GILLETTE'S NEW RAZOR BLADE
What the hell? Why is the AV carrying a story about a razor blade. Well, I read the "New Yorker" every week. The reason for this is because it has some of the best articles. They are written by people who know how to write, and the magazine reads like a book, and they are intellectual enough to be put to good use in some of my Uni essays. Like Elaine from Seinfeld, I never get the cartoons. The standard of the writing on American politics is outstanding, and they have carried some brilliant stories on hollywood history, and the current hollywood too. Their in depth examinations of some current affairs stories show us why we shouldn't brand all journalists as hopeless. Great writers contribute to the New Yorker, and its interesting to open a copy with this famous authors name not up in blazing colours, but just as another article. This time comes an in depth study of the new Gillette blade set to come out in Australia next year. I laughed when I saw that it was seven pages long. When I started reading though, it was very interesting. Maybe I love triviality, but I learned a lot. The article also takes us on a broad journey into this company. Did any of you realise how big this company is??? I have typed it out (my arm has now almost fallen off), so please excuse spelling mistakes.
THE BILLION-DOLLAR BLADE
How the Gillette Company reinvented the razor - and itself
by James Surowiecki (1999)
Miles Yeoman is a tinkerer. His skin is pale pink, his hair is a faded brown, and his metal rimmed glasses are thick enough to obviate the need for safety goggles. He spends his days in a small lab room, where he has put together a high-powered stereo microscope, a laser guided measuring device, and a monitor able to reproduce 3-D images, and has jury rigged them into a machine that can tell you, with remarkable accuracy how well you've shaved.
At forty times normal magnification, a freshly shaved face looks something like a clear-cut forest seen from an air-plane. Skin appears uneven and craggy, riven with streaks of broken red, and interspersed with black stumps cut at irregular angles. Peering through his stereo microscope, Yeoman guides the laser pointer to each stump and marks its tip with a yellow dot. Later, he'll download the data into a computer which will tell him just how much hair is cut by each stroke of the Gillette company's newest razor.
Yeoman works in one of GIllette's major research and development laboratories, which is known as U.K. R.D.L., and is situated on the outskirts of Reading England. There are only three real concerns here: skin, hair and metal. Reading, the Los Almos of shaving, is where the world's most advanced technolog in imaging, metallurgy and design is brought to bear on the most mundane of objects - the stainless-steel razor blade. It's the place where Gillette's newest razor, Mach 3, was born.
The product of seven years of continuous effort and an unprecedented seven hundred and fifty million dollars in manufacturing and development costs alone, Mach 3 will make its debut this July and by the turn of the century should be the most popular razor in America. Within two years, Gillette should be selling 1.2 billion Mach 3 blades each year. And Gillette needs Mach 3 to succeed in order to sustain the rapid profit growth that has made its stock among the fastest - climbing blue chips of the decade, and the company itself a dramatic study in corporate self-renovation. In the next few months a deluge of Mach 3 ads will hit television and magazines. If Gillette prevails in the marketplace, though, it will be not because its advertising is superior to the comptition's but because its razor is.
Housed in a low-slung red brick building that looks like a lot of junior high schools built in the fifties, UK RDL is a far cry from the gleaming modernist hives of most corporate labs. Its employees wander around on industrial quality linoleum floors, and gossip about balky spectroscopes by a coffee machine that looks left over from the days of the Macmillan Government. They wear short sleeved dress shirts and white lab coats. Old fashioned safety posters adorn the walls; one shows a bevy of hands erupting from a toolbox, with the legend "these are your most valuable tools." As eoman downloads data from his stereoscope rig, all around him other scientists and engineers are doing similar work, using handmade machines that have names like "hair response rig", "strain guard razor", and "laser Raman spectroscope." When you roll the "robust friction device" - a razor with wires sprouting from it - across your face, a nearby computer screen fills with numbers indicating how much friction it's exerting. A few rooms down the hall, a young engineer sits at the Silicon Fraphics workstation ad applies himself to 'finite element modelling', which means (as he helpfully explains) that he's trying to duplicate "the interaction between shaver, hair and skin." I peer over his shoulder at what looks like an animated sequence of a blade pulling and cutting. If the machine works, you should be able to see how well a blade prototype performs without actually making one. It separates workable ideas from whimsical ones.
UK RDL is attached to a Gillette factory, and when you walk through the lab's entrance you can hear the hum of large machines and the beeping of forklifts. It's all very grimy and real, and it carries a not very subtle message to the boffins: Don't just come up with cool ideas. Come up with cool ideas we can make.
"We're looking for the right sort of scientists," say John Terry, who was the director of the lab when the preliminary work was done on Mach 3, and who is now the director of its Boston counterpart, BRAD (Boston Research and Development). "If their aim is solely to create knowledge, it won't work for us. We're here to spot the thing that will make a differencein performance - that will lead to a new product." Terry, an Englishman with a shock of white hair, bright blue eyes, and a ready laugh, is a thirty year Gillette veteran. He has an elfin manner, as if playing with razors all day long were just more fun than any one person should be allowed to have. He earned a doctorate in metallurgy, worked on blade technology at Gillette when he was in his late twenties, and then, in 1965, joined the government, which had embarked on a crash program to bring the economy into the space age. "I got to talk to people in all these different industries and study various problems in manufacturing technology," Terry explains to me as we walk back to the Reading lab after lunch in the company's cafeteria.
Yes, but why abandon rocket science for... razor blades?
There's a hint of reproval in his reple: "You want tobe somewhere where you're actually producing something, don't you?"
TO CONTINUE : EXPLANATION OF BLADES SOUNDS LIKE LATE SHOW SKIT