Shavings Bonds

Will King, the CEO of King of Shaves who spoke about his battle to break into the shaving products market at the Economics conference last week, was on BBC Radio 5’s Wake up to Money yesterday – you can listen to the programme or download the podcast from here. King of Shaves is raising a further £5m capital to fund its growth plans – as Geoff reported on the Economics blog last week, King of Shaves is launching successfully in Japan and now looking towards the United States. However at this time when all the news is full of stories of businesses which cannot raise money from the banking system, Will King has come up with a different approach which follows his hugely successful strategy of using the web and viral marketing.

He bought the domain name shave.com for $35 back in 1995 and uses new technologies such as Facebook, Blogs and Twitter now to market products to specific, younger audiences; this time he is using the domain name shavingbond.com which he bought about 5 years ago to invite his customers to invest in the company. He is inviting customers to invest £1000 each and buy a bond that pays a coupon, or interest, of 6% each year for the next three years. That’s twelve times the Bank of England’s official rate – as shavingbond.com describes it, “a new savings opportunity that laughs in the face of the base rate and pokes a finger in the eye of global economic instability…”

You can buy the bonds online, up to a maximum of £5,000 worth of bonds each, and the website says that each ‘successful applicant’ (nice use of persuasive language!) will also receive a limited edition mirror-finish bond certificate to hang in the bathroom and remind them of their investment every morning! Tempted? You had better get your application filled in fast, King said in an interview with the Times yesterday that his gut instinct is that the issue will be heavily oversubscribed…........