Birchbox Man – My Journey Into the Land of Products

A while back I wrote about Birchbox and how much I loved what they were doing.  My wife treats the day that her Birchbox arrives like a holiday.  A few months ago when the company launched Birchbox Man, my wife signed me up for it.  It was nine parts curiosity and one part self indulgence.

A few days ago the first shipment arrived.  I happened to be out of town, and finally got around to opening it on Monday.  The Birchbox Man box is $20 per month, which is twice as much as the women’s version.

Here’s how it went:

As usual, Birchbox did a great job with the packaging.  The box opened like a drawer and had a card on the top that told me about everything I was about to gaze upon.

The contents of my Birchbox Man were as follows:

• A bag of bacon flavored spicy caramel popcorn (yes, you read that right) from Ovenly
• Two decks of playing cards from Dan & Dave
• Some shampoo (which as you can see from the picture below I do not need) from Kerastase Homme
• Shave gel from Zirh
• Cologne from John Varvatos

Of all the items in the box, the thing I liked most was the cologne.  The popcorn was not a hit (and I love popcorn).  The playing cards were nice, but not sure how much use I will get out of those.  The shampoo I will end up giving away, and I already use a product called the Cooling Fix that came in my wife’s Birchbox a long time ago for shave gel.  I will still try this one, but I love the other one.

I guess I was a bit disappointed by the contents of the Man box.  It costs twice as much (as I said above), and I don’t feel like I got twice the value.  I will probably give it another month because I trust the people at Birchbox to deliver based on our history with them, but if it’s not significantly better that will be it.