A colonel, a dry shaver idea and a razor fed like a rifle.

Schick takes its name from Jacob Schick, a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army. A history printed alongside a 1929 specimen share certificate of the Magazine Repeating Razor Company, published by the dealer Scripophily.com, says he retired from the army in 1910 and returned to service at the start of the First World War. In the years between, it says, he staked mining claims in Alaska and British Columbia, and during one of those cold winters he first sketched a shaver that could work without water or lather. Edgewell Personal Care, which owns Schick today, tells the same story in its own words, saying that in 1910 Colonel Jacob Schick conceived the electric shaver.

The dry shaver had to wait. The Scripophily history says that after the war Schick could not raise interest in it and turned to other inventions, and that in 1921 he devised a new kind of safety razor, the Magazine Repeating Razor. It was inspired by the army’s repeating rifle: spare blades sat in a clip in the handle and were fed into shaving position by pivoting the head and stroking a built-in lever, so the user did not have to handle a sharp blade.

Production began in Jersey City, and the razor went on the market in 1926. Edgewell’s brand copy still dates the name the same way, with the line “Schick—since 1926.” The history says the magazine razor was produced in three models between 1926 and about 1935, and that these were the forerunners of the Schick Injector razor.

Schick himself remained devoted to the dry shaver. According to the same history, he sold the assets of his razor company to the American Chain & Cable Company in 1928 to raise money, put the dry shaver on the market in 1929, and incorporated Schick Dry Shaver, Inc. in 1930. From then on the razor company and the electric shaver company were separate businesses that shared his name, and the blade side is the one that leads to the Schick brand sold today.

Eversharp, Warner-Lambert, Pfizer, Energizer, then Edgewell.

The razor business changed hands after the Second World War. The Scripophily history says that in 1946 the pen and pencil maker Eversharp, Inc. acquired the Magazine Repeating Razor Company and renamed it the Schick Safety Razor Company. American Chain & Cable went on making the product for Schick until 1958, when Schick set up its own manufacturing in Bridgeport, Connecticut; in 1961 it moved its manufacturing to Milford, Connecticut.

In 1970, the history says, the Schick Safety Razor Company was acquired by Warner-Lambert, the maker of Listerine. A history of Warner-Lambert in the International Directory of Company Histories, reproduced by FundingUniverse, lists Schick Shaving among the company’s acquisitions of the 1970s and 1980s and names Schick razors alongside brands such as Listerine, Halls and Certs. Warner-Lambert later became part of Pfizer.

The British blade name Wilkinson Sword joined Schick within the same business. Edgewell says Schick and Wilkinson Sword merged in 1992, and by the early 2000s the combined business was known as Schick-Wilkinson Sword. In January 2003 Supermarket News reported that Energizer Holdings of St. Louis had agreed to buy Schick-Wilkinson Sword from Pfizer, the battery company’s venture outside alkaline batteries.

Energizer later separated its personal-care brands from its batteries. Edgewell says its company was formed in 2015 and has carried the Edgewell name since then; Edgewell Personal Care has owned Schick since 2015. Its trademark notice lists SCHICK and WILKINSON SWORD among its marks, alongside shaving names such as Edge and Skintimate. Edgewell presents Wilkinson Sword as a separate brand, with the line “Sharpening your style since 1772.”

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sell razors, shaving creams, gels and depilatories, the everyday products of the bathroom shelf. Shaving and hair-removal brands in general are bought often and quickly, so their identity has to work at arm’s length, on a crowded shelf, through a name, a colour and a familiar shape of can, tube or handle.

Much of that identity is carried by packaging and advertising rather than by a single logo. A can of shaving cream or gel is a cylinder that can be printed all the way round; a razor is a handle and a cartridge that change shape from one generation to the next; a depilatory is a tube or bottle that sits beside skin creams. Slogans and jingles belong to that identity too, and several of these names have passed between owners over the decades, so the company on the back of the pack may not be the one that first put the name on the front.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded the brand, who owns it now, and how its packs and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A surname on the razor and sub-brands beneath it.

The Schick identity rests on the colonel’s surname and has stayed on the razor through every change of owner since Eversharp. Like Gillette, Schick is a founder’s name on a razor, and Edgewell’s brand copy still leads with a date, “Schick—since 1926,” the year the Magazine Repeating Razor went on sale.

The founding product gives the brand its clearest design story. The Magazine Repeating Razor treated blades the way a rifle treats cartridges: a clip of spares stored in the handle and fed into place with a lever. That loading idea carried on in the Injector razor, which the Scripophily history calls the descendant of the magazine models.

Under its later owners the brand has been organised as a family of sub-brands beneath the Schick name. Edgewell’s brand pages present Schick Intuition, a women’s razor it dates to 2003, and Schick Hydro Silk, which it dates to 2012, each with its own tagline.

Edgewell also sells razors under Wilkinson Sword, the British sword-maker’s name, and presents it with its own history and its own line, “Sharpening your style since 1772,” so that one company maintains two heritage names for shaving.

For a design guide, Schick shows how a founder’s surname and a mechanical founding idea can hold a brand together through a sequence of corporate owners, with women’s and men’s sub-brands arranged beneath it. Compare it with Gillette, its long-standing rival, and Skintimate, its stablemate at Edgewell. For this guide we use Schick blue and hydro aqua on rinse white with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Schick’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.