DealHorizon - the faster, easier way to create and share business plans

Almost every entrepreneur knows the "give away the razor, sell the blades" marketing strategy that King Camp Gillette pioneered, but Gillette had some other innovative ideas that have received rather less attention over the years - but may be coming back into vogue.

First, the epiphany. Prior to turning inventor/entrepreneur, Gillette grew up poor after his family's holdings were wiped out by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

He moved west and eventually scored a job working as a saleman for Crown Holdings (still around today, but then called the "Crown Cork and Seal Company"), a corporation that sold bottle caps designed to protect the fizziness of newly-invented carbonated drinks.

One day on the job, he noticed that the buyers of these carbonated beverages simply tossed the products he was selling - Crown's cork-lined bottlecaps - onto the ground. The epiphany? People could be convinced to buy something useful, and then throw it away. Thus was born the idea for the disposable product.

Contrary to popular myth, Gillette did not invent the safety razor - that was thought up nearly thirty years prior to the forming of his company - but his did invent the idea of building a profitable business based on the idea of subsidizing the user's investment in the platform (the razor) in order to profit from the sale of a mass-produced plug-in (cheap blades).

His first year wasn't stellar - his books showed sales of just 168 blades in year one - but in year two, sales increased to over 90,000 blades, and by year seven, he was selling 70 million blades a year. Few business plans have ever succeeded so spectacularly.

The rest of the story? Gillette, like many entrepreneurs, was possessed with some ideas that proved, well, slightly less successful than his disposable razor. This, from wikipedia:

Gillette was a Utopian Socialist. He published a book titled The Human Drift (1894), which advocated that all industry should be taken over by a single corporation owned by the public, and that everyone in the US should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls*.

According to his obiturary, published in 1932 by the New York Times, despite becoming a multi-millionaire, King Gillette remained committed to his socialist ideals for the rest of his business life. He published a Prospectus for Metropolis in 1910 and offered President Theodore Roosevelt the job of CEO with a starting salary of a million dollars a year - in 1910 dollars. According to the Times, the President turned him down.

*Some would argue that we're heading down that road right now in the US - but with a less-costly chief executive (the current salary of a US President is just $569,000, including expenses - the sum offered Teddy Roosevelt is equivalent to $22,738,815 today - you can check my math using The Inflation Calculator.)