Beautiful engraved RARE Specimen Gold Bond Certificate from the
Gillette Safety Razor dated in 1930. This historic document was printed by American Bank Note Company and has an
ornate border around it with a vignette of the Gillette Safety Razor. This item is over 77 years old.
Certificate Vignette
Global Gillette is a business unit of Procter & Gamble. It is the successor of The Gillette Company, which was founded by King C. Gillette in 1901 as a safety razor manufacturer. It was based in Boston, Massachusetts.
On October 1, 2005, The Gillette Company finalized its purchase by Procter & Gamble. As a result of this merger, the Gillette Company no longer exists. Its last day of market trading - symbol G on the New York Stock Exchange - was September 30, 2005. The merger created the world's largest personal care and household products company.
Before the merger, Gillette had grown to become a leading global supplier of products under a variety of brands. In addition to Gillette, the company marketed under Braun, Duracell and Oral-B, among others.
Gillette firsts
Safety razor (Gillette Safety Razor invented in 1895 and patented in 1904)
Razor marketed specifically to women (Milady Décolletée, 1916)
Razor dispenser (1946)
Stainless Steel blades (Super Stainless, 1963)
Double-blade razor (Trac II, 1971)
Disposable double-blade razor (Good News!, 1971)
Razor with a pivot point (Atra, 1977)
Razor with a lubricating strip (Atra Plus, 1985)
Razor with spring-loaded blades (Sensor, 1990)
Razor with microfins (Sensor Excel, 1995)
Razor with three blades (Mach3, 1998)
Razor with battery power (M3Power, 2004)
Razor with five blades (Fusion, 2006)
Razor with rear trim blade (Fusion, 2006)
History from Wikipedia and OldCompanyResearch.com.
About SpecimensSpecimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".
Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates we made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company.
These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that grown in popularity over the past several years.