Add One Blade, Add $200 Million

Sept. 22 -- There are roughly 48 square inches of facial hair on a man's face. Just 48 square inches. And yet there is a huge struggle under way now to control that real estate and the whiskers that come with it.

If you go to your local drug store this week, you will spot the battleground over on the aisle where shaving creams live near razor blades. The instigator of this battle? The Schick Quattro four-blade razor. The first of its kind anywhere in the world and a direct threat to the shaving industry leader, the Gillette Mach3.

"Our goal was to have the fourth blade get hair that is missed by other products," said Schick Vice President David VerNooy. He was interviewed at the super-secret Schick research lab in Milford, Conn. Inside you will find researchers gazing through one-way mirrors at some test "face" lathering up and shaving. This sort of testing has gone on for years and has cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more.

VerNooy said the advent of the Quattro was the outgrowth of a search for the perfect shave, something to one-up the competition.

"It's not that we're trying to cut the same hair four times," he explained. "We recognize sometimes a hair will get missed by the first blade, the second blade, and it's only cut by the third one.

"Sometime a hair is missed by all three," he continued. "And it's 'OK, how do we position and balance the shaving forces so that we get more of that missed hair?' "

All of this has gained the attention of the folks at Gillette, the industry leader, with 75 percent of the market in what's called "wet" shavers.

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Gillette came out with the world's first three-blade razor five years ago. The Mach3, and its heir, the Mach3Turbo. All have, well, three blades. A razor with four blades is definitely something Gillette is not welcoming onto the market.

"This is really the first big threat that Gillette has seen, I would say, in quite some time," said Joseph Altobello, an analyst with CIBC World Markets.