Dive Brief:

• Birchbox announced a rebranding of its men's brand Wednesday, from BirchboxMan to Birchbox Grooming, the company told Retail Dive in an email. BirchboxMan will be replaced by Birchbox Grooming on its monthly boxes starting June 1. 

• According to a company blog post, the rebranding was focused on "building an inclusive home that welcomes all types of customers" and doesn't limit women to buying beauty products or men to buying grooming products. "We offer beauty products and we offer grooming products, but our perspective is that anyone can shop either category; we don't want our brand name to dictate who's allowed to shop grooming," the post read.

• Birchbox Grooming sections will also be available at each of the beauty brand's pilot locations with Walgreens, a partnership, which was announced in October. The beauty retailer will offer full-size products in all six existing locations, as well as the five planned for 2019 that have yet to open, with brands including Pilot Men's Grooming, Duke Cannon, V76 by Vaughn, Oars and Alps, and Blind Barber, among others.

Dive Insight:

Birchbox's announcement is congruent with several trends currently unraveling in the beauty space.

For one thing, its continued partnership with Walgreens, as well as the expansion of grooming products available through those locations, furthers a narrative of drugstores and department stores partnering with new, young brands to put a fresh spin on their beauty departments.

A few months before Walgreens and Birchbox announced their partnership, CVS announced its own beauty pilot of a concept called BeautyIRL. The concept offers select beauty services through Glamsquad, a business that started with the intention of saving women time on high-quality beauty services and has since begun launching its own product, including haircare and, most recently, makeup.

Department stores have also gotten in on the trend, with many revamping their beauty departments to include more hands-on technology and service-based offerings. Both movements seem to be a response to the popularity of specialty retailers like Sephora and Ulta, which are well-known for their high-touch experiences and services.

The rebranding of Birchbox's grooming product line also highlights larger questions of inclusivity in the beauty market, which have sprung up more frequently over the last few years. Sephora, for example, recently announced it would be closing all of its U.S. stores for an inclusivity training in June, along with launching a marketing campaign focused on telling stories about belonging and inclusivity in the beauty space.

In September, Ulta revamped its own brand platform with a new tagline, "The Possibilities Are Beautiful," which included a video with a diverse cast of ages, ethnicities, sizes and genders. Efforts have also been made across the sector to increase the product assortment for non-white shoppers, including at Target, which launched eight new cosmetic brands geared toward medium and dark skin tones last year, and through new players on the scene like Rihanna's Fenty beauty line.