Interesting Gillette Development

Bogeyman

Bogeyman

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Could this be a sign of things to come? Gillette is actually RETAILING DE blades again in the USA it appears in a chain store other than their very own Art of Shaving stores, which I might add sell the Russian Platinum blade for $6 per tuck! :eek: The 'hook' is that these Platinum Plus blades are (were?) made in their Brazil plant!! I can find no current info if that plant is indeed still open as they have closed all other South American production and will IMO shut down St. Petersburg when their huge new plant in Vietnam is completed soon.

The U.S. retailer selling these is none other than the huge corp. Walgreen's who bought Boots the Chemist totally (they previously owned 45% since 2012) for £9bn cash in 2014.

This was posted on another forum to great interest. They are selling them for approx. $1 per blade. Perhaps this is merely a 'fishing expedition' by Gillette to test the waters so to speak with leftover stock(?). Is it a way to dump NOS? The strategy behind this perplexes me. These guys are geniuses at marketing and.........I just don't know.

Regardless, here's a great photo set of the new & neat packaging:


http://imgur.com/a/YFkXH

I'll try & find some to do a review.
 
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Very interesting. Gillette is, of course, a brand owned by Procter and Gamble. I've looked on several of the P&G websites (they have one for each of the countries in which they operate), and there are plenty of those multiblade cartridges shown, but I'm dashed if I can see a single DE blade.
 
P&G have rarely historically gone in for cross-brand promotion though - you'd expect (perhaps) there to be some crossover between laundry detergent and fabric softener for instance (with the exception of Bold 2-in-1) there is rarely/never a mention of (say) Lenor in an Ariel ad (or on the Lenor/Ariel websites)
 
hunnymonster said:
P&G have rarely historically gone in for cross-brand promotion though - you'd expect (perhaps) there to be some crossover between laundry detergent and fabric softener for instance (with the exception of Bold 2-in-1) there is rarely/never a mention of (say) Lenor in an Ariel ad (or on the Lenor/Ariel websites)
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Stove-piping your individual brands by a parent company makes good sense in 2 ways. First, if one brand gets tainted for some reason, you have a degree of separation in the public's mind. Secondly, the old brand loyalty thing 'Oh no, we don't buy Ariel, we always buy Bold...etc'. Ker-ching for the parent company, regardless.
 
Bogeyman said:
I can find no current info if that plant is indeed still open as they have closed all other South American production and will IMO shut down St. Petersburg when their huge new plant in Vietnam is completed soon.
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This bit would be more interesting to me as I want aware of this. Would this have any bearing on the perceived rise in double edge sales? Perhaps a result of the financial instability and security issues within Russia? Shipping costs are obviously going to go up with the distance added. Perhaps labour costs would offset this but I wouldn't think the wages are too high in Russia. I would be most concerned with a shift in quality, even if only temporary.
 
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