EN
Back to the archive

The encyclopedia · Marketing & Brand · Strategic decision · 2022–2025

eos built a shaving product around how women actually shave, not men's razors.

eos reframed shaving as skincare rather than hair removal, and doubled penetration while better-funded rivals reused the old template.

eos Products

the move

Shaving was a category designed by and for men: a razor, a familiar 'shave your face' story, then the same product tinted pink for women. Women who shaved their legs and underarms for skin, not to remove a beard, were being marketed to as a minor variation on the male user.

eos, a skincare brand, reframed the act. The 'Women's Shave' work treated shaving as a skin-care moment — moisture, comfort, sensitive skin — and made that the product and the message, rather than pitching a women's razor as a prettier men's one.

More important than any single execution, the brand stayed consistent about the consumer for years rather than churning through one-off drops. That cumulative consumer-centricity is what the Effie judges repeatedly called out as the reason it kept compounding.

Against competitors with far larger media budgets, eos doubled its penetration and gained share, and the campaign was named the most effective marketing work in the world at the 2025 Effie Awards — winning back-to-back Iridium Effies.

why it works

  • It names the real user and the real job the product does
  • Consistency over years lets awareness and trust compound
  • It attacks the category's assumption, not a rival's ads
  • Consumer-centricity substitutes for the media budget it did not have
the payoffShaving is skincare, not a men's razor in pinkclever

what transfers

When a category assumes one user model, the easy ad quietly makes most customers the wrong model. Rebuild around how the majority actually behave and you can outspend rivals using the old template.

what came after

eos won the Iridium Effie for a second consecutive year in 2025, the global top honour selected from Gold and Grand winners across 60+ programmes, alongside a Global Grand Effie in Sustained Success – Products. The case became the benchmark for consumer-centric disruption against better-funded rivals.

references

spotted an error? The archive wants to know.

same kind of clever