The moments that made millions

Will King, founder, King of Shaves

Made redundant in the last recession (with a measly £2,000 pay-off to boot), former marketeer Will King found himself adding personal injury to career insult on a daily basis when cutting his neck to ribbons while wet shaving every morning. “This was back in 1993, and I couldn’t fathom why I was getting such a rash, so I looked around the bathroom for alternatives to my usual soap,” says King. “My girlfriend suffered from dry skin and she had a bath oil hanging around, and, given my degree in mechanical engineering, I thought: oil should lubricate the parts a bit better.”

An inspired King duly applied the oil to his razor and emerged from his daily ritual satisfyingly spot-free. “I decided to launch the business pretty much there and then,” he recalls, “and so I set about formulating a recipe that would work for men.”
 King felt he could move men’s minds towards oil and away from foam, creating a whole new market in the process. The resulting oil had the working name Sunrise and he began bottling it in his bathroom. “It was only when I was playing pontoon with my dad after a Sunday roast that he suggested I use my name in the title, and King Of Shaves was born.”

Over the next few months, King ploughed through the Yellow Pages, using a phone and desk loaned to him by one of the management consultants that had made him redundant, trying to get stockists for his revolutionary product. “I took on as much credit-card debt as I could,” he says. “A couple of friends also invested money and I had around £25,000 to go to market with. We made just £300 in the first year, but then I managed to get into Boots and the next year we made £58,000. The year after we made £250,000, and it’s been uphill ever since. I’ll be 44 in August, and I’m proud of the fact that I’ve been able to secure my parents’ financial future.”

Today, the company is trying to elbow its way into the fiercely contested razor market, with the launch of its Azor product, and although King has had offers of around £30m-£35m to sell up, he has no intention of doing so: “They say the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is that a millionaire sells up 10 years too soon.”