Man Crates: The Masculine Beauty Box You Open With a Crowbar
The Man Crates team posing with their signature wooden boxes. (Photo: Man Crates)
There are a lot of ways to be a man—and Man Crates aims to cater to every type of masculinity. This San Francisco Bay Area startup, which just raised $3.1 million in funding, sells a variety of “manly” gifts, from a clean shave kit with bergamot aftershave to a Sriracha-themed snack pack with spicy bacon jerky. Most of the gifts come in wooden crates emblazoned with the Man Crates logo and outfitted with a laser-etched crowbar. It takes a fair amount of effort to open the plywood crate, but Jonathan Beekman, the burly, geek-with-glasses founder of Man Crates, told Yahoo Beauty “it’s all part of the fun of enacting masculinity.” The idea isn’t revolutionary: Birchbox already has a monthly subscription box for men’s grooming products, Manpacks delivers “manly basics” like socks, underwear, and toiletries to your door, and UK-based Men Are Useless aims to deliver monthly boxes of grooming products so that “men (and the people who love them)” have “more time to play out.”
The Clean Shave Crate with the laser-etched crowbar. (Photo: Man Crates)
“If you watch a lot of TV, it’s easy to have the impression that there are two types of guys: sex deprived adolescent frat boys or corporate drones who sit in their cubes and are laughably inept at doing their household chores,” said Beekman. “I think true masculinity is what guys aspire to—in the middle. They want passion and adventure. These are things that our grandfathers used to do. I think we’re trying to recapture that.” For example, Beekman’s grandfather was a truck driver who would get “man pampered” at an old school barbershop once in a while, and the Clean Shave Crate, which includes a silver tip badger brush and a Parker razor, attempts to recapture that sense of rugged masculinity. “Like the tender moment you wish you had with your dad when you hit puberty, we’re going to re-teach you how to shave,” the website copy reads. “Your average middle-class guy cares about his appearance—he just might not want to talk about it,” said Beekman.
The crisis of modern masculinity has long been researched and documented—according to a November 2014 report by UK mental health charity CALM (the Campaign Against Living Miserably), 42% of men surveyed said they felt pressure to be the main breadwinner in the family, and 54% of these men lost their jobs. 29% of these men felt that they were “less of a man” without a job. Men can no longer define their masculinity—or self worth—by the same standards as their fathers and grandfathers, but they can recapture the tender moments they shared with the men they loved the most.
The Man Crates guys (and gal). (Photo: Man Crates)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, 65% of Man Crates’ customers are women who are buying for their boyfriends, husbands, or brothers. Men’s gifting services like Man Crates and Manpacks might actually be trying to solve a problem: “People are becoming more disconnected with the people around them, and we’re helping people reconnect with the guys they care about,” said Beekman.
Related:
How Male Grooming Is “Ruining” Men
