He Had a Dull Blade and Six Years to Fix It — The Razor-Sharp Story of Gillette

In 1895, on an ordinary morning in Brookline, Massachusetts, a travelling salesman named King Camp Gillette stood at his sink and tried to shave. The blade of his straight razor was dull. He would have to visit a barber or a cutler to have it sharpened — again. It was inconvenient, expensive, and for a man who spent his working life moving between cities, a persistent, nagging frustration.

He stood there with the dull razor in his hand, and the idea arrived fully formed: what if the blade itself was the part you threw away?

Not the razor. Not the handle. Just the blade — thin, stamped from inexpensive sheet steel, sharpened on both sides, and so cheap to produce that when it dulled, you simply replaced it and moved on.

It sounded simple. It was not. MIT-trained engineers told him it could not be done. The steel would not hold an edge sharp enough to shave cleanly if made thin enough to be disposable. Six years of failed experiments followed. King Gillette approached metallurgists, chemists, and engineers throughout the late 1890s, trying to find someone who could turn his vision into metal and commerce.

In 1900, he found William Emery Nickerson — an MIT-trained chemical engineer who others had written off as an idealist, but who saw in Gillette's idea not an impossibility but an unsolved problem. Nickerson agreed to take it on.

On 28 September 1901, the American Safety Razor Company was formally incorporated in South Boston — soon renamed, at Gillette's insistence, the Gillette Safety Razor Company.

The idea that had arrived in a moment of morning frustration had become a business.

51 Razors, 168 Blades, and the Slow Start of a Revolution

Production began in 1903. The first year's sales were modest to the point of embarrassment: 51 razors and 168 blades. King Gillette had staked everything on a product that, in its first twelve months, found fewer than 100 customers.

Then the second year happened.

Nickerson had built a new blade-grinding machine that removed the production bottleneck, and Gillette had begun using print advertising aggressively — building trust in a new way of shaving among men who had only ever known the straight razor. Sales in 1904 climbed to 90,884 razors and 123,648 blades. The product that had seemed impossible had found its market, and the market was enormous.

On 15 November 1904, Gillette received US Patent No. 775,134 for his safety razor. The patent on the disposable blade technology gave the company a window of legal protection — and Gillette used that window not just to sell razors, but to build habits. The company leaned heavily into advertising, targeting men who shaved daily, building the association between clean-shaven appearance and modern professional masculinity that would anchor the brand's identity for over a century.

By 1905, Gillette had opened its first international branch in London. Operations in Paris, Austria, Germany, Russia, and Scandinavia followed rapidly — recognising early that half the world's population was a potential customer, and that shaving habits, once formed, tended to last a lifetime.

The War That Turned a Generation Into Loyal Customers

The First World War produced one of the most consequential marketing events in Gillette's history — one that was entirely unplanned.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, the US government signed a contract with Gillette to supply shaving equipment to every soldier in its armed forces. Over the course of the war, the government issued approximately 3.5 million Gillette razors and 36 million blades to American servicemen. Gillette hired hundreds of new workers and ran its factories around the clock to fulfil the order.

The military logic was hygienic: in the trenches, beards harboured lice. The shaving mandate was a health intervention. But its commercial consequence was transformational. Millions of young American men — who might not otherwise have encountered Gillette's product — were trained, in active service, to shave daily with a Gillette razor. When the war ended and those men returned home, they brought the habit with them. Gillette's post-war marketing explicitly reinforced this: it did not need to convince these veterans that the product worked. It only needed to ensure they kept buying replacement blades.

The blade was the business. The razor was the mechanism that delivered the customer back to the store.

The Business Model That Many Industries Copied

Gillette is historically associated with what became known as the "razor-and-blades" business model: sell the durable handle at an accessible price — even at a loss — and generate sustained, high-margin revenue from the replacement blades that customers must purchase repeatedly for as long as they own the handle.

In 1921, when Gillette's original patent was due to expire and competitors were preparing to flood the market with copies, the company made a decisive move: it introduced a redesigned razor, and simultaneously dropped the price of its original model dramatically, making Gillette razors genuinely affordable to almost any working American man. The new razor was premium-priced. The old one was cheap. The blades — for both — were the profit engine.

This model did not originate with Gillette exactly as mythology often suggests. But Gillette refined and weaponised it at a scale and consistency that made the company the world's most studied example of recurring revenue in physical products. Printer manufacturers, coffee capsule companies, video game console makers, and subscription software businesses have all, at various points, acknowledged some version of the same logic.

A Century of Innovation in the Handle and the Blade

Gillette's commercial strategy across the twentieth century was built around a rhythm of deliberate, carefully timed product innovations — each one positioned as the finest shave possible, each one launched with enough advertising spend to establish the new standard before competitors could respond.

In 1932, the Gillette Blue Blade — dipped in blue lacquer — arrived and became one of the most recognisable blades in the world. In 1934, the "twist to open" design made blade changing dramatically easier. In 1953, Foamy shaving cream extended the brand beyond razors. In 1971, the Trac II twin-blade system arrived, marketed with the claim that a second blade caught what the first blade missed. In 1977, the Atra introduced a pivoting razor head. In 1989, Gillette launched what would become one of the most famous advertising taglines in history: "The Best a Man Can Get," created by BBDO and launched during the Super Bowl. In 1998, the MACH3 — the world's first triple-blade razor — arrived, backed by extensive patent protection and heavy advertising. In 2006, the Fusion five-blade system followed.

Each innovation extended the brand's technological claim and its premium pricing, and each was protected by layers of patents that gave Gillette a competitive window before alternatives emerged. The timing of these launches was rarely accidental: Gillette consistently introduced new systems as patents on older products neared expiry, resetting the competitive clock with each generation of technology.

"The Best Men Can Be" — The Campaign That Divided the World

On 13 January 2019, Gillette launched one of the most discussed advertising campaigns in modern history.

"We Believe: The Best Men Can Be" — created by Grey Advertising and directed by Kim Gehrig — was a short film that began by invoking Gillette's 30-year tagline "The Best a Man Can Get," before pivoting to ask: "Is this the best a man can get?"

What followed was footage of bullying, sexual harassment, and the kind of passive, bystander masculine behaviour that the #MeToo movement had brought into national conversation. The film closed with scenes of men intervening, men mentoring, men choosing accountability — and the reframing: not "the best a man can get," but "the best men can be."

The campaign was accompanied by a three-year commitment of more than $1 million annually to non-profit organisations supporting young men and boys.

The backlash was immediate and substantial. Calls to boycott Gillette trended globally. Conservative commentators accused the brand of unfairly characterising all men as toxic. Others praised it as an overdue corporate acknowledgement of a systemic cultural problem. Initial social media sentiment skewed heavily negative.

What followed was complex. Gillette's online sales on Amazon continued to grow. P&G took a significant Gillette-related writedown in mid-2019, though the specific causes were multiple and not exclusively campaign-related. Market share in the blades and razor category showed a decline following the ad's release. The campaign generated enormous global attention — and divided opinion in ways that no previous Gillette campaign had approached.

The "We Believe" campaign remains, by any measure, one of the most consequential brand decisions of the 2010s — a case study in the risks and possibilities of purpose-driven marketing at global scale.

The Marketing Strategy That Built the World's Most Dominant Razor Brand

Gillette's marketing across 125 years rests on a set of strategies that are worth examining separately — because each one, on its own, represents a foundational idea that marketing textbooks reference.

The disposable as the infinite business. The principle King Gillette internalised from Crown Cork & Seal's founder — build something that is used once and thrown away, so the customer keeps coming back — was the first and most enduring strategic insight of the business. The razor handle was never the business. The replacement blade, purchased again and again, forever, by every customer who owns a Gillette handle, was the business. Every strategic decision that followed — product innovation, military distribution, price segmentation — was built around maximising the lifetime value of a customer who had been committed to the system.

Military seeding as the ultimate mass trial. The US government's World War I contract was, in retrospect, the largest and most effective free sampling campaign in consumer goods history. Millions of men received a Gillette razor as part of their military kit, learned to use it daily under army discipline, and returned home as habitual Gillette customers. Gillette's post-war advertising simply reinforced a behaviour that the war had already created. The lesson — that getting a product into regular use is more valuable than any amount of brand advertising — informed Gillette's distribution strategy for decades afterward.

Innovation timed to patent clocks. Gillette's product innovation pipeline was not merely R&D for its own sake. Each new razor system — twin-blade, triple-blade, five-blade, pivoting head, lubrication strip — was timed to arrive as previous patents expired, resetting Gillette's technological claim and restarting the premium pricing cycle with each generation. Consumers who wanted "the best shave possible" were consistently given a new answer to what "best" meant, at a price that made buying the previous generation feel like settling.

"The Best a Man Can Get" as emotional architecture. The 1989 tagline, created by BBDO and launched during the Super Bowl, was not a product claim. It was an identity claim. Gillette was not saying its razors were the best; it was saying the man who used Gillette was the best — aspirational, accomplished, at the peak of his daily presentation. This emotional framing kept Gillette's positioning premium and personal, anchoring the brand in confidence and excellence rather than the more functional territory of closeness or comfort that competitors occupied.

Athlete endorsement as performance proof. From Gillette's very earliest use of sports figures as endorsers in its first decades of operation — an approach it is credited with pioneering in advertising history — through its modern partnerships with Roger Federer and other global sports figures for the Fusion ProGlide launch, Gillette has consistently used elite athletic achievement as a shorthand for precision, performance, and the aspiration to be the best. The athlete who uses Gillette is not endorsing a grooming product. He is vouching for the product's fit with a performance mindset.

From 51 Razors to $57 Billion

In January 2005, Procter & Gamble announced its acquisition of The Gillette Company in a deal valued at approximately $57 billion — one of the largest consumer goods acquisitions in history. Gillette became the centrepiece of P&G's Global Grooming division, alongside Braun, Oral-B, and other brands the company had accumulated over its century of operation.

Today, Gillette products are sold in more than 200 countries. The brand that began with 51 razors sold in a single year in South Boston has generated billions of dollars in annual revenue for over a century, driven by the same fundamental business logic its founder identified while standing at a sink in Brookline with a dull blade in his hand.

The blade was always going to be replaced. King Camp Gillette simply decided that it should be by him.

Founded 28 September 1901. First sale 1903: 51 razors, 168 blades. Acquired by P&G 2005 for $57 billion. Sold in 200+ countries. Still the best a man can get.