Corporations: King of Shaves

The gloom that hung over Cincinnati last week as the World Series ended in five games hung just as thickly over a Boston executive suite. The annual radio and television World Series sponsorship costs the Gillette Co., the world’s largest razor-blade manufacturer, a flat $3,000,000, whether the series goes four or seven games. “You root for anyone you want for the first game,” is a Gillette axiom. “After that, you root for the underdog so that Gillette can get its full seven games worth of advertising.”

Universal Mustache. But if it did not feel sharp, Gillette was looking sharper than ever. Half of all the shaving done in the U.S., including the women’s and electric shaving markets, is done with Gillette razors and blades. Since its founding in 1901, Gillette has never failed to make a profit, last year earned $37 million on record sales of $225 million. Gillette Board Chairman Carl J. Gilbert anticipates that the post-World Series push will boost 1961 sales to a new record.

Gillette was founded by a man who needed a shave. Standing in front of his mirror one day in 1895 with only a dull straight edge. King Camp Gillette, a salesman of bottle tops, suddenly had a vision of a flat, two-edged safety razor centered in a perpendicular holder. Gillette scraped up some money from friends, formed his company in 1901. He placed his own bushily mustached face on every package of blades, and launched a widespread advertising campaign to debeard the U.S. male. So successful was Gillette that his face became a medicine-cabinet fixture and the close shave a daily ritual. With firm patents on its razor and blade, Gillette was unnicked by competition until the ’20s, merged with its major rival (Auto Strop) in 1931. But mismanagement and a stock scandal during the ’30s sent Gillette’s sales tumbling, forcing the company in 1938 to hire Joseph P. Spang Jr. away from meat-packing Swift & Co. to straighten Gillette out.

Beauty Bandwagon. Looking for an advertising campaign with special appeal to men, Spang gambled on radio sponsorship of the World Series in 1939, sold so many razors the rest of the year that he committed Gillette to the sponsorship of a Cavalcade of Sports—football bowl games, weekly fights, and racing’s Triple Crown. During World War II, Spang sold the Pentagon on Gillette as the standard G.I. razor, came out of the war with 16 million permanent customers. With the domestic market nearly saturated, Gillette overhauled its overseas operations (which today account for 50% of the company’s profits), in 1948 began to diversify by spending $20 million for the Toni home permanent company and getting aboard the home-beauty bandwagon. While pushing Gillette’s sales from $17 million to $200 million, Spang looked around for an heir apparent, found him in Gillette’s Boston law firm. After rising from National Guard private to light colonel and winning a chestful of medals in the Pacific, Carl J. Gilbert had returned to his law partnership disenchanted with the law. “Fussing over a comma with a roomful of lawyers,” he says, “didn’t seem so important after being shot at.” Spang hired Gilbert as Gillette’s treasurer, in 1956 made him president and in 1958 chief executive officer.

Smooth Kisser, Buddy. Spang and Gilbert continued to diversify, bought Paper Mate pens in 1955 for $15 million, began to market a line of proprietary drugs (Thorexin, cough syrup and cough tablets) in 1957—and continued bringing out a stream of toilet accessories (latest: an aerosol deodorant) to boost Gillette sales. To combat the inroads of electric shavers, Gillette’s technicians went to work to perfect a sharper, smoother-cutting Super Blue Blade (by chemically treating the edges of the steel). Introduced last year, the Super Blue now accounts for 45% of Gillette’s blade sales in the U.S. Once a major threat to Gillette, electric shaver sales have fallen from a high of $138 million in 1956 to $100 million last year. To maintain its preeminence, Gillette aims much of its annual $35-$40 million advertising budget to wooing new shavers. Sunday comic sections are saturated with ads, and jive-talking disk jockeys ad-lib the merits of a “smooth kisser for the cool chick, young buddy.” For as Carl Gilbert well knows, today’s peach fuzz is tomorrow’s 5 o’clock shadow.