Will King Spills The Beans

We met the founder of KMI, the company behind King of Shaves, at his Buckinghamshire offices to find out about how he uses the web to interact with his customers, what makes it such a struggle to hire a good FD, why he is going into space and exactly who Beanius are!

Starting up in troubled times

Founder of KMI, Will King, is no stranger to battling through hard economic times. When he was made redundant from a well paid advertising job in the tough early nineties, he decided to produce something that would solve his shaving problems and start the empire that created King of Shaves.

King, whose company now produces and licences a wide range of cosmetic products, decided that selling products was a safer bet than advertising.

"I decided to get into product because products were still being sold; you just weren't spending millions of pounds advertising them."

King discovered a niche market for shaving oil when he used his girlfriend's aromatherapy oils to avoid getting a shaving rash. Determined to bring his idea to the world, King bottled the first batch single-handedly.

Pointing to what looks like a contraption to blow up balloons, King proudly shows us the pump that he used to fill 9600 bottles.

The meeting room that we're in is decorated with the groups' funky products and press cuttings of John Terry, endorsing King of Shaves, but the King of it all is relaxed and down to earth, even after 16 years of continuous success.

One of King's products sells every two seconds, but growth at the King started small. It made just £300 in the first year and was £30,000 down but King was sure that the small success they had had in Harrods was the start of good things.

Sales rocketed to £58,000 in the second year and Will was confident that they were going in the right direction. KMI made its first healthy profit of £120,000 in 1997, 5 years after it had begun.

"That's when I started to pay myself." Laughs Will as he recalls living off of loans and credit cards for five years.
King's business partner, Herbie Dayal, was behind Will's redundancy in the early nineties, but it's clear that the twist of fate was a blessing in disguise as Will admits that he may not have made the leap into business if he was not pushed.

"I don't know if I'd be here doing this because I was good at my advertising job; I had a TVR sports car, a £40k salary and a mortgage to pay!"

Finding a niche and competing with Gillette

Will's continued success can be partly attributed to finding the right gaps in the market, from the need for a sensitive shave oil in 1993 to the market for recyclable green toiletries, Patently Obvious.

"We look at market niches. The secret of our success are market gaps where we can launch a niche product and grow it into a mass product."

The latest phenomenon to come from King of Shaves is the Azor razor, King speaks passionately about his products, and it's clear, that if you allowed him to, he could talk about shaving all day. What's refreshing, is that Will is completely in tune with everything that goes on in the empire and it's clear that the goods, especially the Azor are a by- product of his vision.

Breaking into the online world

King is particularly web-savvy and in tune with the ever-developing internet, he bought the domain Shave.com for a mere thirty five dollars when the web was a world away from what it is today.

"In the early days of running the business we had no money and had to seek competitive advantage as a pint sized business vs. a gorilla sized business. In ‘93 CompuServe.com came along and our first email address was 10043775@compuserve.com; I knew the internet was going to change things."

King vividly recalls having to phone up and order shave.com, which he was offered £1m for in 1999, because the company providing domains did not even have an email address at that time.

"The first phase of the internet was the domain name land grab where lots of people would buy things like vodka.com and then try to sell them on, what we should have bought was shaving and shavers.com!"
Keeping an eye on the web has helped King utilise the phenomenon and he believes that the internet has powers beyond any other means of communication.

"Only the internet can get people to collectively collaborate on your behalf as a brand."

King, who seems to enjoy that the internet has disrupted traditional media, uses it with PR to get his messages out.

"We can use an editorial review and inject it into a community of people who enjoy using King of Shaves. They'll individually blog about it and links will go from their blog pages to your article. The more genuine and community based (information) is, the harder it is for a company like Gillette to just spend money at it to say they're better."
King, who opened up the Ecommerce shop nine years ago, before even Tesco offered an online service, has spent a lot of money on using the web to communicate with what he calls his "loyal subjects."

"When you realise how powerful the internet can be, you see that it's only going to get more powerful. The rise of Google and social networks over the last 10 years has been astonishing. Facebook is a platform that we engage with heavily because it allows you to only target the eyes looking at that screen with a message, rather than a random advert in a magazine read by all manner of people, some of which couldn't give a toss about your products."

"When I'm not in meetings I'm looking at what people are blogging about relating to the razor launch seeing whether people are loving the shave or not loving it. I'm spending a huge amount of time working out how to leverage our launch without having access to the £20m advertising budget that Gillette have got."

Spending so much time on internet forums, King can easily spot a false blog and he responds to threads himself as The King of Shaves.

"You've got to be genuine on the internet because it you were dishonest it would be a disaster scenario."
King believes that more companies will eventually come round utilising the internet to promote their products.
"As the web shifts out of 2.0 to whatever its next iteration is and becomes more of a global community it will either work in concert to get good things done, or if bad things are out there to point those things out."

"We're a small business but we compete with big companies like Proctor and Gamble and Palmolive so we can't outspend them by throwing money at advertising. We have to leverage the social networks and communities to get behind our products, on the basis that they are great products."

Recruiting for the King

Judging by the Shave.com blog, Will's team appears to have hired a group of vibrant happy people but he admits that they're tough to find.

"Recruitment is very hard because the people in the business make the business a success or a failure. If you've got a good product you've got to externalise how good it is through talented people."

"We can offer the excitement of working in a small fast moving entrepreneurial environment with its own risk and rewards but not necessarily the big numbers that big people require. Secondly, when you run a smaller company, it's so obvious when someone is good or bad, almost from day one. There is nowhere to hide in a company of this size. If you are a bit weak you spin your wheels quite quickly and therefore it doesn't work out.

Many of King's staff have been with him for five or ten years and he paints himself as an empowering, supportive boss, though he admits he won't tolerate fools.

Will believes that, historically, one of the most difficult positions to fill has been that of the Financial Director.

"The FD is so important in a small company as you have to retain a strong transparent look at what is going on. We've gone through quite a few...we've got a good guy now though."

"Marketing is hard here too because the brands are so unique to the personality of the business." If I could clone myself and have him as Marketing Director for King of Shaves that would be fantastic because I know what will turn on our customers and I know what won't."

Will supports two staff members in New York but generally leaves the running of the £5m US division of the business to them.

He comes across as a genuinely nice boss and he's even helping one staff member with his lifelong dream. "There's one guy working for me who really wants to be a rock singer, we'll hopefully help him become a rock singer with his band Beanius. I know that he doesn't want to be sales executive here for the rest of his days but I'm interested in working with him proactively to get him into a space."

The man behind the shave

King's animated expressions make him great to converse with and his recollection of detail is amazing. When he is done "shaving the world", he plans to get involved with another love in his life, yacht design.

King spends some of his free time sailing and will be taking to the air next year when he flies Virgin Galactic to be the first man to shave in space.

King uses vivid similes throughout the interview and compares Virgin's space craft to the streamline Azor and the shuttle to his competitors. The trip will cost him £100k but he's confident he'll get his money's worth.

"I'll make sure that the leverage that comes out of it from the cost perspective will be value for money; I'll somehow get a wireless connection to do it all live."

Will declares that his son is nervous about him going to space but he is sure that Branson will take good care of him.

"No one is going up if it's blowing up! People won't be flying Virgin Atlantic if they can't trust Virgin Space to fly safely to infinity and beyond!"

http://shave.com/