How Gillette
designed a razor for men who can’t shave themselves
Treo,
a masterpiece of inclusive design, is a finalist in the 2018 Innovation by
Design awards.
Gillette has been designing razors since 1900–but they’re all
designed for you to shave yourself. There’s another group of people who want to
be shaved and rely on other people to do it for them: the elderly and people
with disabilities. For caretakers, shaving someone else is a nerve-wracking
process that requires navigating a lot of awkward angles with the constant fear
of accidentally cutting them.
In 2017, Gillette began testing Treo, its
first ever assistive shaving razor designed specifically to alleviate the
challenges of shaving someone else. Treo, which
is a finalist in the 2018
Innovation by Design awards, fuses a razor blade with tube of shaving gel
that serves as its handle and gives shavers more control while keeping the mess
to a minimum. For elderly men who can no longer shave themselves, it’s a
product that can help them maintain a clean appearance and preserve a semblance
of their youth.
“Shaving in that context is a massive part of those men’s
dignity,” says Matt Hodgson, a principal design engineer at Gillette’s product
development facility in the U.K. who led design for Treo. “It’s something
they’ve done all the way through their lives.”
Treo is an example of inclusive design at its best–and it
originated from feedback Gillette began to hear from its users. While many of
the company’s advertising campaigns focus on the moment a father teaches his
son how to shave, Gillette had started to get feedback on social media about
what happens when a father no longer can shave himself. The verdict? None of
its razors were designed to help.
To understand why it was so hard to shave someone else, Hodgson
started by shaving a colleague in the office. Once he tried it, Hodgson
realized just how difficult it was to do: unlike when you shave yourself, it’s
hard to tell if you’re applying enough pressure to effectively cut the hairs
while not inadvertently cutting the skin. And if shaving those tricky spots is
onerous when you’re doing it yourself, it’s even worse when you’re doing it for
someone else.
Hodgson also traveled to a local nursing home to observe assisted
shaving in the wild. “I watched three guys being shaved,” he says. “It was
something I’ll never forget. I sat there thinking, we can do so much better
than this. In addition to all the problems I was finding, there were so many
more in that situation, particularly when you’re shaving someone who’s in a
vulnerable position.”
It wasn’t just that it was challenging to know how much pressure
to apply to someone else’s skin to get the job done. The circumstances of
shaving were entirely different too: Men were usually shaved sitting down or in
bed rather than in the shower, meaning there wasn’t immediate access to water
to wash off the razor. That also meant that using standard shaving cream would
quickly become a mess. Because the person being shaved is typically in a seated
or reclined position, shavers also needed to hold the razor at a different
angle to get a close shave.
Hodgson and his team developed a series of five different
prototypes over three months, returning to the nursing home with dozens of test
razors for the caregivers to try out, before arriving at the final design. To
tackle the problem of shaving occurring outside of the bathroom and away from a
running tap, Hodgson added a special razor guard that was initially designed
for the Indian market, where men’s hair is thicker and they tend to use less
water when shaving. Whereas Hodgson had originally observed caregivers going
through two or three disposable razors for a single shave in the nursing home,
the guard helped with clogging and enabled shavers to do the whole face using a
single razor. Treo’s handle doubles as a tube of water-based gel, developed to
go onto the skin cleanly without creating the kind of mess that shaving cream
would–an imperative for shaving that’s happening outside the bathroom. Hodgson
also reoriented the angle between the razor head and this tube handle so that
shavers can hold the device like a paintbrush or a pencil, giving them more
control.
In the fall of 2017, Gillette began sending out this final design
for free to nursing homes and individuals across the United States and U.K. as
part of a pilot program. During testing, the team had primarily focused on
professional carers who were shaving multiple men on a daily basis, but they
wanted to know if the product would work for people in different situations.
One pilot tester was Anne Baker, a woman who shaves her husband who has
Parkinson’s about once a month before important events. “He was military. He
was an executive. He always put his best face forward. His appearance was
incredibly important to him,” Baker says.
She’s found Treo to be the answer to her fear over cutting her
husband while trying to shave him, and wishes it had been around when her
father–who worked for Gillette–was old. “This would have been a godsend when he
was quite old and in a nursing home,” she says. “He would have loved this. He
always wanted to be clean-shaven.”
Armed with positive feedback from the pilot, Gillette has started
selling razors to a limited number of people through its website as it assesses
whether to bring Treo to the mainstream. “We know the shave business inside
out, better than anybody else,” Hodgson says. “But this was a completely
different market.”
BY KATHARINE SCHWAB
https://www.fastcompany.com/90232951/how-gillette-designed-a-razor-for-men-who-cant-shave-themselves?utm_source=postup&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Fast%20Company%20Daily&position=6&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=10022018
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