Caring for the company face

In a sense, the web site of Britain’s home-grown shaving brand, King of Shaves, has been an unmitigated success: every day the company receives a huge volume of emails and significant web traffic. But it has also created a huge IT headache that requires constant maintenance to keep the company’s systems up and running.

When the company dreamed up its domain name back in the early nineties - www.shave.com ­ no-one foresaw the explosive growth in junk email, or that such a name would be so irresistible to spammers selling Viagra over the internet.

Nicky Springle, IT director and customer care manager for King of Shaves, is phlegmatic about this electronic onslaught: ‘You have to laugh at the type of email addresses the spammers try. You can’t really be sensitive in this role. You have to be quite unshockable.’

Fighting battles over brand names has been an important part of the company’s short history. When Will King founded the company in 1993, he was determined to call it King of Shaves.

But use of the words “King of” was considered laudatory, implying it was the best and so it was not allowed a trademark by the Patent Office. King did not give up; he took the case all the way to the European Patent Court where he won his case.

King’s insistence on his chosen brand name appears justified. Since the company launched, it has steadily won market share from its rivals and now commands just over 10 per cent of the UK shaving market, making it the second largest company after US behemoth Gillette.

The genesis of the company came when King developed a terrible shaving rash. His girlfriend at the time suggested he mixed his shaving product with some bath oil which fixed the problem. He then started to develop a product based on essential oils and the company has grown from those days when he would fill the bottles himself.

It now sells a shaving product once every ten seconds globally and even has t he temerity to sell its wares in Gillette’s home market.

Brand recognition is the reason that the company has decided to stick with its domain name, despite receiving a spam email once every seven seconds, which adds considerable strain to the company’s servers and slows the speed of internet traffic.

Waging a war against the spammers is a constant battle; requiring continual updates to the software as emails become ever more sophisticated. ‘The biggest problem we currently face is from picture spam and we’ve just updated our Antigen coding to filter these out as well,’ says Springle.

Her childhood ambition lay in a very different direction: she wanted to become a nurse. ‘I love helping and looking after people. It’s a strong side of my personality.’ A local Buckinghamshire girl, her father persuaded her to stay on at school to take her A levels. She did this reluctantly but found she loved history and politics and then decided to carry on studying these subjects at university.

While she was at college her father developed a terminal illness. Unsurprisingly, this turned her life upside down and those years spent in hospitals turned her away from her childhood ambition. ‘Everyone seemed very jaded. I hated the way consultants dealt with things,’ says Springle. ‘It was such a struggle to get anything done. Even getting social services to help out with father at home was difficult. The whole experience wore me out.”

After her father died, she decided to work as a temp. She found herself setting up an IT help desk and realised she enjoyed the job. ‘I liked talking to people, dealing with their problems and seeing how I could fix them,’ says Springle.

She went to work for a business satellite television and worked her way up the ranks of the IT help desk over the following seven years. When the company moved to Amsterdam she decided to stay on in a sales support role.

The role, however, did not suit Springle: ‘I suddenly had to deal with sales guys who didn’t really care. Their attitude was, “Just sell it in, don’t worry about it working.” I found that incredibly frustrating. I spent the last six and half years making sure my customers had the right technology. Dealing with oiky sales people who knew less than me was a bit wearing.’

Springle quit and found her new role at the King of Shaves as customer care manager which she has now been fulfilling for just over three years. ‘When I came in for the interview, they told me the role would involve a little bit of IT but over time I’ve expanded that role to around 40 per cent of the job,’ she says. ‘I understand how the network functions, I’ve become an expert in spam and I’m looking at disaster recovery.’

In Springle’s view the two roles are so closely intertwined that it’s not possible to do one without the other. ‘Our competitive advantage is that we are a small company and our customers like that they can talk directly to me. We’re not a faceless corporation,’ she says. The company makes it as it easy as possible for the customer to contact the firm, including free phone number on its products along with an email addresses.

The company’s IT system ensures that Springle can communicate frequently with her customers: ‘Around 90 per cent of the correspondence is via email which is why our IT structure is so important for us.’ Talking with regular customers and carrying out frequent market research ensures that King of Shaves can improve product and develops one that people want to buy, she adds.

The King of Shaves’ web site is a broad church: hosting an online shop, information about the company’s products, charity schemes as well as corporate and media information. It sells around £11,000 worth of products each month through its site and is looking into retailing other company’s brands as well.

These direct sales, however, are only a small part of the company’s turnover and there are no plans to make it a bigger slice of the pie. ‘Our biggest outlets are retailers like Boots and Tesco and we do not want to compete with them directly,’ says Springle.

And evolving social trends and improved cosmetic technology means that men are becoming ever more metrosexual and increasingly interested in sophisticated cosmetic products, such as anti-aging remedies, self-tanning products or tinted moisturisers. ‘Men use these products. They might be slightly embarrassed to admit that they use them but they do buy them,’ says Springle with a smile.

How to develop the web site in the future is something that Springle and other members of the team constantly debate. ‘There’s a lot of information on the site and we frequently discuss whether we should split out different sections but so far we’ve decided against such a move.’

For Springle, the future of the web site lies in making it ever more interactive. To maintain and grow its share of such a highly competitive market, the company is constantly developing new products and customer interaction over its new products is the key to getting the business right.

‘At the moment we have a panel of people who we use to review the products,’ she says. ‘I’d like to use the web site to expand the number of people we can use for market research. Product reviews are currently quite a labour intensive process ­ we have to print out documents and send them out to the clients. I’d like to get to the stage where that could all be downloadable.’

Springle admits to being envious over the level of interactivity of other corporate sites, such as L’Oreal: ‘I love the way you can download advice on how to apply your eye make-up.’

In the future, she believes IT should be able to make it even easier for the company’s customers to choose the right product. ‘If you look at the vast array of consumer products, there has to be an easier way of deciding which one to buy rather than hanging around the aisles in Boots or Tesco and reading every single product label.’

Her dream is develop the site so that customers can have a live web chat with an assistant, guiding them through the company’s product range.

If Springle and the team at King of Shaves revolutionised web site design for cosmetics, then it would be more that just the spammers who would be flooding the company’s servers with emails.

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