Flamingo: The Razor Brand That Said No to Pink - Challenger Series
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Flamingo walked into one of the most tired, most patronising categories in retail and decided patronising didn’t work for them, or their audience.
Written by Rachel Pearson
For decades, women's razors followed a simple formula. Take a men's product. Make it smaller. Make it pink. Charge more for it. Repeat until somebody notices.
Women OBVIOUSLY noticed. Somebody else did too…
Enter Flamingo.
Launched in 2018 by Harry's Labs, Flamingo set out to do for women's grooming what Harry's had done for men's shaving, strip out the crap, be honest about what the product actually is, and build a brand that talks to its audience like they're the adults they are.
The brand became the third biggest player in women's shave in the US by saying something different in a different way of saying it.
First rule: No f**king pink
The Flamingo brand launched with minimalist, sophisticated design and packaging with one founding principle built in from the start: no pink.
That's not a small decision in a category where pink is the default setting. It's really a category reset because even though we hate it, pink is the easily recognisable colour signal of products for women. It’s a visual sign ‘female? Then this is for you’, which is pretty gross and infantilising isn't it? But shunning pink was Flamingo saying, before a single word of copy is written, that they are not going to do what every other brand in the aisle has done. We think more of our audience.
That kind of brand confidence is rare but it works because it's consistent. The packaging, the copy, the campaigns, they all come from the same place. The message embedded in everything is, ‘we know you're smarter than this’.
More than a million women had already signed up to Harry's before Flamingo launched as they were drawn in by better pricing and a subscription model, precisely because women's products carried a premium that men's didn't. (Cue inner rage blackout)
Flamingo didn't quietly benefit from the pink dynamic. They named it. The pink tax, the practice of charging women more for near-identical products, wasn't yet mainstream conversation in 2018. Flamingo helped make it one. That's a baller challenger move: identify what everyone is quietly accepting and call it out.
The category was also selling an aspiration that didn't exist. Silky smooth. Zero body hair, presented as the natural state of womanhood. (Ew) Thankfully Flamingo took the opposite position, embracing women's natural bodies "bumps, dry skin, body hair, and all", and building what they called a "judgment-free space made for education and candid conversation, where nothing's taboo."
That's a culture shift supported by a bold brand willing to stick its neck out for what’s right.
The campaign that made the industry bush…I mean BLUSH
In 2019, Flamingo did something that most personal care brands would never sanction in a boardroom. They launched a campaign about pubic hair.
GASP!
They didn't do it euphemistically. No wink and a soft-focus model. With full-page ads by Paula Scher in the The New York Times, transit posters across New York, a physical campaign headquarters, and a toll-free hotline.
The Bush 2020 campaign used the visual language of a presidential election to celebrate body hair choice with taglines like "This is a Pubic Service Announcement," "Supporting America's Growth," and "We Are Grow-Choice."
They launched it alongside Mons Mist, a spray-on conditioner for pubic hair and skin and called the whole thing a "full-frontal introduction to talking about pubic hair."
The brilliance of the campaign is two-fold
First, it's genuinely funny. As an agency with comedy chops, we love that. The politically-inspired typographic system is bold and absurd in exactly the right measure. The campaign avoids euphemisms entirely, using frank, straightforward language that treats its customers with respect and intelligence. Bold in a world where words for female body parts mean a possible social media shadow-banning!
Second, the humour is doing serious work. Flamingo's general manager Allie Melnick put it plainly: "In today's world, there are binary messages being shouted. In order to be feminine, you have to get rid of hair. In order to be a feminist, you have to grow it out. In reality, women make choices that are unique to them."
That's the brand thesis and the campaign is the most entertaining possible expression of it.
The tone of voice that felt like a friend
What separates Flamingo from most personal care brands isn't just what they say. It's how.
The category default is aspirational distance. The idealised woman, the perfect result, the before-and-after. Flamingo went the other direction entirely, warm, direct, a bit cheeky, never preachy.
Their stated aim was to make women more comfortable talking about shaving and waxing, normalising the fact that women might have hair "here, or there." That sounds simple. In execution, it requires a level of consistency and nerve that most brand teams don't have. Every piece of copy, every campaign, every product name has to hold that same position.
Bush 2020 didn't feel like a stunt because it wasn't one. It felt like a natural extension of a brand that had been building up to exactly this conversation since day one.
They kept challenging, not just at launch
Challenger energy is easy to perform at launch. The real test is whether it survives retail expansion, category competition, and time.
Since launching in 2018, Flamingo became the third largest player in women's shave in the US, with coverage in Vogue, Vanity Fair, Elle and InStyle, and major beauty accolades from Allure and Essence.
In 2025, they launched their biggest campaign yet, a retro 80s infomercial-style push for their new Moisture+ razor, airing across linear, digital and streaming platforms, complete with leg warmers and static graphics. The brand that said no to pink is still refusing to be boring. Competitive enough that when Dollar Shave Club finally entered women's grooming in 2026, their CEO explicitly called out Flamingo by name, positioning the new line as "anti-Flamingo", the clearest possible signal that Flamingo now owns a position in this category worth arguing against.
When competitors are defining themselves in opposition to you, have you won the framing war?
Key takeaway
Flamingo looked at a category built on condescension and chose directness. They saw a gap between what brands were saying and what women were actually thinking, and they closed it with humour, honesty, and a campaign that ran a full-page ad in the New York Times about pubic hair!
That's what bold brand content does. It earns attention by being genuinely worth paying attention to.
Like the other brands in this series, Flamingo proves that the most powerful thing a challenger can do is say the thing the incumbent is too nervous to say.
