Baby Face
link P&G Razor Launches in Recession’s Shadow – WSJ.com.
This is truly what makes America tick. Never mind the weighty issues of the day, annoying things such as unemployment, depleted pension funds, collapsing currency, nuclear nations, far away wars, none of that stuff. What men prize most above all is a close shave.
According to the website, about.com, the patent for the ‘safety’ razor was issued in 1904 to King C. Gillette, ushering in whole new way for men to make themselves presentable. Until this point in history, men had to endure the fickleness of shearing off facial hair with various kinds of sharpened knives and until Gillette’s invention, a straight razor. I don’t know about anyone else, but the thought of sitting in a barber’s chair all lathered up while he goes at your face and throat with one of those sharpened blades makes me tense up like a fat guy at a cannibal convention.
Before the invention of the safety razor, it’s amazing that men bothered to shave at all. Even with a safety razor, it was not unusual for men’s faces to appear as if they had been using their faces to fight cats, with red slashes and nicks aplenty. The interesting part of the Gillette story is the idea planted in his head by William Painter, the inventor of the crown cork bottle cap. Painter told Gillette that the real money was to be made by selling your product over and over again to the same satisfied customer. Sheer genius really. Thus was born the now famous “razor blade” business model, though as we see, it should really be called the bottle cap model.
Gillette spent money and research to develop the type of steel needed to satisfy his business model, consequently factories were built, people were employed and with a military contract in hand, the rest as they say, was history. From an idea to a business dynasty. Fast forward a little more than 100 years. Even with the invention of electric razors of all kinds, the razor blade business is still pretty vigorous. According to the linked article, sales of Fusion, Proctor and Gambles’s top selling razor, contributes over $1 billion dollars of sales a year to Gillette’s parent company. The product itself has evolved substantially from the 1904 model. Over the years, there have been multiple blades added to the device which now stands at 4 or 5 on some of the recent iterations. I can’t remember exactly how many, suffice to say, you are essentially shaving with venetian blinds.
The real challenge though will be how they propose to sell this. The article states that the blades will sell for almost $17 for a 4 blade package. Not exactly shave and a haircut, 2 bits as per the old ditty. Seems like a lot of scratch to scratch your face. I suspect women will be as likely to purchase at this price point as men, since at $17 bucks, a case of beer may be the stronger pull. However you can never count out a company that has been successful for well over a hundred years on ingenuity of marketing alone. Now about those nose hairs…..