I was going through some old boxes in my attic yesterday, and found the article that I've scanned and posted with this post (the magazine cover image is above; the actual article, as a PDF, is linked below.) In light of my recent conversion to DE shaving, maybe some of you will be interested in the story behind it...
I was 27, it was 1989, and I was at my first serious job, working as a reporter in New York at a magazine covering the advertising and marketing industry. Gillette was my beat, and the company was about to announce a new, "secret" razor. The pressure to figure out what the company was doing before the official announcement was intense; I was in the chase with the business writers at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and all the other magazines in town that covered the company.
And I got the scoop by heading down to the US patent office and tediously going through all of Gillette's recent patents, then comparing them to what issue we thought Gillette's product might address, which - we believed - was the increasing marketshare being garnered by the Good News product, which had commoditized the company's business. I confirmed the info by calling the Gillette designer listed on the patents, who told me I was right. He probably shouldn't have, and he probably got in trouble (more on that in a second.)
Though we didn't get the name of the product - it would be called "Sensor" - I pretty much nailed the design, with the spring-loaded cartridges and the improvements (debatable!) on the Atra/Trac II designs.
I learned a lot at that job - I had a wonderful mentor who taught me how to write long-form magazine articles, which is what I do today. But I also felt very bad about the engineer who I'd called; he wasn't used to talking to the press, he was honest with me, and Gillette's PR people were angry: they thought I'd committed a foul by not going through them. In the news business, of course, a scoop is a scoop, and I hadn't misrepresented myself or my intentions, but I began to feel less comfortable with the aggressive techniques of that form of news gathering. I wanted to write stories that were more positive, and had positive interactions with my subjects.
A few years later, I switched directions and pursued a job writing about the thing I love most: riding bikes. I became editor of Mountain Bike magazine, and though I've long-since moved on (believe me, a 50-year-old guy shouldn't be running a publication like that), I've had a wonderful and fun career ever since. The reason I mention this is that there's a funny postscript. As some of you probably know, a lot of bike riders shave their legs. A few years after my Sensor scoop, I decided to write an article about technique for doing so, so I got out my old rolodex and called Gillette's PR people. They didn't believe I was really working for a bike magazine - they were sure I was trying to trick them - so I ended up calling Schick.
I used the Sensor for a while, but really didn't have any particular preferred razor. And that leads up to my few months here on B&B, and my growing passion for DE shaving. In the end, my scoop was correct - at least factually - but, as I now know, neither Sensor, nor its cartridge-based successors, were truly "the best a man can get."
- Dan
The article is here.
