King of Shaves Cuts Deal With Kai, Launches King of Style Precision Grooming with Remington in UK

I write this from NYC, where I’m delighted to be a guest at Diane Woods’ (our very own Queen of Shaves) wedding today in New Jersey. Sadly, the weather’s a little British (read raining cats and dogs) but it promises to be a fantastic day for Di – for whom the sun will certainly shine on her and her partner, Steve in the future (and definitely where they’re going on their Honeymoon!)

Awaking, I was delighted to read coverage in The Sunday Telegraph on not just our recent deal with Kai Industries Co. Ltd. of Japan, our technology partner (Kai is a £700m revenues company headquartered in Tokyo) but also a nice write up on our stylish, brand new Precision Grooming range developed in partnership with the Remington division of US $3Bn consumer products company, Spectrum brands.

This is the first time we’ve taken ‘The King’ into the arena of men’s hairstyling & grooming, and we launched the range with Argos earlier this month. It’s available in over 700 stores, and will bring King of Shaves to a wider audience. Of course, we have more planned – both in this area, and in our core wet shave arena in terms of NPD – indeed, one person tweeted today that he saw King of Shaves “as the dyson of shaving” which pleased me greatly!

Before I flew to the USA, my Dad chastised me gently for not updating my blog more frequently – I tend to twitter and post on facebook, both of which he doesn’t particularly engage with. So I hope readers (and Dad!) enjoy reading this latest blog post.

It’s an exciting time for us, having entered the hyper competitive wet shave market with our King of Shaves Azor 4 in June 2008, and more recently launching our Azor 5 Sensitive in the UK, and shortly in the USA (yes, King of Shaves AlphaGels and Azor will be available much more widely in the USA in the Fall, as announced by Dave Lumley the CEO of Spectrum Brands Inc. (SBI) in their recent Q3 Earnings Call.

The King of Shaves Company continues to attract much interest from a wide variety of parties, looking to work with us on expanding our global reach – after all – in high performance system wet shave (an intensely challenging category, with high barriers to entry (patents) and potentially enormous commercial profitability (Gillette was bought for US$57Bn by P&G in 2005) I’m excited that King of Shaves is the only other high performance brand in this space, other than Gillette & Schick Wilkinson Sword – that’s right – just THREE companies, and ‘The British Are Coming’!

Over the coming weeks and months I’ll try to update my blog here, and my Brand Royalty blog more frequently – Dad (and Penny) if I don’t, keep on at me.

King of Shaves. The Future of Shaving! Come, join our Kingdom!