet, and weeks of work to make sense of it all. Add in the fact that we’d miss the sentiment analysis entirely, and it’s pretty easy to see the value of the SupporTrends platform.
Quick note: while Amazon product review data provides the material for this presentation, our platform normally digests data from customer systems like Zendesk, Kustomer, and more. Regardless of whether it’s survey response data, CRM integration, website reviews, or phone call recordings, we process these customer conversations in the same way, clearly separating products and features so that you can see what matters most to your customers.
First Glance
These (mostly) very different products have surprisingly similar ratings from their customers. Harry’s Razor for Men leads the way at 4.44 stars, with the disposable blade and the Weishi Long Handle Butterfly Open Double Edge Safety Razor sharing exactly the same 4.34 rating (who would have thought?). The Gillette ProGlide Shield is incrementally lower-rated at 4.32 stars, comfortably ahead of the Schick Hydro Sense at 4.15 and the Amazon Solimo MotionSphere at 3.89.
Our sentiment analysis - which evaluates the language used by customers to describe their product experience - tells a similar story (though the Gillette and Weishi have swapped positions).
Now that we have a high-level view of customers’ opinions on the products they purchased, we can dive into how these ratings and scores have changed over time.
Here we can see that something (good) changed for Harry’s in Q4 of 2019, when both its star rating and sentiment scores rose noticeably, indicating an upward trend at the moment. The Solimo product, on the other hand, has trended downward over the last two years.
With that in mind, we can take a quick look at the natural language analysis of these customer conversations. As a group, our platform highlights that customers appreciate a high quality shave, great value, and blades that last a long time.
On the other hand, customers are displeased by poor quality, wasting money, and an uncomfortable shave when evaluating all six of these products together.
What Matters Most
It is quite clear, even at a glance, that the shaving experience itself is a good area to focus additional energy on. Even in the other categories, comments such as “I have never had so many razor burns and bumps with any other razor” and “I literally blurted out "Ouch!"” appear. Ouch indeed. As it turns out, both of these comments came from the same product - the Amazon Solimo 5-Blade MotionSphere Razor - so let’s have a look.
After selecting the Solimo product, it becomes immediately clear that, while the top challenges like “waste of money” and “garbage” are the summations of general sentiment (and should be addressed), the underlying challenge this razor blade faces is delivering a good shave. Comments revolving around the blades themselves and the overall unpleasant shaving experience surface near the top of our Areas to address section.
Looking a bit further, each of the top problem areas of “blade”, “razor”, “shave”, and “product” are dominated by comments related to an uncomfortable shaving experience.
Normally we would evaluate the same shaving experience categories for the other brands as well, but there was actually very little to evaluate. Sure, there were complaints, but they were few and far between. As you can see below, specific complaints are either statistically insignificant, not about the shaving experience, or both.
But that’s just at a glance. What about "by the numbers”? In this data set, customers often faced challenges like “nicks”, “cuts”, “razor burn”, and “blade”, which were among the top most common descriptors for this group. We’ll call these “negative blade experiences” since they encompass a wide variety of terms that people use. Since we can all agree - and customers clearly tell us - that these are undesirable things, it is informative to have a look at which products’ customers comment about them most often.
It’s important to note here that the key phrases identified by the SupporTrends platform surfaced because of the manner in which they were used. So terms that might appear positive, such as “sharp blade” are not positive in this context (think “not a sharp blade”). As we so often see, this highlights the flexibility of our platform vs. basic keyword mapping or searching, as “good” phrases can be bad while “bad” phrases can be good.
With that in mind, we can see that both the Weishi and the Amazon Solimo brands experienced comments like these most often. There were fewer available reviews for the Gillette product than we would have liked, but it, along with the Harry’s and Schick, performed similarly in this area. Even though there were only 232 reviews for the disposable blade, it’s quite interesting that it also had the lowest percentage of comments around a negative blade experience.
But it’s not all bad news. Customers also had lots of good things to say about the blades of these razors, as shown below.
As is the case with the negative experience chart, activity here takes into account the context in which the phrases or words were used, so terms like “nick” would have been used in a positive way, such as “didn’t nick my skin”.
The Harry’s and Weishi blades both scored highest here, and are very close to each other. Harry’s stands out because it also had a relatively small number of blade detractors, indicating that, as a whole, its customers are fairly happy with the shaving experience. The Weishi blade is interesting because, while it’s near the top of the positive blade experience chart, it also had the highest percentage of customers who were unhappy about its blades. This appears to be a “love it or hate it” shaving experience, and there is almost certainly a story about setting expectations here.
The Amazon blade isn’t too far behind the Harry’s and Weishi blades, with just under 30% of its customers indicating they are happy with the shaving experience. Schick and Gillette are right there as well, with the disposable razor a substantial amount behind. Contrasting with the Weishi, which was basically at the top of both charts, the disposable razor was at the bottom of both, implying a “take it or leave it” attitude from its customers, at least when it comes to the blade.
Picking a Winner
So is there a shaving experience winner here? To determine that, we can use our NPS Index formula that you may have caught a glimpse of in a few of the screenshots. Within a category, we subtract the “detractor” percentage from the “promoter” percentage, much in the same way NPS is calculated in the real world. Keep in mind that our NPS Index is an estimation, and due to various biases inherent in customer communication channels, it should not be directly compared to actual NPS.
But that doesn’t mean we cannot compare results within this evaluation!
The Harry’s Razor for Men emerges the overall Shaving Experience winner of this competition, by way of its smaller-than-average number of unhappy customers and its best-in-class number of customers who indicated they are happy with the shaving experience. Schick, Gillette, and Weishi are not too far behind, but there is a bigger gap to Amazon. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the disposable razor shows up at the bottom of this list. The score isn’t negative, which suggests that expectations were not entirely unmet; its customers came together to issue a collective “meh”.
Price plays a role in customers’ decision-making process too, and when you consider that the Harry’s cartridges cost less than half of what the Gillette cartridges cost, the experience-winning Harry’s Razor for Men presents itself as an even stronger value.
Interested in competitive analyses like these, or instantly harnessing the power of your customers’ feedback in support tickets, call, recordings, and more? We can help in as little as 30 seconds.
And if you want to learn more about Looker, the analytics platform we use here at SupporTrends, reach out to the Looker team and find out what you can achieve with real-time data analytics.