Gillette

Gillette is an American shaving and personal-care brand founded in 1901 in Boston, Massachusetts, and known above all for safety razors and replaceable blades. Its founder, King C. Gillette, set out to commercialise a razor that held a thin, disposable double-edged blade, and the company built itself around the blade-and-handle model that still defines wet shaving today. Gillette has been owned by the consumer-goods company Procter & Gamble since 2005 [5], and now operates as one of P&G's grooming brands rather than as an independent company.

The brand remains commercially active and global, with a current product line that runs from face razors to body and intimate grooming. It is best known to a general audience for the razor systems it released across the twentieth century and, more recently, for a 2019 advertising campaign that drew unusually heavy public backlash.

The business was incorporated as The American Safety Razor Company in Boston on 28 September 1901 [5]. King C. Gillette is recorded as the founder; the working razor itself was co-developed with William Emery Nickerson, an engineer and MIT-trained chemist who helped turn the concept of a cheap, disposable steel blade into a manufacturable product [5]. The first safety razor with disposable blades reached the market in 1903, and in 1904 the company was renamed the Gillette Safety Razor Company [5] — the point at which the founder's name became the brand's name. Because the founding date is tied to the 1901 incorporation of the predecessor company while the Gillette name dates from 1904, sources describe the firm as "more than a century" old, consistent with the 1901 origin.

Gillette's history is largely a sequence of razor systems, each adding blades or mechanisms to the basic safety-razor design. The Trac II of 1971 introduced a twin-blade cartridge; the Atra followed in 1980 with a pivoting head, and the Sensor arrived in 1990 with spring-loaded blades. The three-blade Mach3 launched in 1998, and the five-blade Fusion in 2006. In 2000 the company extended the franchise to women with the Venus line.

The most significant corporate event came in 2005, when Procter & Gamble acquired Gillette in a deal valued at more than $50 billion, announced in January of that year [5]. The acquisition folded Gillette into P&G's portfolio of consumer brands while keeping the Gillette name on its products.

Gillette is owned by Procter & Gamble, which completed its acquisition in 2005 [5][4]. Within P&G it sits among a large group of personal-care and grooming brands, including Old Spice, Head & Shoulders, Pantene, Olay and SK-II, as well as the related women's line Gillette Venus. P&G lists Gillette on its corporate brands page under razors and grooming [4].

Gillette positions itself around shaving "comfort and precision," describing its purpose as helping men "look, feel and be their best." The company frames a social-purpose strand alongside the products: through its "The Best Men Can Be" initiative it states a commitment to "ensure every boy benefits from positive role models," and describes community support as "part of the fabric" of the organisation. That initiative descends from the brand's long-running tagline, "The Best a Man Can Get," in use from 1989 to 2019 and again from 2023 [5].

The brand's signature products are its razor systems, from the early double-edged safety razor through the multi-blade Trac II, Sensor, Mach3 and Fusion cartridges. Its current range centres on the GilletteLabs line, which the company markets for face, body and intimate shaving; Gillette describes the GilletteLabs body razor as its "safest" body razor, qualifying the claim as referring to fewer nicks and cuts. The original innovation underpinning the company was the safety razor itself: King C. Gillette filed a patent in December 1901 for a razor that held a double-edged blade between two metal plates on a T-shaped handle [7]. Gillette is headquartered in Boston, where it maintains both manufacturing and research-and-development facilities [5].

In January 2019 Gillette released an advertisement titled "We Believe: The Best Men Can Be," which reworked its established slogan to address bullying, sexism and "toxic masculinity," themes tied to the #MeToo movement [6]. Reactions were sharply divided: some commentators praised it as a stand against misconduct, while others said it disparaged men, and the spot drew threats of boycotts and became one of the most-disliked videos on YouTube [6]. Procter & Gamble subsequently took an $8 billion writedown on Gillette, reported by Reuters in July 2019, against a backdrop of weaker shaving-category sales [6].

Gillette is an active, globally distributed brand owned by Procter & Gamble. It is classified as acquired rather than independent: P&G has held it since 2005, and it now operates as a P&G grooming brand rather than a standalone company. Product development continues under the GilletteLabs name, and the brand retains broad retail availability.