Hive Health

We have a winner, following extensive public voting,  a massive push on charity giving and dedicated support from Rossy.

The Hive Movember award for effort, growth and giving goes to Chris. Chris raised stacks of cash, and contributed the most to our £1205 total. When asked what had contributed to his current hairy success he put this success down to “his ambitious follicles” Modesty to the last.

Chris we salute you, and like you more now you are shaven.

As I am sure you will agree. Keeping a moustache definitely makes your face look quite rugged and gives you a very serious look as well. It adds more volume to your face and accentuates facial features like eyes, chin, jawbones, etc.

After a month of facial effort; yearning for bushy growth, midnight itching, exfoliation, trimming, maintenance, and styling – here we are, the results of a month of dedication. So far we have raised a stack of cash for Prostate cancer, and have made a number of local new friends in the Soho area (all facilitated by our facial common ground), which has been handy as I doubt any of us has got any action since going Mo.

You can track the progress we have made through our Mo Diaries here - Week 1 Week 2 Week 3, you could even download the photos to use as a screen saver.  Week 4 – our final week is below for  all to savour.

It wouldn’t seem fair to have the judging left purely to the non-hairy in the office. So here you are. Please vote for your favourite facial surprise.

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Hive now has a geek squad, a hard core of nerds who seek out science in its purest form. When we aren’t sawing golf balls in half in the office kitchen, we’re usually at the Dana Centre. Check it out, it’s part of the Science Museum and last night we arrived to partake in a series of lectures on the future of science.

We found out that the lectures were to be given in the Pecha Kucha style. Essentially there would be 10 different talks, each around 6 minutes along, directed by a slide show over which the speaker had no control. First was a talk on cosmology from a Cambridge guy who became increasingly attractive over the minutes as he wowed us with pictures of galaxies and planets.

He was very quickly followed by a lady from Bristol who was looking at science in story writing. This one we struggled to take seriously – her story of The Painter and the Physicist didn’t touch at all on the richness of the art-science mix.

The evening unveiled great talks on everything from CERN and the Large Hadron Collider to the future of cognitive neurology. My personal favourite was around stem cell research in blindness. It was a fascinating event, but it would have been good to hear from fewer speakers for longer to really get a feel of their area of specialism.

That said, our geeky brains are refueled. We have a further trip planned for the Horror in Dreams talk on the 9^th March. Let us know if you fancy it.

Deep in the hairiness of Movember here.  We are all far from designer stubble and it’s time to do something about this. We need trimming and we need it now. On offer has been the usual set of man products – from the joys of King of Shaves to the  faceless world of Gillette. The shelf at our local pharmacy got me thinking about developing products, pipelines, and Becks, Roger, Tiger et al. avataring their clean shaven faces, and the brands that occupy this space.

I am not sure whether the Gillette pipeline delivers any genuine value at all. Its all the damn same. Beyond the financial performance, I cannot see the point of the product range.  I am bored senseless of the desperate need to convince me of blade proliferation and its ever closer benefit. Is Gillette focused on media led demand, or product led experience? If the former where can the company go next; 20 blades shaving ever closer?

When I compare the biggies with the smaller market entrants, you cannot help but cover King of Shaves. The product was discovered when Will King, started using his wife’s bath oils to beat his razor burn. Some pretty focused selling later, a gutsy fax to Harrods that led to a distribution deal and that all important halo effect. the brand is marching along and getting recognition in the US – moving steadily and surely. It feel like a company with feel, panache and honesty. A face and personality in an area that’s all about exactly this.

I found this interview with Will and thought it pretty inspiring for those of us having started something, and enjoying the days we find ourselves in. Although in my current ginger-hairy-face-prison – I would be happy with a pair of scissors or a wax strip.