My Gillette Mach 3

I remember when I was in class 10th which was the year 2000 I had got enough of facial hair that I was using scissors to trim. Most of my Arunachalee local friends didn’t have that issue, some genes at play :). Probably in that year itself my father got me a razor Gillette Mach 3 and it is the same razor that I am still using in the year 2021 and will continue to do so. That is easily 20 years and over 1000 shaves on an average 1 shave a week. I did buy the blades but the razor has remained the same original one.

Other than this razor I am not sure if I am using something actively that is of similar times. I have kept few things like my Fastrack Watch from school days, Wing Sung Ink pens, my first Nokia 1100 phone but not using them actively. My mother prides on few things that she has in her kitchen like the cooker when we we were just few years or the cooking stove when we were in primary school. My mother will beat most of the people hands down on keeping  stuff carefully and using them for a long time.

So I just got curious as to how was the development cycle for such a product and here is that amazing backstory of the company and the razors.

Gillette – The Company

Gillette was founded by King C. Gillette in 1901 as  American Safety Razor Company which he renamed as Gillette Safety Razor Company in 1902. He had realized while working for food can company there is value in basing a business on a product that was used a few times, then discarded. Shaving razors at that time were expensive and had to be sharpened. He envisioned that  a razor whose blade could be thrown away when it dulled would meet a real need and likely be profitable. And hence he started working on the design with other folks who were machinist and helped him to improve the design of the removable blades. Mr Gillette is though falsely credited with the razor and blades business model where one sells razor cheaply to sell blades at premium which Gillette actually started by following competitors. In not many years he started to sell 50 razors a year to millions across America and Europe. Gillette was not able to keep the control of the company and soon sold out to Joyce but his name remained. He almost went bankrupt due to his investment and the great depression.  Mr. Gillette was a interesting personality and his ideas were inclined towards socialist.

The patent that Gillette had got in 1904 looked like this

Gillette Mach 3 Product Development

Fast forward to 1990’s and Gillette has been fairly good at incremental innovation in the Safety Razor product line and had expanded across the world. Mach3 development had started in 1993 and was a secret project with a 3 blade system.  While doing the development the company chose the product design such that it can be easily patented and there were about 35 patents protecting the design both the razor handle and the removable. 

Once the prototype design was ready, company invested about $750 million on continuous motion production lines and robotics in the Boston Plant. This gave them the  capacity to produce 1.2 billion Mach3 razor cartridges a year. It also spent another $300 million in order to market the product through add campaigns and over television, retail channels and others.

Over the years Razor and Blades have contributed to a quite large part of their revenues and profits. Gillette eventually acquired many brands like Duracell, Braun, Oral-B and eventually merged with P&G in 2005.

Learnings for any product development

Product development takes time and being in the industry for a while helps to create differentiated product. It also helps to build confidence that volumes can be sold which will mean enormous investment in manufacturing. But what happens when you are not making the copies of the same product unlike Mach3. 

Protecting the product through patents allows enough time to  keep the competitors at bay, but legal costs and battles take a lot of time and investment. The real barrier to entry can be manufacturing prowess and cost structures that will neither be easy to replicate and nor meet a profitability. But protection is important otherwise a bigger shark can come asking for licensing fees (Remember Micromax/Intex versus Ericson)

Products made to last also denies a company many customers like I never moved to Gillette Fusion which maybe their best and newest product. The backward compatibility is also something a company needs to keep thinking while bringing out incremental changes to the product. 

Does the vendor make the product obsolete themselves? Apple has been accused of slowing down their earlier version to encourage people to move to the latest product. Products like razor don’t have to change with technology changes but what about products that have electronics or software products that are design to run on particular machines (Remember Mainframes)

What products have you used for a while? Please let me know by commenting out here? I would like to know. How products in the future should be made?