Business: Bogus Blades

The Gillette Safety Razor Co. prints on the tasteful green wrappers of its blades, besides a handsome portrait of King C. Gillette, the words “NO STROPPING NO HONING.” Timid users of Gillette blades, especially women, think these words are a command, forbidding the shaver ever to have a Gillette blade salvaged once it wears out. Other people ignore the legend or interpret it as gentle self-ingratiation by the Gillette Co., meaning, “Whoso uses a Gillette razor, he strops not, neither does he hone.”

On the Gillette blades themselves, all doubt is dispelled. There the Gillette Co. abruptly says: . “Not to be resharpened.” Nevertheless a certain bold percentage of Gillette users frequently have their blades honed and stropped, or do it themselves on machines made especially for that purpose.*

There is another legend on the Gillette blade wrappers, the last and smallest line of all. It needs no emphasis nor interpretation, being firm and final. It says: “Reg. U. S. Pat. Off.” The company needs hardly worry for feat purchasers will defy those words.

Yet last week, detectives who followed an automobile from Irvington, N. J., † to Newark, where the men in it passed several packages to a woman in a window in a mean street; and police who later raided the so-called Peerless Blade Corporation’s factory in Irvington, found the Gillette Co.’s smallest, most serious legend had indeed been defied, grossly. In the Peerless factory they found many hundreds of thousands of counterfeit safety razor blades, modeled on the Gillette design, ready to be wrapped in tasteful green wrappers with the handsome portrait and the two legends. At other hiding places, raiders seized more of the imitations; two million blades in all, which had cost perhaps $10,000 to manufacture out of cheap metal, which would have retailed as genuine Gillette blades for $150,000.

The Gillette Co. had traced the bogus blades after hearing that the South American market was flooded with them. Eight suspects were held for questioning.

*As everyone knows, safety razor manufacturers derive the bulk of their profit, not from razors, but from the replaceable blades.

† Not to be confused with Irvington, N. Y.