SELL SOMETHING PEOPLE USE UP AND THROW AWAY...

Friday, January 26, 2007

...was the advice given to King Camp Gillette by his boss. Gillette was a 21 year old traveling salesman for a company that made cork lined bottle caps, and an aspiring inventor when the owner of the company, William Painter, gave him the secret to making a fortune.

"King, you are always inventing something. Why don't you concentrate on just one thing something like our cork bottle caps—something that people use once and throw away."

"But what?" King Gillette became obsessed with the idea of inventing something disposable. One morning in 1895 while shaving, in the days when shaving meant using a knife-like straight edged razor, he had a sudden burst of inspiration.

"As I stood there with the razor in my hand, my eyes resting on it as lightly as a bird settling down on its nest, the Gillette razor was born. In that moment I saw it all: they way the blade could be held in a holder; the idea of sharpening the 2 opposite edges on the thin piece of steel; the clamping plates, with a handle halfway between the 2 edges of the blade."

The beauty of the idea was that when the blades for his razor became dull they would simply be thrown away and the user would have to buy more.

King Gillette was living in Boston at the time and visited MIT to discuss his idea of putting a sharp edge on a thin piece of sheet metal with the metallurgists there. They told him his idea was impossible. It took him six years to find an engineer and inventor named William Nickerson who was able to find a way to do it.

Gillette and Nickerson began selling their safety razor in 1903. They named the company Gillette, after deciding that they probably couldn't sell a razor blade named Nickerson.

They put the likeness of King Gillette on each package.

Gillette gave away millions of his razors, including shaving kits given away as bank promotions. He sold 3.5 million "Service Set" shaving kits to departing servicemen during World War I. When the boys came back from war, they were confirmed Gillette users.

King Gillette sold the razors dirt cheap. He became rich refilling them with his disposable blades.

One little twist to the story is that Gillette was a socialist who was against the system that made him wealthy. His great dream was to build a Utopia.

King Gillette planned to build a metropolis under a glass dome powered by Niagara Falls. He envisioned the entire United States population, 60 million at the time, living there in 100 million rooms served by vast dining halls. All production would be under the control of one company, the People's Corporation, with all residents working toward the common good.

He gave up on Niagara Falls as the site for his idea and later formed the World Corporation just prior to World War I with plans to build his Utopia in Arizona. He even asked Teddy Roosevelt to be president.

King Gillette never saw his dream for Utopia come true and his fortune was wiped out by the stock market crash of 1929. He died a frustrated man in 1932.

The Gillette company still survives, today, and we still use his invention and you can still make a fortune following the advice of Gillette's mentor: Sell something people use up, throw away, and need to buy more.

Plus, let's not forget that those fucking loser New England Patriots play in Gillette Stadium.

Fuckers.