Razor Blade Manufacturing: Gillette to ABB Robots

Razor blade manufacturing mixes heavy steel processing with extreme precision. A coil of thin stainless steel goes in at one end, and an edge only a few hundred angstroms across comes out at the other, ready to be clipped into a plastic cartridge with up to five blades. This post follows the job from straight razors and King Gillette's first disposable blade to today's grinding, coating and cartridge assembly lines. It ends with Gillette's new investment in Massachusetts and the places where ABB robots could plausibly handle, assemble and pack blades in the future.

A Gillette Fusion razor cartridge with its five blades. Photo: Barcex / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

How straight razors gave way to Gillette's safety blade

For most of history a shave meant a straight razor, an open blade that its owner or a barber had to strop and hone. Around 1762 the French cutler Jean-Jacques Perret most likely invented the guard razor, a straight razor with a protective guard. In 1880 Frederic and Otto Kampfe of Brooklyn filed a patent for improvements in safety razors, the first attested use of the term, and sold their product as the Star Safety Razor. Those early safety razors still used thick blades that needed regular sharpening.

A roadside barber shaving a customer with a straight razor in Kashgar, 2011. Photo: John Hill / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

King Camp Gillette wanted a blade cheap enough to throw away. He and his associates founded the American Safety Razor Company on 28 September 1901, and his patent for a razor with a disposable double edged blade, applied for in 1901, was granted in 1904. Getting thin steel to take and hold an edge was the hard part, so production started slowly in 1903, and the first year brought sales of 51 razors and 168 blades. In 1904 the firm became the Gillette Safety Razor Company, and William Nickerson built a new blade grinding machine to clear a production bottleneck.

King Camp Gillette in 1906, two years after his razor patent was granted. Photo: Benjamin Joseph Falk via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In the second year, sales reached 90,884 razors and 123,648 blades. War pushed the numbers much higher: during the First World War Gillette supplied US troops with about 3.5 million razors and 32 million blades, and returning soldiers kept buying replacements. New plants opened in Paris, in Canada and later in Britain, including the factory on the Great West Road in Brentford, built in 1936 and 1937. The steel changed too. Wilkinson Sword began selling stainless steel blades in 1962, and its Bonded Shaving System of 1970 set a blade into a disposable plastic cartridge.

Early Gillette double edged blades and their original wrappers. Photo: Helsinki City Museum / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Razor blade manufacturing lines today

Gillette answered with the twin blade Trac II, announced in 1971. Bic introduced a fully disposable razor in 1974, and Gillette added a third blade with the Mach3 in 1998 and a fifth with the Fusion in 2006. That same year Gillette stopped using its Brentford plant and moved the production to Poland. Closer to home, on 7 October 2026 NBC Boston reported that Gillette is investing 1.5 billion dollars in a Boston headquarters and its plant in Andover, Massachusetts, where blade and razor manufacturing is moving from South Boston after more than a century in the city.

The former Gillette factory on the Great West Road in Brentford, built in 1936 and 1937 and used until 2006. Photo: Jim Linwood / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The process inside such plants is still recognisable from the patents. Stainless steel strip is slit to width, hardened in a furnace and quenched. The hardened strip then runs past grinding wheels coated with ever finer abrasives to form the edge, which is honed afterwards. Hard coatings and a thin outer layer of PTFE strengthen the edge and reduce friction, and patents describe a finished tip radius of roughly 200 to 300 angstroms. Then come the plastic parts, such as housings, lubricating strips and springs, which are assembled with the blades into cartridges and packed.

A three blade Gillette Mach3 cartridge. Photo: Crisco 1492 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

We found no published ABB installation in a razor plant, so ABB's role here is a possibility based on work its robots already do. Grinding and coating of the strip happen inside dedicated machines, so robots fit best around them. A small arm such as the new IRB 1200 can tend machines and move delicate parts, and a YuMi cobot can handle small part assembly. ABB robots with Force Control hold a constant pressure when grinding and finishing other metal parts, as described in our post on robotic grinding and deburring.

An ABB IRB 6700 grinding a steel part in Teqram's EasyGrinder cell at Ancofer. Photo: ABB

What comes next for razor blade manufacturing

A new plant like Andover is a chance to rethink the whole flow. Blade lines run fast with very tight tolerances, so the next gains will probably come from machine vision that checks every edge and from automation that moves coils, reels and finished cartridges without anyone carrying them. Packing small cartridges into blister packs and cartons is classic work for delta robots such as the IRB 360 FlexPicker, and cells like that are usually designed and tested first in RobotStudio.

ABB YuMi assembling small parts beside a lab worker. Photo: ABB

Shavers at home now choose between cartridge systems that keep adding blades and features and the double edged safety razor with its cheap, simple blade, the same kind of product Gillette started selling in 1903. Both depend on grinding a strip of steel into a consistent edge, millions of times a day. For the factory, a wider product range means switching formats more often. A robot can be retaught for a new cartridge, while a fixed machine is usually built around one design.

The new generation ABB IRB 1200, a compact six axis arm for fast small part work. Photo: ABB

Cost comes first. Blade making already depends on highly specialised machines, and a robot cell has to pay for itself by cutting waste or labour in handling and packing. Safety needs extra care when sharp blades and fast arms share a cell, so cells need guarding or tools such as SafeMove that slow a robot when people come near. Plants also need technicians who can maintain both grinding machines and robots, and simple programming tools such as the Wizard interface on the single arm YuMi make that easier to learn.

Programming a single-arm YuMi with Wizard on the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

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