Or you could have just read post 11.
Ah, the “Hot and Foamy” shaving cream heater. Great episode. I like the part where NIles discovers that Mavis had him painted out of a portrait of the two in a garden.
Niles, “I don’t think I can take any more of this”.
Fraser, “Well, you better not take a close look at the face on that skunk in the woods.”
Dennis
Closeness of a wet shave has more to do with proper pre-shave beard prep than with the type of razor. The straight razor has lot of mystique surrounding it, but a cheap POS Bic throw-away will give a better shave when coupled with adequate prep, if the straight razor is coupled with typical in a hurry half-assed prep. An old barber I used to hunt with used a straight razor because his customers expected it, but he always said the two most important things were to soften the beard with moist heat and to shave in as few strokes as possible.
There are several very good reasons why this doesn’t happen.
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Most consumer-products companies are extremely risk-averse. Ideas and formulas for new products are tested extensively, and given the amount of money it costs to develop and launch something, companies generally don’t launch something unless the research tells them that it’s like to succeed – and even then, many (even most) new products fail.
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Product failures, particularly high-profile ones, have lasting impacts at companies. The people who worked on a high-profile failure often see their careers with that company damaged (and they may wind up having to leave the company entirely), and the failed product can endure in the collective memory of that company for many years. Given that, it can be very difficult for an old, doomed idea to get new support in a company (“we did that already, it bombed, the answer is not only ‘no’, but ‘hell no.’”)
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While a few products may fail because “people weren’t ready for this,” and thus, maybe changes in consumer tastes might mean it could succeed years later, it’s difficult to tease out the idea that “it was a great product, before its time” versus “it actually wasn’t as good as we thought it was.”
I miss the straight blade barbers, but it is easy enough to heat foam with a sink basin of hot water, or even the whole can of made of metal. For that reason foam is better than hydrophilic gels.
Hot foam is comfy, all right, but it doesn’t give you a closer shave. According to a long-ago article in Esquire magazine, you need to go cold to do that. The cold makes the facial skin shrink back very slightly, but the beard hairs do not. If you have a heavy, fast-growing beard, that tiny fraction of an inch shorter whiskers can keep you looking clean-shaven a bit later in the day. To chill the face before shaving, soak a face cloth in cold water and hold it to your face for several seconds before applying shave cream.
The cold face is apparently at less risk of shaving cuts, as well. I take an anti-coagulant drug (Eloquis), so that’s important to me. I haven’t cut myself shaving for a long time.
Maybe so, but I’d think there would be more companies that are thinking “outside the box” and could succeed with it.
What about products that sold well but then didn’t and were discontinued? I bought a box of Quisp the other day. It was a huge seller in the late 60’s/early 70’s then wasn’t and was discontinued. Then they brought it back.
Auto manufacturers routinely bring models back. Charger, Challenger, Ranger, just to name a few.
As far as the OP’s product I would think 50 years is long enough to give it a shot again.
After 50 years, I would be stunned if anybody involved with the original product in any way is still working. Most probably aren’t even alive.
I was working at Quaker Oats in the 1990s when they brought Quisp back. It’s actually been available again for 20+ years; it’s just that they sell it as a niche-y, retro product, appealing to adults who loved it as kids (and, now, hipsters). It’s not widely available, the way that Quaker’s other cereals are (that is, you can’t find it at most grocery stores), and hasn’t been since it was re-introduced. When they first brought it back, you had buy it via mail-order, or at one of a few retailers; today, you can buy it on Amazon.
Quaker’s done a reasonable business with it in that manner (certainly enough to justify continuing to make it), but if there were enough demand to relaunch it as a general-market brand, I can guarantee you that Quaker would have done so by now. It was always a beloved brand at Quaker, and if there were a strong business case for a big relaunch, the company would absolutely have done so.
They bring back model names, and some styling cues (and they do so, in part, because of retro appeal), but the modern versions of those vehicles are, of course, radically different from their 1960s and 1970s versions.