The Grooming Moment Luxury Hospitality Forgot to Design
Luxury properties design almost every part of the guest’s day with intention, except the few minutes a guest spends getting ready. Men’s grooming is one of the last corners of the experience left undesigned. The Art of Shaving, the number one super premium men’s shaving brand, founded in 1996 and built on the ritual of a barbershop shave at home, is the kind of expert that corner has been waiting for.
The Part of the Stay No One Planned
A luxury property thinks carefully about how a guest arrives, how they sleep, what they eat, and how they feel in the room. The lighting is considered. The bath products are chosen. The coffee is specified down to the origin.
Then the guest stands at the bathroom mirror to get ready for a dinner or a meeting, and the intention stops. The grooming moment, the few minutes that shape how a guest feels walking out the door, is rarely designed at all. It is left to whatever generic products happened to make it into the room.
For a category built on attention to detail, that is a surprising gap. And it sits at a moment that matters more than its length suggests.
Why This Moment Carries Weight
Getting ready is not a neutral act. It is the point where a guest prepares to face whatever the day holds, a presentation, a celebration, an evening out. How they feel in that moment carries into everything that follows.
A guest who looks and feels their best walks out with a different kind of confidence, and they associate that feeling with the property that provided it. That is the quiet opportunity in the grooming moment. It is a chance to send a guest into their day feeling sharper, and to be remembered for it.
Most properties miss it, not by choice, but because grooming has never been treated as a designed experience the way the spa or the restaurant has. It has been treated as an afterthought, a bar of soap and a disposable razor, at a property where nothing else is left to chance.
What It Looks Like When Someone Takes It Seriously
The brands that understand grooming treat it as a ritual rather than a routine. That distinction is the whole point.
The Art of Shaving has built its name on exactly that idea since 1996. What began as a single shop on New York’s Upper East Side grew into a reputation for one thing: turning the daily shave into a considered, almost ceremonial experience, the feeling of a barbershop shave, recreated at home. As the number one super premium men’s shaving brand, its approach is built around a simple ritual of preparing, lathering, and caring for the skin, with products made from quality ingredients rather than filler.
The response speaks to how much that resonates. The brand holds a 4.7-star rating across more than 25,000 reviews, the kind of number that signals a genuine following rather than a passing purchase. People do not rate a razor that highly. They rate an experience they look forward to.
What This Means for Luxury Properties
The grooming moment is a designed experience waiting to happen. It is daily, it is personal, and it lands at a point in the stay when a guest is most focused on how they look and feel.
For an operator thinking about where to deepen the guest experience, this is a rare kind of opening: a touchpoint most competitors have overlooked entirely, and one that speaks directly to a guest getting ready for something that matters to them. The properties that design this moment, rather than leaving it to a disposable razor, are the ones a guest remembers as they walk out the door looking exactly as they hoped.
The Art of Shaving is a Partner of the International Luxury Hotel Association. For more information, reach out to mikey@theartofshaving.com