The first Gillette Advertisement
System
Magazine, Nov. 1904. The razor sold for $3.00
(the average weekly wage at the time was $15.00). The original advertising
budget was twenty-five cents per razor sold. In 1905 the ad budget
was increased to fifty cents per razor.
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One day in the spring of 1895 a traveling salesman named King Camp Gillette had an idea while shaving. Later he explained (in testimony in a patent suit): "…the thought occurred to me that no radical improvements had been made in razors, especially in razor blades, for several centuries, and it flashed through my mind that if by any possibility razor blades could be constructed and made cheap enough to do away with honing and stropping and permit the user to replace dull blades by new ones, such improvements would be highly important …" The Gillette Company was born in September 1901 as The American Safety Razor Co. By the next June the name was changed to the Gillette Safety Razor Co.
Model of the first Gillette razor and blade based on the U.S. patent drawing (Source: The Gillette Company). The first
Gillette razor was sold in 1903; 51 razors were sold that year. The next
year 90,000 were sold. By the end of 1908 sales had passed the one-million
mark.
Click
here to see the original Gillette Patent Drawing.
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 Two U.S. patents were applied for:
Gillette Sales Co. set, pre-1908 |
Copyright
© 2001, Robert K. Waits E-Mail:
[email protected]
Reference: King C. Gillette
by Russell Adams, Jr. (Little, Brown & Co., 1978).
