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Gillette Company History Geek Out

Spawned out of a line of investigation originally started in this other thread, I'm starting up this thread for anyone who wants to help untangle elements of the who, what, where, when, and why of the early days of the Gillette Safety Razor Company -- one of the first things I'd like to sort out is what factories were operating when and what were they producing, but we can go beyond that as interesting questions come up.

Please post information with clips from and/or citations to original sources so that we can fold reliable information back over into the wiki as appropriate.
 
That is a good story. Thanks for linking it, and your reasoning about the 'H' makes sense to me. It is hard to see how the British serials would be so much higher than the contemporary USA ones, unless they started from a different base or there was something else going on.

I also went spelunking in the Blade, and came up with this from KCG:



I had assumed that a razor with a British patent number would be made in the UK, but this suggests that there were no Made in England razors before early 1909, and earlier ones were made in Boston (or perhaps Montreal, from 1906 on?) and shipped to London. Achim's early examples do not show "Made in England" anywhere that I can see. But his early USA single rings have no such marking either, so I suppose they did not start that until later on. But if the pre-1909 British sets were made in the USA, then it becomes even harder to see how a script-logo case would contain anything past an 'A' or 'B' serial number.

That timeframe for the first England plant matches up with this article from the May 1908 issue of Dun's Review:



According to that the factories in Canada (Montreal) and France (Paris) were already operating, and new ones were soon to be opened up in England (Leicester) and Germany (Berlin). The Paris factory may not have been making anything but blades, and I'm not sure about the Berlin factory.

This also suggests that after September 1908 the case ought to read "Gillette Safety Razor, Ltd" rather than "Gillette Safety Razor Co". But I might be putting too much faith in KCG's memory or in the consistency of the factory output. After all, a page or two later we have this drawing with "Company" instead of "Ltd", right on the factory building.


I can't really say what they were doing there... This 1908 German ad that Achim has gives that Holborn Viaduct address and also says "Gillette Safety Razor Co." rather than "Ltd." I don't know if that's an important detail or if it's just a case of them not always using the official legal entity's name.

The rest of the piece is funny too, but later in the same article he mentions a couple of interesting facts. One is that the first Montreal plant was burned out, but quickly replaced (this makes the 1912 factory the third one in Montreal).

There were actually four locations in Montreal. If you keep reading in that Bittues piece past that "Started Again" heading you'll see he's talking about a large 48,000 sq. ft. building. That's their final location. This piece from the July 1918 issue of the Gillette Blade, Canadian Edition does a little better job of outlining things and has photos of all four locations. According to that the first Canadian factory was opened "very soon" after April 1906 at 34 St. Antoine Street. That space burned to the ground on January 3, 1907 and new space was found at 622 St. Paul Street and kitted out with equipment from the Boston plant. They then outgrew that space and moved into a larger place at 63 St. Alexander Street. Then in 1911 they started construction of what would be their final location, the five-story building at 73 St. Alexander Street.

A bit later he writes that "There are shipments leaving the Montreal factory for England". That was in 1918, well after the Leicster factory was up and running. Buttes writes that Montreal's early production was good but early sales were very slow. So it would make sense to send excess razors to England, even from the beginning.

What I believe he's talking about there is fallout from the European factories having closed down because of WWI. The Canadian plant apparently picked up a lot of that manufacturing slack to keep the supply up. This clipping is from page 93 of the Jubilee issue of the Blade:

$gillette_canada_1917.gif

I think that the Canadian plant probably carried most of that load until the Slough plant started operations at the very end of 1920. From page 102 of the Jubilee issue:

$gillette_england_1920.gif
 
Wow, Porter, this is great! I've subscribed, and will add anything I accurately can! Thanks for your efforts so far! I'm sure between you, mblakele, and others this will be a very interesting and informative project.
 
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Definitely - and I am pretty sure Alex knows how to operate the wiki, too.

As always, let me know if you get into any technical difficulties. This new page is a bit different than normal, because it makes heavy use of templates. I think the page contains examples of just about everything you might want to record, though.
 
Everyone can contribute. Post your info and confirmed sources right here Alex.
thanks Phil and Porter.

Definitely - and I am pretty sure Alex knows how to operate the wiki, too.

As always, let me know if you get into any technical difficulties. This new page is a bit different than normal, because it makes heavy use of templates. I think the page contains examples of just about everything you might want to record, though.
Ok, I will study before doing anything, and will call you if I encounter anything.
 
As a student of history at Ohio State, I have a wealth of resources at my fingertips to contribute.

As a student of history at Ohio State, I have no time at all to do extra curricular research.

But summer is coming. Stay tuned.
 
I have been doing a cursory search in early 20th century newspapers, and have found a lot of stuff. I just need to figure out how best to source the information to the community.
 
Most of what is in the timeline was distilled from this thread, but I came across a couple of new-to-me items. First, I think I found a copy of the first Gillette ad - and a quick search suggested that it has not been posted here before. McKibben says that the first ad was placed in System in Fall 1903, and this one appeared in the November issue. I suppose everyone on the Gillette board read this magazine, along with everyone they knew in the Boston business community, so it seemed like a natural placement. Click to see it in google books, where you can zoom in to make the text legible.



Second, I gathered some information from this item in the Canadian edition of the Blade. This is also linked to google books, and the whole article is interesting reading.



This gives us an early date for widespread manufacture of pocket editions in Canada, and may also explain some of the oddball razors that we have seen - both from Montreal and other factories. It sounds like when they did not have the right local machinery or skills to implement part of the design, they took a pragmatic approach and made the product as best they could. This may explain some of the unknurled handles and other anomalies we have seen in early Gillette sets.

Finally I was amused to do the math around King Camp Gillette's July 1904 sale of some of his shares to former colleagues at Crown Cork: http://books.google.com/books?id=ECuyAAAAMAAJ&pg=RA2-PA8#v=onepage&q&f=false. It seems KCG met with them to tender his resignation, after finally getting a salaried vice-president role at the Gillette company. He was so enthusiastic that they wanted to buy some shares, so he sold them 4000 of his own shares for $80,000. That was $20 per share, and he later says that the going rate was between $0.25 and $1.00. The par value was $7.69: $500,000 $10: $650,000 invested in 65,000 shares outstanding. Then he went back and bought 9000 more shares for himself - whether from colleagues at Gillette or via some options grant is not clear, but it is hard to see how he could have spent more than $20,000 on the new shares. So he went from 9000 shares to 14,000 shares - profited by at least $60,000 into the bargain.

I believe this left KCG with a little over 20% of the shares outstanding. He used some of the money to pay back an old debt to John Joyce, who also seems to have been buying as much stock as he could at prices up to $2.50 per share. I think Joyce had over 12% of shares and an equal value of bonds from his 1902 investment - plus whatever other shares he had acquired. But I am fairly sure Joyce did not have an absolute majority until 1910, if then. Each of the other board members probably had about 5%. It would be interesting to know more about the distribution of shares at various points in the KCG-Joyce political struggle, so I may do some research there.
 
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Trying to track down the Berlin factory, I started with Achim's fine collection of adverts and letters.



This letter is interesting because it is dated 1908-04-30. The letterhead has no diamond logos, which makes sense. It lists Berlin along with Paris, Montreal, London, New York, and Boston - but under the heading "Offices and Factories" so we cannot assume a plant in all those places. Apparently the Leicester plant was in London, by courtesy. It also shows KCG as president, confirming the Directory of Directors data. I will add a reference for that.



Porter linked to this German ad earlier in the thread, but I wanted to go back to it because it does not mention Berlin. It lists the Holborn Viaduct address in London, and also mentions a Hamburg importer "E.F. Grell". I wish we had a more exact date for this advert, since it seems to show that Berlin did not even have a sales office, much less a factory. We might be able to do something with the claim that (loose translation) "over 2M Gillette razor devices... are in use". Annual worldwide sales figures would be a great addition to the timeline anyway.

Google books thinks that Fliegende Blätter, Volume 127 (dated 1907) might have matches for Gillette and Grell, but they do not have the content available online. http://diglit.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/fb127?sid=258015cc96464b5130b050fb3722c1bf&ui_lang=eng appears to have the right volume of this weekly publication - but only as scanned images. So that will be a needle in a haystack search, and may be a red herring anyhow. From a quick look, I am not sure that the publication took advertising.



Achim dates this to 1908, which might make it an earlier use of the diamond logo than the Christmas 1908 ad campaign. But I have not been able to find a 1908 example in google books: all the matches seem to be from 1909. Achim's earliest pocket edition is also dated to 1909, by serial number I think, and its case seems to have the stitched-on diamond logo. And we have the evidence from Peterson in the Blade that Montreal did not get any large orders for pocket editions until June of 1909. So on balance I suspect that this ad was not published until 1909.
 
This letter is interesting because it is dated 1908-04-30. The letterhead has no diamond logos, which makes sense. It lists Berlin along with Paris, Montreal, London, New York, and Boston - but under the heading "Offices and Factories" so we cannot assume a plant in all those places. Apparently the Leicester plant was in London, by courtesy.

I would assume that Gillette was just taking some license since most people outside England would likely never have heard of Leicester, and London would sound much more prestigious. Also, that letterhead could just as easily been referring to the London sales office, though the later ads that include London in the list of factories would be relying on that bending of the truth.

I found this interesting nugget in the October 10, 1908 issue of Electrical World that references an August 15th letter that includes Gillette in a list of foreign companies that had bought land and built factories in England:




It also shows KCG as president, confirming the Directory of Directors data. I will add a reference for that.

That's a great find. It gives a solid "no later than" date for his re-titling.

Achim dates this to 1908, which might make it an earlier use of the diamond logo than the Christmas 1908 ad campaign. But I have not been able to find a 1908 example in google books: all the matches seem to be from 1909. Achim's earliest pocket edition is also dated to 1909, by serial number I think, and its case seems to have the stitched-on diamond logo. And we have the evidence from Peterson in the Blade that Montreal did not get any large orders for pocket editions until June of 1909. So on balance I suspect that this ad was not published until 1909.

I agree with you. That same ad ran in the June 5, 1909 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, the June 10, 1909 issue of Life, and the July 1909 issue of Outing.
 
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