Cloud hosting case study: King of Shaves
King of Shaves is the UK’s leading quality shaving and skincare challenger brand, founded in 1993 by Will King and offering a range of innovative products for both men and women.
Since Will King created the Original Shaving Oil in his kitchen back in 1993, King of Shaves now sells a product every three seconds worldwide and is regarded as one of the UK’s most innovative and successful challenger brands.
We spoke with Simon Watson, Head of Design at King of Shaves about how Layershift Managed Cloud Hosting responded to the King’s needs and did everything possible to help make their online Kingdom the greatest of them all.
Simon, who are you and what’s your background?
I formally trained as a Graphic Designer at Middlesex Polytechnic graduating with BA Hons degree in 1991 before starting work for a small corporate design consultancy, Ludden Taylor, in London for five years working with blue chip clients like The BOC Group, Rolls Royce Aerospace, Philip Morris and the EU – we were one of the first studios to produce every piece of work completely on computers (Apple Macs, naturally). I then worked for a design and advertising agency called Ambleglow based in Maidenhead, Berkshire doing a mixture of recruitment and consumer advertising mixed with corporate identity design.
An old school friend was working for a small male toiletries business, KMI – who owned the King of Shaves brand, and asked us to work on a few small projects for them. We started off doing a couple of leaflets and I ended up doing so much work for them that I was head hunted and ended up joining them full-time in 2001. During my time at Ambleglow, in conjunction with a specialist HTML / PHP coder, I designed and built the first major version of the King of Shaves website and online store at www.shave.com – my first proper internet project.