Darman's main role in the development of Mach 3 was the design memo that his department gave Gillette's chief industrial designer, Mike Gray, who has been with the company since the early sixties and still talks about his craft with an air of wonderment. Darman told Gray, who had designed Sensor, that he wanted something masculine, high-tech, and aerodynamic. Gray already knew that, for engineering reasons, the razor had to have a very wide head and a forward pivot. And then he listened to what people who were shaving with the early versions of the Manx were saying.
"I heard that in some early shaving tests people compared the razor to a paintbrush," Gray tells me. "It was so effortless, they said, that it felt as if you were painting your beard off. So I took a paintbrush, and put a razor cartridge in the bristles, and at a meeting I pulled out the paintbrush with the cartridge and showed how as you drew the brush along a surface the cartridge head would swivel and bounce back into position."
It was also clear from the beginning that Mach 3 had to have a distinctive metal finish. To make sure that the plating company they were using got it right, Gray suggested that its engineers go out and rent the movie "terminator 2," with its computer-generated liquid-metal villain. "Once the guys at the plating company saw the movie, they knew exactly what I was looking for," he says. "It's not chrome. It's almost mercury like in its finish, and it should seem as if metal had just been poured over it."
The aerodynamic look of the razor does make a happy match with its new name, which was chosen after an elaborate filtering system had pared an original list of several hundred down to four - Triad, Synchro 3, Vector 3, and Mach 3. Besides being consumers' favorite, Mach 3 resonated with all the themes that Darman wanted to strike with the product's three hundred million dollar advertising campaign.
Clever names, slick advertising, powerbranding : in today's business world, these are taken to be the only things that really count. "Of all the things that your company owns, brands are far and away the most important and toughest," the advertising man Jim Mullen claims. "Founders die. Factories burn down. Machinery wears out. Inventories get depleted. Technology becomes obsolete... Brand loyalty is the only sound foundation on which business leaders can build enduring, profitable growth." That this has become the reigning wisom of the nineties is evident in Sara Lee's decision, last September, to sell off factories in order to concentrate on "building brands," because, as the company's CEO said, "the investment community does not like asset intensive companies."
But if branding were everything, companies like Disney and Gillette with their enormously potent brands, wouldn't have fallen apart in the first half of the eighties. Disney found the way to recovery in its extraordinary animated films (which in tunrn, supported an explosion in merchandising) and in the "imagineering" of its theme parks. Gillette's experience, too, demonstrates that Mullen's formulation is backward. To lay the foundation for business growth, it's hard to do better than invest in new technology, build factories, buy new machines. Strong brands are almost always effects, not causes, because sooner or later performance defeats positioning. The strongest companies are still the ones that can figure out how to put that layer of niobium between the steel and the carbon - and to do so at the rate of a billion blades a year.
Excellence in manufacturing has become the most underrated ingredient in corporate success, and yet nothing distinguishes strong companies from weak ones like the ability to make goods efficiently and reliably. Intel's domination of the semiconductor industry, for instance, was built on the dramatic superiority of its production lines to those of competitors like Advanced Micro Devices. Toyota has carved away market share from American companies because its production system remains the best in the world. And, in shaving, Gillette rules because of decisions like the one it made to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on machines that would allow it to mass-produce Mach 3 in an entirely new way.
As you walk through Gillette's cavernous main factory, in South Boston - it has a giant sign outside that readss, "World Shaving Headquarters," and glows a pleasing blue at night - you have to be careful not to bump into the bright yellow vehicles, called AGVs for automatic guided vehicles, that are purposefully moving from machine to machine, picking up magazines full of cartrdiges or heading back to the warehouse to await further instructions. "It was a big concern of ours, how to prepare our people for the arrival of all this automation," one Gillette manager tells me as we make our way through one of the manufactuiring floors. Then in inadvertent illustration of his point, he happens to bump into a passing AGV; it stops dead and begins to emit a loud plaintive squeal.
With the sound still ringing in my ears, I go on through the factory, past acres of machines where Sensor, SensorExcel, and Mach 3 are being made. Though the trend in business these days is to outsource as much production as possible, Gillette still makes all its blades and cartridges in-house. Giant coils of steel - each would be twenty miles long unspooled - stand on end. Sensor housings - cartridges that haven't had blades installed in them - are put in bins by machines moving in an oddly halting way, reminiscent of a sewing machine, which means that it's signalling to the central dispatcher to send out an AGV for a pickup or delivery.
When Gillette was putting the production lines for Mach 3 in place (they became operational last fall), it built a giant plywood wall to separate them from the rest of the factory; workers on the "plywood ranch" had to sign strict confidentiality agreements. The most dramatic of the new machines is a sicty foot long DLC vaccuum chamber. Before entering this chamber, fourteen thousand freshly sharpened blades on a giant spindle are given what one GIllette employee called "an atomic-level cleaning" in a Class 5000 clean room, populated by gowned and shower capped workers. Inside the chamber, a high voltage charge is sent between a sheet of carbon and the spindle of blades, hurling carbon atoms into the surface of the blades in a process called sputtering. "Our tolerances are on the order of wavelength of visible light," an engineer says tersely.
The bunny-suited environment around the DLC chamber, though, is unique on the factory floor. For the most part, what is striking about the Mach 3 production lines isn't how high-tech they look but how sturdily functional, and how the machines still seem to belong to the Industrial Age. In Japanese car factories, the floors are clean enough to eat off; here the floors are just - well, fine places to put big, heavy machines on. The most important of these are the whirling, continuous motion machines that are used to assemble the Mach 3 cartridges. The intermittent-motion Sensor machines stop and start before each task (hence the sewing machine look); the languidly gliding Mach 3 machines appear to be doing much less work, but they're more than twice as fast. Interestingly, machines, like people, have learning curves, and in the next two years the speeed of the continuous-motion machines is going to be steadily racheted up until they're turning out two million Mach 3 blades a day.
"When you get a new machine, you have to debug it - make little changes here and there," Fred Campatelli, who is in charge of engineering on the factory floor, says. "Then, when you solve those, you take it up another notch in speed and you find a whole new batch of things to fix. But we'll get it up to its top rate soon enough."
Mike Cowhig, the head of manufacturing, who has been standing next to me during this explanation, now leans in and says to me, "Then we're going to ask them to push it past that."
Campatelli looks at him hard, wondering if he's serious.
He is. "I knew you didn't know that," Cowhig tells him breezily.
Standing in the middle of all these brand-new machines, I find it a little unsettling to realize that a few years from now they will be obsolete - or anyway, not good enough for Gillrttte's best product - and that soon a new plywood ranch will be constructed. Somewhere in the Reading lab, after all, Mach 3's successor is already in the pipeline. "We'll get a hell of a kick when we see the new razor on the shelves," John Terry told me. "But the truth is that by then we're already preoccupied with what comes next."