King Gillette Did Not Invent the Strategy Named After Him
The famous story is that Gillette gave away handles and made his money on cartridges. The numbers say otherwise.
King C. Gillette filed his patent for a disposable safety razor in 1901 and sold the first ones in 1903. The story repeated in business-school case studies is that he priced the handles below cost, sometimes giving them away, then made his fortune on the proprietary blades only his razor could hold. It is a tidy explanation for the model that now bears his name.
It is also wrong on the dates. The razor's patent ran until 1921. For those eighteen years Gillette charged $5 for a handle — about $150 in today's money — and didn't bundle or discount aggressively. The handles were the profit center. Only after the patent expired and competitors started selling cheap clones did Gillette pivot, dropping handle prices and pushing high-margin blades. By then the strategy had earned its name from the wrong period.
The pattern itself is older than Gillette. Standard Oil reportedly distributed cheap kerosene lamps in late-19th-century China to grow demand for kerosene. John D. Rockefeller's company knew the trick. Modern examples are everywhere: inkjet printers and ink, video-game consoles and games, e-readers and ebooks, espresso machines and pods, water pickers and replacement filters. The cheap durable, the expensive consumable.
A second, subtler version sells the durable at retail and locks customers into a service subscription — gym equipment with required app subscriptions, smart-home hubs that need cloud accounts. The mechanism is the same: capture the customer with one purchase, monetize over the rest of the relationship. Whoever first proposed it, the legend named the wrong man.
Make Recess yours.
Sign in to save the ones you loved, never see the same thing twice, and tell us what you want more of.