Risk Free Assessment
Access Granted: Manscaped Part 1 Transcript. Tune in wherever you listen to podcasts.
Mike: Welcome to Access Granted, where we shine a light on extraordinary companies, breaking barriers and championing inclusivity. I’m your host, Mike Iannelli, and it’s an honor to be your guide on this journey of innovation and impact. Today, we’re thrilled to bring you an inspiring conversation with Manscaped, the men’s grooming company, redefining grooming standards and deeply committed to weaving accessibility into every facet of their business.
From groundbreaking products to a seamless customer experience, Manscaped sets a new inclusivity standard. At Ablr, we’ve had the privilege of partnering with their team over the past few years, and I can’t wait for you to hear the powerful insights on making accessibility a priority. Get ready to be inspired. This is one episode you won’t want to miss.
[To Preston] Welcome man. And by the way, it’s good to, good to see you finally in person. I’m glad you’re here. I appreciate you coming down, obviously welcome to Access Granted. This is, and like I said before, this is a fun time. Obviously the brand you work for is, I’m a huge fan.
I’ve had multiple lawnmowers, big product. I’m a big product fan. I definitely want to find a way to get the, what do you call it? The roller.
Preston: The The Dome Shaver™ Pro.
Mike: The The Dome Shaver™ Pro.
Preston: It’s great for the bald friends.
Mike: Was talking this morning with the team. One of the things that they said to me was “get comfortable with the word balls” and uh.
Preston: Yeah. You can see on my shirt right here.
Mike: What does it say?
Preston: “Manscaped, your balls will thank you.”
Mike: Your balls will thank you. So this conversation today is really about your leadership in accessibility, right? And inclusion, which is awesome. I mean, we first talked a while, a long time ago, it’s been two years now, I think we’ve been.
Preston: Yeah, it’s been, been quite a long time.
Mike: Yeah. So we’re in this two years, but like the innovation, not only in the products that you guys create, but the actual inclusivity of the products and inclusivity of the experiences that you guys have. That to me is why that’s why we’re here. You know, the whole purpose of this show that we create is to really elevate our clients because, it takes courage to kind of step up and say, hey look you know. Cause there it’s always these things about like, “oh we don’t have people with disabilities aren’t our target,” or “they can’t see.” It’s always an excuse of why not to do something. And Manscaped, and even from the legal team to everyone I’ve ever talked to, it’s like we want to do the right thing. That’s what we’re here to celebrate. So that’s what this whole point is for today. And to say, and so we can say balls a lot without feeling bad about it.
But I will tell you, I use the Lawnmower. And I don’t know if I’m supposed to even talk about this, but I actually use it on my head. I use it on my face. I use it everywhere. So is it, was it made and created for like anywhere or was it made just strictly for the balls?
Preston: Strictly for below the waist. Yes. Strictly for below the waist. So we started with that. That was our first product and that’s what got us into the industry. And the great thing was we were a category creator. No one was thinking about that. Everyone’s thinking about above the waist grooming. Because that’s what everyone was doing before. But we came at it the opposite way. We went to the most intimate part, sort of grew from there. So now we went from just having that single trimmer to elevating that from lawnmower I guess the original Lawn Mower®, The Lawn Mower® 2.0, Lawn Mower® 3.0, Lawn Mower® 4.0, now we’re at Lawn Mower® 5.0 Ultra. But now we’re also moving to everywhere else on the whole body. We can have some things for from head to toe.
Mike: Yeah you have the brand, you’ve got the audience, right? You’ve got the market, so you might as well just keep producing incredible products. And it’s all about like, the anti nick and clip, right? I mean it’s sort of a guarantee, in theory, that you’re not gonna, you know, hurt the boys, right?
Preston: Hurt the boys, yeah. It’s called SkinSafe® Technology. So it’s patented SkinSafe® Technology to help for that. And I think once you get customers to use something below the waist then you can sort of get that traction. And if they trust you down there, they’ll trust you on the rest of your body.
Mike: Yeah. Everything else is groovy from there.
Preston: Exactly.
Mike: You can protect that. I mean, that’s a hard thing to protect.
Preston: Yes.
Mike: There’s a lot of moving parts down there. So man, welcome to Access Granted. Talk about like your role there and I want to because I know that you sort of lead the development squad, but I want to kind of know from your perspective. And again, we’re big fans because you’re sort of leading this new charge in terms of full inclusivity, universal experiences, that whole deal. So talk a little bit about your role, how long you’ve been there, what you’re doing with the team and just walk us through it.
Preston: Yeah. So my name is Preston Straight. I’m the Lead Principal Engineer for Manscaped. I joined Manscaped during the pandemic in 2020. I believe we started with accessibility and all that. For driving towards e-commerce because e-commerce’s number one thing is making sure that anyone can order products on a website. That’s the most important thing.
So we sort of started the drive for accessibility and development with that in mind, but we did realize we needed some help. I think we used all these browser tools, browser extensions, check those boxes to say that things are working, but I think accessibility goes much further than that. It is something that you really can’t know unless you have anyone to help with it.
So I know on the Ablr team, we have a great team that helps us. We get screen recordings of walking through screen readers. Which we can hear screen readers, but we have no idea how that works because we can also see the text, see everything as it’s going. So, I’ve enjoyed immensely working with Ablr and seeing just what the issues are that they run into.
And once all tell us, “this is the problem,” we’re able to resolve it pretty quickly. And I think Ablr finds more mistakes than.
Mike: We got a pretty detailed team here.
Preston: Yes. Yes.
Mike: Yeah. And so they, I say this cause they’re huge. Okay so, we were on the phone earlier before we jumped in and Kim was always like, “be comfortable with the five letter word.” And I was like, what do you, what five letter word? And I’m thinking, that’s a four letter word and I’m very comfortable with that. But she was saying, no the five letter. And she goes, can I say this? And I’m like, What are you talking about? And she said, and for Kim to say it is funny because Kim is like as straight laced as they come, and she said “balls.”
And she said, we were on this conversation, and they said, get comfortable with it Kim. And then she said, we started talking about it, and she said, they had the most fun looking at and reading through the audio descriptions. Listening to the audio descriptions, because some of the content It’s just absolutely amazingly hilarious to listen to as you’re going through audio descriptions.
Preston: Oh yeah. Yeah. We send every video to you all to get transcripts out of. And we have lots of videos. We go from how to, to comedic, just like The Boys campaign. I think you all wrote transcripts for that. So you see all of us.
Mike: It’s fun man. I’m a big fan of the products man. I’ve had the first, I had the first mower when it first came out. I upgraded, I think I’m at a 2.0. I didn’t realize that it’s gone. And my son find a good product that works, it’s easy to continue to go back to it. And to me, you guys have literally redefined this entire, I mean you own the category, and you’ve taken over. And it’s from some of these traditional guys that have been doing, you know, traditional beard trimmers, conditional, you know, all the, I shouldn’t even say these other brands.
Mike: But the point is you’ve walked in and completely changed the whole category, disrupted the whole category.
Preston: Yep. That was our, that was our intention. And I think we saw a niche that was not really thought of. We made up the word Manscaped. I don’t think anyone heard about that before. And no one really considered it.
And now you can see that it’s a full category. You can see it in social media. You can see it in everything, TV, you hear people talking about it so we coined the phrase and now look where we are now.
Mike: You own it. Now, what’s it like? Now do you work remote? Do you work in the office sometimes? What’s that like?
Preston: Yeah, so we work completely remote. We do have some gatherings in our office. We’re located in San Diego. I’m on the East Coast, so I’m just up the ways in D.C. And yeah, it’s all remote all the time.
Mike: What’s it like working for an organization that is just fun. Like it seems to be from the outside. Look, I mean, I know it’s business, right? We got business to do, but at the same time, it’s like you work for one of the coolest brands. I mean, it’s just one of the coolest companies out there.
Preston: I joined, of course when we went remote. I heard stories from a bunch of my coworkers, what it was like in the office which would have been amazing. But I think we kept the culture still alive.
We have some great activities. I’m sure other remote companies do the same thing, but we do some interesting things. We had a mixology course, and we had a cooking course that was all through Zoom and remote. And they sent us the ingredients and built things. We do have meetings and kickoff parties, which we get to see everyone.
I think that’s probably one of the best times of the year, especially getting to see people in person, talk not just shop, and learn what other departments are running into and issues they’re running into. It blows my mind. We don’t really think of how the rest of the company works. We’re so dedicated to the e-commerce, but imagine shipping products and creating them and manufacturing, and everything’s just so crazy. Especially for we’re an international company. We have products all over the world. We’re shipping to doorsteps and.
Mike: From humble beginnings, right? And we talked about this preliminary. But the humble beginning was the show you guys were on. The founders went in right? And then they had this opportunity to show off the products, which I think helps sort of jumpstart it.
So going from there to now you’re a global organization. You’re selling millions of products. You’ve got incredible campaign ads. I mean, you guys have just like, what’s that like? And you’ve been through a huge part of that growth because you started with COVID right?
Preston: Started in 2020.
Mike: So four years you’ve been doing this.
Preston: Yeah. I started when we were just a small little site that was in the U.S. When I came on, we went from a single site and a single market to eight sites covering almost every continent in the world. And the limitations are the issues that we run into, it’s very complicated. We’ve localized our website so people in Germany can understand what they’re buying and understand exactly how good our brand is and what it can provide. We’re in Singapore, Middle East, North Africa, South America.
Mike: What’s that like? I mean, how cool is that? Because you’re a part of this for a long time. So I mean, it seems like you’re. I mean, not to say you’re a lifer, but like how cool would it be to just be from the start and not a finish, but just to see five mowers out right now.
Preston: We have five mowers and now we’re expanding more and more. Like some of my favorite products are the newer products that we’re releasing. We have The Beard Hedger™, and of course that’s great because I wanted to use something above the waist and below the waist. I didn’t want to use the same product.
Mike: Is that like a, just a beard trimmer?
Preston: Exactly. It’s a beard trimmer. So we’re using the same technology that we’ve learned from the lawnmower and expanded it to the beard. We also have this thing called The Handyman™, which is a portable foil shaver. So if throw it in my dop kit and I can take it with me, we have a dop kit called The Shed.
Mike: Like how fun is that? Like The Shed, right? It’s just The Shed. And then you got the, I don’t know, The Lawn Mower® and then The Beard Hedger™. And it’s like, it’s just such a creative concept. And it’s just such a fun company. Like we have so many great brands we work with. When you think about this, it’s like just being able to say the word balls, like you guys trim balls, like that’s what you do.
Like, here’s the question, what is the mission? What is the mission? Like, is there a mission statement that you guys have? It’s like, we trim balls or is it like, we’re just a personal grooming company? Like, what is your, just what is your mission internally? And is it any different than what it is externally?
Preston: I think externally, our mission is to bring the most innovative way to “manscape” your entire body. I think our saying is that we want to make men look good, feel good, and do good. And I think we do that through and through, from our website, through our products, through everything. It’s pretty amazing what we’ve done with our product line.
I like using it for everything. I feel good, like when I use my Beard Hedger™.
Mike: And you do use a hedger?
Preston: I do, I love it.
Mike: Is it like a multi, like the other ones. Does it slide up and down like a single clip? Or do you have like all the traditional?
Preston: It’s like a little rotary thing that you can spin to move it up and down, and you have different lengths to shave at.It does a great job. We also have The Chairman™ Pro that literally just came out, which is a foil razor that can also give you like a stubble look. My favorite thing about it is it has a light on it, just like the lawnmower. Yeah. Which I think is the coolest thing. Like, I’m in the shower, I don’t have good light.
Mike: Yeah.
Preston: And we have this little thing that shines a light that helps you see what you’re shaving.
Mike: And it’s all waterproof.
Preston: All waterproof everything.
Mike: Now can you turn the light on and off now or is it automatic?
Preston: Turn it on and off.
Mike: Oh, see that’s what I want.
Preston: Yeah.
Preston: And thinking about accessibility and how we innovate on products, one of the cool things I saw with the, I believe The Lawn Mower® 5.0. We added like a two tone light coloring. So it’s good to work on all skin colors where we had a sort of a brighter, whiter color, which didn’t work as well on all skin tones, where we added a two tone, so it’s more yellowish and warm.
So it allows you to see and it lets the user decide what’s best for them. So it’s just thinking about little things as we evolve, adding in just all these functionalities to make sure that anyone can use it and everyone’s comfortable with it. We take in customer feedback from everyone. We look at what the industry is doing, and then we also derive from what the industry is doing and release new things that make Manscaped unique.
Mike: Yeah. See, I mean, and talking about accessibility. I mean from our perspective, we talk about obviously the physical side of buildings and universal experiences, but at the same time, it’s digital, it’s content. But you guys are taking accessibility and you’re incorporating it into the products.
Preston: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t work as closely with the product team. I’m fascinated. I, we have a thing called all hands. It’s basically a monthly or bi monthly meeting where everyone in the company comes and a department introduces. And one of my favorites, it was probably pretty early on when I started was product design and they showed just a foam cutout of what I think The Lawn Mower® 4.0 at the time. Pre-production, pre everything of what it looked like. And they had it compared to The Lawn Mower® 3.0. They were doing testing and all these different things, prototypes, and just seeing what those people do like. I’m not in that part of the the industry and it’s just so cool to see how they innovate. They have product testing. They send it out to focus groups, they send it out to some employees to test. They send it out to everyone to get feedback and innovate on and keep going. I actually have a testing prototype of a Lawn Mower® 4.0, I think it’s near identical to what the production is.
Mike: The OG? Like, is it like on the stand in the bathroom, like in bronze is sitting there untouchable?
Preston: And now we also just released colorways on The Lawn Mower® 5.0. So now we have a gold one and a white one, just because people are asking for it. And I’m trying to make sure that we have what people want. So the white one looks very cool.
Mike: The gold one looks pretty, yeah. A lot of times you’ll go like when I go to a beard trimmer like I have a, I have a groomer. And they have a gold one and and and I don’t know. It’s just there’s something about the gold.
Preston: I’m a stickler for the, I like the black one.
Mike: I like the adjustable light, now I didn’t know you had adjustable. Cause that’s big time. So now I know you got adjustable light, you got the foil now on the new one.
Preston: Foil one, yep.
Mike: And now have you guys started packaging, like is The Shed sort of a package where you can get all four of these things?
Preston: Yeah, so we have bundles for everything. We started with I think the performance package, which has everything you need for below the waist and your balls you have.
Mike: Wait, what did you say?
Preston: The trimmer! The trimmer! And then all these formulations. So we don’t just make tools. We have formulations. We have deodorant. We have aftershave. I know it. Crop preserver.
Mike: Yeah, crop. I love that.
Preston: We have crop mops. Crop Mop® is one of my favorite things. The names are so fun. Crop Mop® is sort of like a towelette. But it’s great.
Like I go to music festivals. I love music. And of course, like throughout the time you’re walking all over the place and that sort of gives you a cleanup to make sure and refresh you up and keep you going.
Mike: So the insights into the products have just been so well done and so thoughtful and it’s so fun too. So it’s not only just fun and it’s great name, but the products work. You guys are always innovating in terms of what you guys are trying to do. And then you have all the little things that if you want to bolt on, which is fun.
Preston: We have a subscription service, which sort of different than other subscription services. Like usually a subscription, you order something, you just get it on repeat. Ours is different. We sort of cater it to looking at what you’ve purchased and then finding what best products that go with it and making sure that we refill it. So if you’re getting cologne, you don’t want to get a cologne in every shipment. But you’re going to get it every six months, get a replenishment.
We’re also going to send other things to you. If you’re getting a lawnmower, we’ll send a replacement blade, but we’ll also send deodorizer, crop mops, anything that you need to keep you going.
Mike: Now tell me. The one thing I will say, the nose trimmer piece.
Preston: The Weed Whacker®!.
Mike: The Weed Whacker®. So I get the little guards.
I do get, I was getting those for a while. Which is great, man, because you know, those things get old. But like, I struggle with the nose hair man. Like I just do. Do you know like, are you just supposed to go up in that thing or are you supposed to go around?
Are you supposed to open it and cut? I mean, what is like? Cause I was saying man, I get in there and then I still get these little stragglers.
Preston: Up and around. You can also just pick it up. You can sort of look in the mirror, try to stick it into the cylinder and get it cut.
Mike: Now, where can I get all these things? Now I know you can go on the site, but are you guys selling like the packages and everything still in like Target and all those other locations too? Is it only direct?
Preston: Yeah, we are multi channel. You can go on our website, you can go on Amazon, Target, Walmart. We are everywhere across the whole world, which is really exciting.
Mike: Okay. That’s great. Alright. So let’s talk about accessibility a little bit. Cause this is.
Preston: I mean, I could talk off the balls.
Mike: No, there it is. There it is. So the products’ obviously accessible, right? You guys are thinking about the consumer first, which is fantastic. Cause you always put the consumer first, which is amazing.
Preston: Yes.
Mike: When you talk about the e-commerce website that we can go and buy all these products, your role there is sort of, and I know we talked a little bit about it, but like you ultimately sort of manage the development team right. And so one of the things that our team has always said, it’s about incorporating best practices.
Mike: So you can come in and say, “Hey, we need to do something. Can you just get us an audit, fix it.” And then a year later, it completely is inaccessible again. You all have made a commitment to saying, hey listen, this is part of our experience. Everything we do is going to have an accessibility lens from the very beginning.
And I know that they were very, very, very focused on you, specifically saying, Preston has done an amazing job. Not only because in the beginning, It was going backwards and saying, “Hey we got to go back and fix this. We got to go back and fix this.” And now you’re incorporating new best practices to make sure that everything that you do has that lens in the very beginning. Talk a little bit about that and what you’ve done, and why you’ve done that.
Preston: We had a dev initiative, I think in 2021, when we were all looking for a partner to help us. So, we were exploring, getting past just what we knew. We sort of had the basics down of knowing how to tag things correctly on a website and using best practices, but we didn’t get to the full 100% overview of knowing exactly what’s needed. We joined with Ablr and we got a accessibility audit.
Mike: Yeah. I call it the roadmap remediation report, which is basically the. And again, that’s another thing I call it. I think Kim calls it the accessibility report. But to me I call it roadmap because it gives you every single violation. What is it violating, where is it violating, how severe is it, where is it located, and ultimately prioritization in terms of where you fix it. And then video, like you said earlier, videos and content around it. But it’s a roadmap on how to get your content where it needs to be. And so that was your first experience.
Preston: Yeah. We thought of it as the seemingly endlessly long spreadsheet that we’re never going to be able to complete. I’m kidding, of course, because we thought we were doing accessibility best practices. But what I’ve learned is even tooling doesn’t provide the context that’s actually needed to be accessible. A lot of things aren’t picked up. One of the hardest things I think that we’ve dealt with was making sure that any of our alerting modals and different pieces on the website that’s telling a user what happened in an interaction, that’s not caught up by these tools.
And screen readers have struggles with it. So when you’re making a change and we have a pop up saying, heck your change has been saved, or there was an error with your change. Our site was not alerting on that. And after Ablr pointed that out and we sort of worked for making that happen, I started exploring other sites.
I have a screen reader on my computer and I’ve noticed that like most don’t, even the big names. It’s shocking that you have these things that you would assume like as a visual learner, you can see my update’s been saved. And if you aren’t able to see that, you won’t know. And you’re sort of locked into the system and it’s just gotta be debilitating cause you don’t know where you’re at in the entire flow.
So that’s what I think has been amazing that we’ve learned that we have the ability to add that. We’re adding these tags and making sure that follow best practices and getting the confirmation from Ablr. Angus, he has been instrumental with us. So he has validated things for us. He’s walked through things. He’s pointed out things that we would not be able to do.
Mike: He’ll love to hear that too. He’s such a good dude man.
Preston: Yeah no, the whole team. Like that’s the great thing with Ablr as well. Like it’s not just the big company that we get put into a ticket process and don’t get any responses. Or you know, sort of get validations and it’s forgotten about like the team always re reviews things. They’re doing checks. They’ll catch things that we didn’t even see. The hard thing with websites is, every single release, every single piece of code added is possibly another bug. And it especially happens with accessibility bugs because you don’t really think about that. QA struggles with that because they’re not using screen readers.
So we sort of rely on Ablr as our accessibility QA to make sure that we’re not making those mistakes and they pop up left and right, because it’s impossible to see. Just like I said, we are able bodied people. We can see what’s happening on the screen. But not everyone else is. So we want to make sure we’re inclusive to everyone.
Mike: Thank you for joining us for this episode of Access Granted. Today we had the pleasure of hearing from Manscaped, a trailblazer in men’s grooming, as they shared their inspiring journey to make every customer experience more accessible and inclusive. At Ablr, we are grateful to connect with remarkable people and organizations passionate about embedding human kindness into their accessibility initiatives.
Mike: Together, we’re just not envisioning a more accessible future, we’re actively building it, one ball at a time. Stay inspired, stay committed, and keep pushing for progress.