Gillette’s New Razor with Heat Bar
Distancing itself from affordable shave subscriptions like Dollar Shave Club, Gillette put its heated luxury men’s razor on Indegogo last month and it received nearly 5 times the amount of funding needed. The company behind “The Best a Man Can Get” doesn’t necessarily need the communal help of a crowd-funding company, rather, Gillette put the prototype on the site to see how many people actually would want a high end heated razor. The razor has added in top-notch engineering and a warming bar, creating a sophisticated at-home shave.
The Heated Razor provides the same effect as a heated towel treatment normally reserved for a splurge shave at a barbershop. The style of this razor is more traditional but with the touch of a button it heats up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit in an instant. The trickiest part of engineering their new product was finding an evenly distributed and consistent heat without making a bulky cumbersome appliance.
First, Shaving is our passion – and we don’t mean the act of shaving every morning. We mean shaving as a science. For us, every detail counts. We do over 60 precise quality checks from raw material to final cartridge and it must pass every single time, or it will never leave our plants. We know of no other razor manufacturer globally who holds to this standard. We are working hard every day so that our best razors are better than any other product out there, because we want to give you the best shave possible and we want to be better than your expectation, every time. Why does this matter? Because we want you to start every day confident that you are using the best razor for the job, without worrying about the right shaving technique or getting irritations from low-quality razors that are just repackaged with a fancy name and website.
Bar Over Blade
The mechanics and aesthetics of the razor go far beyond the disposable units you can buy at your local Walgreens. The cartridges will be similar to the current Gillette high-end lines but the entire heated package will cost $150 – muc higher than the average consumer spends on their hygiene tools. For that price the customer gets the Heated Razor, wireless magnetic charging dock, and a lithium-ion battery option for traveling.
“What we’re trying to do here is really elevate the experience of shaving. We want to take it from an everyday activity to something that you can actually look forward to.” – Gillette senior engineer, Stephanie Niezgoda Moss.
The design game changer that takes Gillette past their competition is the incorporation of heat into a bar rather than a blade. They filed the patent last spring and within the bar are four sensors that monitors even heat distribution. Other products, like heating lotions and creams, fell by the wayside for their ineffectiveness and short life span. The bar provides just enough surface room to keep the heat high and the shave sharp.