It's a $500 billion worldwide industry.
Different kinds of soap for different kinds of skin.
You'd use one for your face, one for your body,
one for your hands, one for babies.
And 5 trillion razors are used every year.
This is something men do every single day,
day in and day out.
But just before the 20th century,
daily hygiene is almost nonexistent.
Soap is still a luxury.
Very few people have access to it, and when they do,
it could be very dangerous and very corrosive.
They would just use sand and mud
to kind of scrub off the filth.
Until two candle makers
named Procter and Gamble
stumble onto one of the biggest breakthroughs of all time.
Ivory soap was originally an accident.
Which becomes America's
first nationally advertised product.
It paved the way for the personal care industry
as we see it, not only for soaps, but also for hair care,
cosmetics and shaving products.
Plus, two rivals wage a war.
Shaving is a very dangerous enterprise.
An open blade tap dancing across your most vital veins
in your neck.
Which spawns one of the greatest innovations
of the century.
Schick comes up with a brilliant idea.
King C. Gillette didn't like competition at all.
Schick and Gillette.
Two titans battling it out.
They'll harness the power of new technologies.
This is a major gamble on Schick's part.
Basically, he's laughed at.
Help win a world war.
He does something that most people couldn't imagine.
And transform body care
and cleanliness on a global scale.
Everyone's telling you it's not gonna work.
Talk about a risk taker.
This is impossible.
Until it isn't.
In the mid 1800s,
daily life is a laborious struggle for most Americans.
It's a time when much of the United States workforce
is still doing manual labor,
so they are literally earning their keep
by the sweat of their brow.
Compared to today, the mid 19th century
was a very filthy, smelly time.
While living and working conditions
are difficult and often unsanitary,
hygiene has not yet entered the public consciousness.
People don't have indoor toilets.
They're lucky if they have an outhouse.
They don't have running water.
Water is dirty, it's not clean.
They are in an environment that's filthy.
People would do their laundry in a cooking pot
and then rinse it out and then cook that evening's dinner.
When immigrants arrive at Ellis Island
in search of this idyllic America,
I doubt they thought about the lice, and the vermin,
the rats, the roaches, the maggots
that are literally more abundant in American cities
than people.
Over 80 years before government health offices
like the CDC are formed to provide guidance,
myths about proper hygiene run rampant.
There's a lot of conflicting information
about what is in fact healthy for you.
So some people are beginning to advocate regular bathing,
but others are saying, no, no, no.
That's gonna shock one's system and it's not good for you.
And the lack of hygiene
is having lethal consequences
as diseases like typhoid fever,
dysentery, and tuberculosis spread.
We look at environmental hazards
as things that build up over time, right?
You're exposed to something,
eventually it leads to cancer
or something that is really life-threatening.
That wasn't their problem
because they didn't live that long.
They were facing things that would kill them in a few days.
In Ohio,
two men are running a struggling candle making business.
James is this intellectual forward thinker, leader.
He was interested in chemistry,
so he went to pursue a PhD in chemistry.
He never finished it
because he came back to run his family business.
Harley comes into the business and has all these ideas
and being the businessman and the salesman,
he wanted to grow and succeed.
Harley had all these visions about better marketing
and making them an incredible, successful company.
Their names, Harley Procter and James Gamble,
will one day emblazen iconic products the world over,
from soap, to medicine, to batteries.
Their innovations will birth a new industry
and generate over $83 billion,
becoming the largest seller of consumer goods on the planet.
But in 1879,
sales of their only product are plummeting fast.
1878, Paris lights up its streets
with the first electric street lamps.
A year later, Edison comes out with the electric light bulb.
As electricity becomes more prevalent,
they realize pretty quickly
this candle gig isn't gonna last forever.
We had cassette tapes and then you go from a Walkman
to a Discman to an iPod in rapid succession.
The same is true for the candle.
It's almost overnight that this becomes a relic.
And Procter and Gamble
realized there's gotta be a way to find a new opportunity.
Hunting for a new product,
Gamble searches for a way to use raw materials
they already have on hand.
Anything?
Procter and Gamble recognize that they have a lot invested
in candles and the question is,
can they take this investment
and make it profitable in the production of something else,
something that's future looking?
Then, Gamble hits on an idea.
He realized that they used the same raw materials.
The fat used to make candles is similar in soap.
So pivoting from candles to soap makes a lot of sense.
The chemistry is pretty complex.
Both businesses rely upon the oils and fats.
Gamble thinks he can do something new
with a product that is not yet commonly used on the body.
Some soap makers would use a combination
of ash and lye in the soap
to kind of hold the brick of soap together.
But the problem with lye is that it's very dangerous
and very corrosive.
If you get that mixture wrong,
you actually produce something that can dissolve a human body.
At the time,
soap is the same all-purpose item for most Americans.
You used it for laundry, used it for cleaning your house,
you used it for basically anything
that you could possibly clean.
For the few who do attempt
to use soap on their skin,
washing is infrequent and unmanageable.
People were bathing in streams,
in rivers that were murky.
Soap would fall to the bottom,
you could dig around and try to find it.
So it's not easy.
Sometimes they would just use sand and mud
to kind of scrub off the filth.
Procter and Gamble are poised to change the world
if they can figure out how to make an everyday soap
for all Americans.
Meanwhile, even the simple task of shaving
is not yet a daily routine for men.
So at this period, being clean shaven,
confers that extra level of professionalism
that was ever more valuable.
But shaving was a high risk activity.
In Boston, a traveling salesman
for a bottle cap company
dreams of one day owning his own business.
His father was an inventor
and his father sort of instilled within him
this entrepreneurial spirit from a very young age.
He was excited about the world of commerce
and like many men of his time,
he was sort of obsessed with inventing.
He was, I think above all else, a salesman,
but he was an idea man.
So that was really his mission in life.
But he's still selling stuff and then he's shaving
and he thought, this could be better.
While the device he uses
is considered cutting edge technology at the time,
shaving hasn't progressed very much since its inception.
You can go back and you can look at Egyptian hieroglyphics
and you can see people who look like barbers
wielding tools like long straight razors,
sort of held to the customer's neck for that clean shave.
Traditionally, barbers were also surgeons.
They did both at the same time.
And it wasn't until around the founding of America
that those two professions became distinct.
And modern barbering began, but it was expensive.
Shaving in the 19th century
was less for ordinary citizens
and more for men of higher status.
American military figures
become really taken with interesting shape beards
and it becomes a reflection of one's status.
The most famous example
is probably General Ambrose Burnside,
who grows this huge, interesting beard.
Basically giant sideburns
and that's where we get the word sideburns.
And while shaving oneself at home
becomes possible by 1900,
it's still a far less appealing option.
Shaving is a very dangerous enterprise.
People not only sustain the kind of minor nicks
and cuts that we associate with modern shaving,
but literally one slip of the razor
and it could be a very serious injury.
The straight razors are quite difficult to use.
Shaving was a pain in the butt.
The blades, you know, they could get rusty.
They were big, heavy things,
would take you up to 30 minutes to shave.
A straight razor is basically just an open blade
that you are tap dancing across your most vital veins
in your neck.
So most men went to barbershops to get it done.
And now, even at the cusp of the 20th century,
the most advanced razor in history
is anything but convenient.
It's called the Star Traveling Razor,
was actually the first safety razor of all time.
It was a handheld razor that had a kind of T shape
and it required you to remove the blades
and you would take that blade
and you would strop it every time you used it
to get it as sharp as possible
by taking a strop, which is a long, thin piece of leather
and kind of whetting the blade against it many, many times.
It's a very, very cumbersome process.
The sharpening process was A, extraordinarily dangerous,
and B, not very effective.
This bottle cap salesman
will one day turn shaving into an everyday occurrence.
Building an industry with a company
that sells 26 million razors a year and is worth $7 billion.
His name is King C. Gillette.
In the late 1870s,
with electricity threatening their candle business,
Procter and Gamble are racing to come up with a new product.
Soap's made in great, big, giant cakes.
And then they cut a piece and give you a chunk, right?
And James Gamble keeps thinking,
how can we make a better soap?
Gamble's planning to create
a groundbreaking bar of soap,
one that's safe and also convenient enough
for the average person to start using every day.
It's not just as easy to flip a switch
and go from making candles to making soap.
You have to figure out the logistical challenges,
the manufacturing challenges.
Anytime you're the leader,
there's always this voice in the back of your head saying,
"Hey, are you doing the right thing?"
Gamble is attempting to make a new soap
formulated just for cleaning your skin.
Soaps in this period were made of substances
we'd probably consider dangerous today.
And the idea was to scrub yourself to get yourself clean.
But some of these agents, lye in particular,
were so dangerous.
Lye and pine rosin in soaps at the time
turn them yellow.
But Gamble tests an additive
that he believes will be gentler on skin
called silicate of soda.
And it makes his mixture pure white.
There's one final ingredient found in soaps at the time,
but it's expensive.
So Gamble looks for an alternative
with materials he has on hand.
The candle business went down.
So they had all this stuff
and different chemicals and oils and fats.
Gamble decides to replace olive oil
with cotton seed oil.
He realizes, wait a minute, it's readily available.
It's not all that expensive.
He can create a special kind of soap.
Throughout history,
you realize that amidst all the innovation
and all the inspiration and all the perspiration
is improvisation.
And you realize that very often
these incredible leaders took existing technology,
took existing know-how and learned how to pivot.
Procter and Gamble believe they've cracked the code
on an inexpensive, gentle soap
that ordinary Americans can finally use every day.
It's a product that will dominate
the modern soap industry,
eventually bringing in annual revenue of $112 million.
I call it Procter Gamble's White Soap.
Okay, well what says clean and fresh to you?
Ah.
Ah-ha.
All thy garments, smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia.
It was from a Bible quote.
Out of the ivory palaces
whereby they have made thee glad.
Procter and Gamble really imbued soap
with the idea that cleanliness is as close to godliness
as you can get.
Ivory.
But now, Procter and Gamble
have to figure out how to convince people
to use their soap daily.
So actually Procter and Gamble had to think really hard
about how to sell this new product
that no one knew they needed.
As they start mass production,
one flawed batch is about to offer a unique marketing idea.
They had left the soap making device on for too long
and it ended up becoming mixed
for much, much longer than a soap is normally mixed.
And the resulting product
was something that was very, very interesting.
Okay, I'm here.
What's so important I had to come in on Sunday?
The extra time in the mixer
infused the soap with more air, making it lighter.
Incredible.
It was so light that if you dropped it in a body of water,
it would float right up to the top.
This may sound funny, but the discovery of floating soap,
is truly a game changer.
It's a really big deal.
If you pay for a bar of soap
and you're bathing and it sinks to the bottom of the lake
where you can't get it, that's a problem.
This unintended breakthrough
offers the partners a distinct way
to pitch their product to consumers.
The fact that ivory soap floats
becomes one of these genius marketing tools and conveniences
that make it almost indispensable in the market.
On July 18th, 1879,
P trademarks the name ivory.
Their precut and individually wrapped white soap
hits area general stores at 5 cents for a 10 ounce bar.
Procter and Gamble really put a huge emphasis on branding
and advertising of the soap.
Ivory is not only white,
but it kind of floats to the surface.
So you can imagine that that kind of promotes this image
of purity and naturalness and kind of lightness.
You're not coating yourself with some greasy, lardy soap.
This is this kind of light new, innovative product.
As they try to break into more markets,
they begin an aggressive ad campaign for ivory soap.
We saw personal care marketed first with ivory
and this soap is soft and gentle
and you could use for yourself and your children
every day, every other day.
And ivory soap sold like crazy.
And then finally the big breakthrough
is Procter and Gamble's ivory soap
was the first national campaign.
They advertised in Century Magazine,
which was one of the most powerful magazines of the era.
That had a circulation of 200,000.
Ivory soap became truly a national brand.
And there's no question it was one of the first.
As the first brand with a national ad campaign,
sales in the first year, 1879, top $3 million.
They are almost single-handedly
changing American hygiene habits.
Ivory is taking out ads that have instructions
of how to wash yourself.
So this was this new practice they had to teach people,
hey, you lather it up,
you put water on yourself first, then you wash your body.
Procter and Gamble was teaching people these new habits.
As daily bathing becomes inclusive for all,
sales of ivory explode.
And Procter Gamble are producing 200,000 bars a day,
turning P into a national powerhouse.
It was one of the first companies outside the railroads
to go public, you could buy stock in, in 1890.
So these guys were already becoming big.
And now, ivory soap has transformed
a small candle making company
into the largest beauty and personal care company
in the world.
I think without a shadow of a doubt,
that ivory soap paved the way
for the personal care industry as we see it,
not only for soaps, but also for hair care,
cosmetics, all those sorts of things.
Because ivory soap
really, really leaned in to a brand, right?
And a brand is distinct from a product
because the product is what you can hold in your hand.
But a brand is the cleanest soap
you can buy at the grocery store.
P will eventually go on
to create even more inventive advertising campaigns,
using emerging platforms like radio and TV.
Procter Gamble would advertise to the housewives
their soaps and household cleaning products
during their commercial breaks.
These very dramatic, serial installments of shows
became known as soap operas.
Their clever marketing campaigns
will help catapult their popular brands
like Tide, Charmin, and Pampers,
turning P into one of the most profitable companies
in the world with revenue of over $80 billion
and a commanding share of nearly half of the entire market.
Meanwhile, in 1900, despite the growing hygiene market,
shaving options have not advanced.
And King C. Gillette is determined to change that.
He himself was a tinkerer.
He wanted to create something convenient.
Gillette invests all of his savings
into creating a stronger blade
that won't need daily sharpening.
He gets advice and he tries to make his first prototype.
He goes out to a hardware store
and he gets all of this metal ribbon.
He really worked at it for a couple of years,
talks to many different manufacturers
and all of them say,
we cannot make a metal that is strong,
pliable, and would last longer.
It simply cannot be done.
So Gillette pursues a new idea,
unprecedented at the time.
He realized that if he could create something
that was much cheaper and more affordable,
then you could just throw it in trash and replace it.
It's a game-changing idea
that will be imitated in other industries
for decades to come, a disposable razor blade.
But first, he has to figure out how to make it.
Gillette's disposable blade
was from the outset, a challenge.
You had to make a very, very thin and pliable steel blade.
To help bring his vision
of the thinnest razor blade on the market to life,
Gillette turns to an expert in the field,
MIT engineer, William Nickerson.
Now, you're just the man for this job.
What do you say?
Gillette, like any smart entrepreneur,
knew that he needed other talents.
He had an inventor's mindset,
but still, he didn't know anything about machining steel.
He didn't know anything about how to put a sharp edge
on a little, tiny, thin piece of steel.
Respectfully, Mr. Gillette,
this is impossible.
Until it isn't.
It's the early 1900s
and since the launch of Procter and Gamble's Ivory soap,
America's views on hygiene are changing.
This is a critical turning point,
one that will have a very important effect
on the way that we think about hygiene
and controlling infectious disease.
More and more Americans are bathing with soap.
They are cleaner, they're dressed better,
and hygiene in many ways is a reflection of one's status.
And these are gonna be markers
of a more sophisticated lifestyle.
When King C. Gillette was probably in his 20s,
he saw ivory soap come out
and ivory soap was one of the first lifestyle products
that was marketed.
Being in an environment where there were so many ideas
constantly being born for new and better products,
I think that he really wanted to take a risk
by launching a new razor blade.
Gillette's idea
is to eliminate the need to sharpen
by creating a blade so thin
that it's cheap enough to throw away and replace.
But two years of failed prototypes
had drained his resources.
They tried all different kinds of metals,
they tried all different kinds of machines,
but he believed in what he was doing
and he just kept after it
until he got that razor blade system right.
It's a story as much about his perseverance
as it is about his success.
Had he walked away,
the convenience of the disposable razor
we take for granted today may have come along a lot later,
or perhaps not at all.
It was really the blade that was the most important thing
to bring Gillette's vision to market.
Nickerson kept inventing different machines
to make that sharp blade.
They eventually went to a system
where they made all the blades in one great, big, long strip
and then chopped them off.
That was a big advancement.
After years of trial and error,
Nickerson finally designs a blade
thinner than anything on the market.
And the world's first disposable razor is born.
I'd like to call it the Nickerson.
A razor with "nick" in the name?
Seems like bad marketing to me.
It's called the Gillette safety razor.
And he starts to put his face on the packaging.
And that is something that was quite novel in personal care.
By introducing something that has a brand name,
you are kind of hammering that brand name
into the minds of American consumers.
Like we're not just talking about a razor.
This is a Gillette razor.
This has the Gillette name on it.
And in 1903, the Gillette safety razor
hits stores throughout the Boston area.
The original razor is $5 for the handle
and $1 for a pack of 10 disposable blades.
Gillette knows that if he can get customers
to buy his razors,
the disposable blades create built-in demand for more.
Something that will need to be disposed and bought again.
So you can have a repeat customer,
a very interesting business model.
By selling a razor
that you would have to continually refill,
you were locked into transactions with Gillette
for a lifetime
and you really didn't need to replace the razor handle.
You could just replace those blades.
It's a model that will eventually be replicated
by the likes of Kodak with film for cameras
and Keurig with single-use K-cups.
It was also more convenient.
Cut shaving time from 20 minutes to five minutes,
it gave them a closer shave.
So it really in almost every regard,
it was a vast improvement, a big breakthrough.
But right now, there's a problem.
In that first year, the sales are disappointing.
He had been working on this razor
for almost a decade at this point.
He sells 51 razors and 168 blades.
It is not a good first year for him.
On the other side of the continent,
an army colonel is recuperating after a severe injury.
He was in the military, he was laying telegraph lines.
He had a lot of different interests.
And one day he was on a gold expedition
and he injured his hand.
He sustained a pretty significant injury
in the course of his military service,
realized he was having an incredible amount
of difficulty shaving.
He had to change the blade every single day.
And with his hand injury, he could not do that.
So like many great inventions,
they're born out of necessity.
He comes up with a brilliant idea.
What if you didn't have to remove the razor?
It's a seed for an idea
that will one day create a $15 billion industry
and grow into one of the greatest brand rivalries
of all time.
And the colonel's name is Jacob Schick.
King Gillette has just released
one of the greatest innovations of the century,
the disposable razor blade, but no one is buying it.
He had been working on this razor
for almost a decade at this point,
and he knew that he had a great product,
but it was just about getting it into more people's bathrooms.
But he is very tenacious.
Soon, a new conflict raging in Europe
leads to new advances in chemical warfare,
putting troops in grave danger.
So during World War I,
mustard gas was part of warfare at that time.
So Americans were equipped with gas masks to protect them.
But if you had facial hair, it would impair the seal.
So if you had a clean face,
you'd get a nice tight seal around on your face
and have a greater chance of surviving a gas attack.
Not to have access to a razor
could be the line between life and death.
But the types of razors available to troops
are nearly impossible to use on the battlefield.
They were using straight razors
and the trenches are not exactly a tranquil environment
for shaving your face with a straight razor.
Gillette pitches the army on his new razors.
World War I was a huge boon for Gillette.
He gets a contract to work with the US Army in 1918.
Gillette packages his innovative safety razor
into a first of its kind compact disposable shaving kit.
1918, he launches a shaving kit
that is issued to servicemen in the US Army.
So that is a really big deal for the war effort,
but it's also a big deal for the brand of Gillette
because all of these American men who are going off to war
have now had kind of product exposure to Gillette.
And they've learned this new habit.
In less than a year,
3.5 million Gillette razor kits and 32 million blades
are in the hands of America's fighting men.
In fact, by 1920,
the British Army decides to buy Gillette kits
to issue to their soldiers.
So now we have at least two huge military contracts
that Gillette gets to fulfill.
A lot of these men became customers for life
and so did their sons and so did their sons' sons.
So by the end of World War I,
Gillette is not only the most famous razor in the world,
but he is one of the most famous faces in the world.
Gillette sales rocket to 4.2 million razors
and 19.5 million blades by 1921.
And his revenue is increasing steadily
by over a million dollars a year.
Meanwhile, retired army Colonel Jacob Schick
believes he has the idea that will top the market
Gillette has recently cornered.
At the turn of the century,
pretty much every man served in the armed forces.
And there was this legacy in terms of the way that men,
the things they invented
or the accommodations they made within their lives
was shaped by their wartime experience.
Four years before the majority of US homes
are electrified, Schick believes he can create
the world's first electric razor.
Jacob Schick spends a lot of time developing,
doing a lot of R, and he comes up with some blueprints.
Securing a patent for his design,
Schick reaches out to investors and manufacturers
to make his long shot dream a reality.
Basically, he's laughed at.
They think this is the most ridiculous idea
they've ever seen.
Everyone's telling him it's not gonna work.
No one really wants to make it because they think it's a loser
and that they're never gonna get paid.
While Schick struggles
to get his electric razor off the ground,
shaving with a regular razor is only becoming easier.
Back then, you would kind of have to take a brush
and whip up a shaving soap into a foam
they would paint onto their face using a brush.
By 1921, a new type of shaving cream
is sweeping the market.
It's called Barbasol.
So now, the shaving cream that we use today
that doesn't need a brush to kind of whip it into shape,
it just comes out of the can foamy and ready to apply,
which ended up performing really, really well
in the market.
As shaving cream
helps propel sales of Gillette's razor,
Schick's vision drags him toward a financial crisis.
If you look at the history of shaving,
there's constant competition between all of these companies.
I mean, I hate to invoke a Gillette tagline,
but these shaving companies have really tried to give us
the best a man can get
because the technology has constantly been refined
the pursuit of more business.
Schick has an idea
for how to fund the development of his electric razor,
but he'll have to take on Gillette's prized product
to do it.
I think shaving would not be as effective as it is
if it weren't for Schick and Gillette.
Two titans battling it out.
In 1925, retired Army Colonel Jacob Schick,
with no industry experience,
is gunning for the king of razors, Gillette.
He sees his comrades using Gillette razors.
He probably likes how dextrous he can be with it,
but I don't think he likes how the blades are exchanged.
The current Gillette razor is basically every day
you're changing a single razor blade, right?
It's not protected.
I mean, it's a razor blade, sharp.
You're exposing your skin, cut risk, all that stuff.
Jacob Schick realizes that, hey man,
there's a better way to do this.
To make the ingenious safety razor
even safer,
the Colonel finds inspiration from his fighting days.
Schick has an idea for a safety razor
that you can reload without having to touch the blades.
And his idea combines a safety razor and an automatic rifle.
Schick begins to funnel money
into developing a prototype.
Essentially creating a magazine of razor blades
that would be stored in the handle.
The head of the safety razor moves up.
And then simply you could eject one razor blade,
replace the other.
And never touches human hands.
The old razor pops out the top
and that new razor is loaded in.
You turn this back and it's ready to use.
It officially hits the shelves in 1925.
It's a razor that's no bigger than a fountain pen.
It's got a cartridge that you can change.
It's a very, very cool design
and it becomes kind of popular, people are buying it.
And now, the undisputed king of shaving
sees the first real threat to take his crown.
King C. Gillette, he didn't like competition at all
and certainly he was in one of the hottest markets
at the time.
Gillette was seeking to once again distinguish itself
from the competition.
We are Gillette, we are the American shaving company.
To counter Schick,
Gillette unleashes a brand new product.
So they added a thin coating of chromium
to have increased durability
to increase the life of the razor.
But the new razor blades prove to be a misstep.
The blades were a disappointment to customers.
They were more expensive, they were 50 cents more,
and they were so flimsy,
and customers ultimately just didn't like them
compared to their old Gillette blades.
King Gillette then makes an unprecedented move,
issuing a public apology.
A complete admission of the fact
that they were very, very, very wrong.
With Gillette reeling,
Schick prepares to take over the shaving industry.
He has a one track mind
and that track is the electric razor.
Colonel Schick's safety razors are doing very well.
And yet at the same time,
he recognizes that electricity is the future
and there's potentially more profit.
And as an innovator, he couldn't resist that.
Despite only half of American homes
having electricity in the 1920s,
Schick is going full throttle on his electric razor dream.
This is a major Gamble on Schick's part
because this is a moment where electricity isn't ubiquitous
by any stretch of the imagination.
There's still fear around electricity.
After years of planning
and countless dollars invested, in November 1928,
Schick receives a patent for his electric razor.
At this time,
there weren't even outlets in most people's bathrooms,
even if they had electricity.
So to launch this product
that you needed to plug in basically in your bathroom,
it really was a gamble.
The future of shaving, it's perfect.
Think how much this one product
changed the nature of shaving.
No water, no replaceable razors, no lather,
and you didn't have to replace it.
I mean, it lasted for years.
And he's so invested in that idea,
he does something that most people couldn't imagine.
He sells the patent from his cartridge razor
and pours all of his energy and resources
into the creation of this electric razor.
Using the capital from his magazine razor sale,
the first electric razor launches in New York.
With a price tag of $25,
it's five times more expensive than Gillette's safety razor.
Just to put it in perspective,
$25 in 1929 is, in today's dollars, $440
for an electric razor.
Imagine dropping that kind of money
on an electric razor today, probably not gonna happen.
And within months
of the pricey razor's release, the stock market collapses,
thrusting the country into The Great Depression.
Imagine you're Jacob Schick.
You have this passion in your heart
to come up with an electric razor.
So you get all your chips in on this electric razor
and it's not doing well at all.
As a businessman, you're panicking.
I had this great product, the magazine repeating razor.
People loved it, but I sold it off, right?
And at this point,
I'm questioning whether or not I made the right decision.
But as an entrepreneur, failure is not an option.
I was hoping we could discuss these projections.
I don't have time to discuss that right now.
I've seen those projections.
Right now, I'm figuring out who I have to lay off.
The depression was hitting,
which might logically be seen as a real obstacle
to the adoption of the electric razor.
At the same time, remember that the electric razor
is a more durable consumer product than a disposable razor.
In economic downturns, it's often consumer products
that actually are not as affected by downturns.
The projections were wrong.
And so something like an electric razor,
which feels like an essential because now being clean shaven
is more of a cultural expectation,
it kind of hit that sweet spot.
So in 1937, Jacob Schick's electric razor turns a corner.
He sells 1.5 million electric razors,
which eventually would turn into $120 million a year business.
We really should think of the electric razor
as a vanguard in this whole industry
of handheld personal hygiene products.
Think of the hair dryer, the flat iron, the diffuser.
I mean, all of these things are in some ways,
lead back to this innovation.
Today, the longest running rivals
remain two of the biggest names in shaving.
And the electric razor industry that Schick helped create
is now worth nearly $15 billion.
So if you look back, Jacob Schick got it right
because we're still using his design today.
I mean, it stood the test of time.
So I gotta give Jacob Schick a thank you
because every time I shave, it's easier, it's safer.
Despite the electric razor
cutting into its market share,
Gillette today is the largest brand,
with their line of shaving products
raking in an annual revenue of $10.3 billion.
And in 2005,
the personal hygiene market comes full circle
when Procter Gamble spends $57 billion
on their largest acquisition ever, Gillette.
I think what Schick and Gillette did
was not only make valuable contributions to men's hygiene
or men's grooming,
but they truly became major linchpins
in the creation of modern, male, American culture.
And I think the way shaving is a rite of passage.
It could not happen.
It would not be as embraced as it is.
It would not be as efficient as it is,
and it would not be as effective as it is
if it weren't for Schick and Gillette.
These are brands that have built the legacy
of what it means to be an American man.