Cremo

Before he became obsessed with shaving, Mike Boone made dry-erase boards and markers, building Boone International into a business big enough that Fortune Brands bought it in 1999. A Stanford-trained engineer and Newport Beach native, Boone treated his next project the way he treated the first one: as an engineering problem nobody had bothered to solve properly. He had tried dozens of shave creams and gels over the years and disliked all of them, and when he dug into how they were made, he found that the industry spent far more on marketing the cans than on what came out of them.

So he spent roughly fifty thousand dollars of his own money chasing a single quality he could only describe as impossibly slick, reformulating in pursuit of a glide that would let a razor pass without nicks or burn. The result was a concentrated cream so different from the foaming aerosols of the era that, at launch, it was the company's entire reason to exist. Boone sold it the slow way, through mall kiosks and small boutiques, where a clerk could actually demonstrate the difference on the back of a customer's hand. In 2007 Kyle Schroeder came aboard and pushed toward mass-market distribution, betting an ordinary guy would pay a few dollars more for a noticeably better shave.

That patience paid off when the men's-grooming wave finally crested. Cremo expanded into beard oil, hair, body wash, deodorant, and a roster of multi-layered fragrances such as Bourbon and Oak, Italian Bergamot, and Palo Santo. Retail sales reportedly reached around seventy-five million dollars by 2018. The trade-off is visible in the catalog: the lineup is now driven as much by scent and packaging as by the formulation fixation that started it. The original cream still does the slick, irritation-free thing better than almost anything in the drugstore aisle, but much of the range is competent grooming rather than reinvention.

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