A travelling salesman, a dull razor and a blade meant to be thrown away.

Gillette carries the name of King C. Gillette, a travelling salesman. A history of the company published in the International Directory of Company Histories and reproduced by FundingUniverse says the idea came to him on a summer morning in 1895, when the edge of his straight razor had gone dull. By his own later account, he pictured a new kind of razor with a blade that would be used until it was blunt and then thrown away. The history says he had been looking for a product that customers would have to use and replace regularly, and a razor blade fitted that description.

The same history notes that another safety razor, the Star, was already on sale, but that its blade still needed stropping before each use and eventually had to be honed professionally. Gillette’s plan was for an inexpensive, double-edged blade that could be clamped over a handle. He spent about six years trying to perfect it, and the history says the scientists and toolmakers he consulted doubted that it could be done.

The turning point came in 1901, when Gillette joined forces with William Nickerson, a machinist educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nickerson worked out the production processes, while Gillette formed the American Safety Razor Company in Boston to raise money for manufacturing, becoming its president. Production began early in 1903. The business was renamed the Gillette Safety Razor Company, and in October 1903 it began advertising, in System magazine. Gillette received his patent on the safety razor in 1904.

Growth followed quickly. The FundingUniverse history says the company bought a six-storey building in South Boston in 1905, opened a London sales branch the same year and, by 1909, had manufacturing plants in Paris, Montreal, Berlin and Leicester in England. In 1910 King Gillette sold a large part of his controlling stake to the company’s main investor, John Joyce; he kept the title of president but, the history says, no longer played an active part in running the company.

From the Blue Blade to Mach 3, then Procter & Gamble.

The First World War spread the habit of shaving with a safety razor. The history records that the United States government ordered Gillette razors and blades for its troops, and that former servicemen went on needing blades for the razors they had been issued. When the original patent expired in 1921, the company introduced a “new improved” razor and renamed its older model the Silver Brownie, selling it at the low end of the market.

At the end of the 1920s Gillette merged with Auto Strop Safety Razor Company, owned by Henry J. Gaisman, to settle a patent dispute. King Gillette resigned as nominal president, Gaisman became chairman and Gerard B. Lambert became president. Under Lambert the company introduced the Gillette Blue Blade, made with Gaisman’s strip-processing method, which the history calls the company’s most recognisable product of the period.

The modern multi-blade razor took shape in the second half of the century. The history dates the Trac II twin-blade system to 1971, the Sensor system, with blades mounted on springs, to October 1989, and SensorExcel to late 1993. The Mach 3 followed in 1998, adding a third blade and a pivoting cartridge, and women’s razors such as Lady Sensor and Venus ran alongside. The same history records that Gillette went to court in 2003 over Schick’s four-blade Quattro, and lost its attempt to stop sales of it.

By then the company had spread far beyond razors. The history lists Braun, bought in 1967, Oral-B, Duracell and the Paper Mate, Parker and Waterman pens among its businesses. On 1 October 2005, it says, Gillette and Procter & Gamble merged, and P&G has owned Gillette since then, alongside grooming names such as Old Spice. The Gillette website today groups its range under the Gillette name and a separate King C. Gillette line of beard-care products, which includes a double-edge safety razor sold under the founder’s full name.

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, a blue blade and a line from 1989.

The Gillette identity begins with a surname. King C. Gillette’s name was on the company from its renaming in 1903 and on its blades from the start, and it has stayed through the 1930 Auto Strop merger and the 2005 merger with Procter & Gamble. The company’s own website now uses the founder’s full name as a second brand, King C. Gillette, for a beard-care range, so that the founder appears twice: as the surname on the main range and as the full name on the newer line.

Colour has a long history in the range. The product name Blue Blade, introduced in the early 1930s, put a colour into the name of the company’s main blade. Each later system, from Trac II to Sensor and Mach 3, arrived with its own product name set beneath the Gillette name, so that the house name stays constant while the system names change.

The best-known element of the identity is a line rather than a picture. Adweek, writing in January 2019, said “The Best a Man Can Get” made its debut during Super Bowl XXIII in 1989, in a campaign by the agency BBDO for Gillette’s Atra razors. The line was still in use thirty years later, when Adweek marked the anniversary. In January 2019 Gillette released “We Believe,” a 90-second film by Grey New York that, Adweek reported, reframed the line as a question about “the best men can be.” The Gillette website still carries a page under that title.

For a design guide, Gillette shows how a founder’s surname, a colour and a short line from a 1989 commercial can hold a brand together across a century of new razor systems and a change of owner. Compare it with Schick, its long-standing rival, and Old Spice, its stablemate at P&G. For this guide we use razor blue and steel grey on foam white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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