It's an elastomeric one-piece hinge,” explains Will King bafflingly. “Bumper tension skin - built into the handle, not into the cartridge. It's been bent-tested two million times.”

The item he is enthusing about resembles a brightly coloured plastic child's catapult with a solid block where the elastic should be. It is an Azor, the razor that his company, King of Shaves, launched last summer on the back of a range of oils and other shaving products that Mr King has been marketing since 1993.

His enthusiasm is surprising for two reasons. First, he is where he is now, he freely admits, only because of two devastating failures, both of which knocked his chosen career path off course. Second, he admits that in a few years he hopes to have sold the company and moved on.

The first failure came at school with a disastrous set of A levels, depriving this keen sailor and instructor of the chance to go on to design yachts. The second came in 1992, when he was made redundant from his job of organising conferences and other events.

This was in the depths of the last recession. His company had been taken over and management consultants came in. One of them was Herbie Dayal. “I met him and, essentially, he made me redundant,” Mr King says. “The business had more company cars than it had sense. It wasn't my fault the country was moving into recession. There was no way of saving it - the company was a busted flush.”

After this unpromising start, “he and I seemed to hit it off. I spent a bit of time hanging around his offices.” The two became business partners.

Mr King had already had his “eureka” moment. His skin used to react badly to wet shaving, breaking out in rashes. He experimented with a girlfriend's bath oil. It seemed to help. He decided to develop his own shaving oil and, in those pre-internet days, started searching the Yellow Pages and directory inquiries for leads.

He and Mr Dayal found themselves in Henley-on-Thames — “he was trying to buy a company there.” Mr King wandered into an aromatherapy shop, which stocked exactly the right product. “I asked for 50 kilograms of oil. He said he couldn't do that. I paid him £250 to tell me who his supplier was.”

The first year of trading was catastrophic. They sank £30,000 into the venture, raising money from credit cards, his parents and his best friend from polytechnic. Sales were just £300. But he did get the product into Harrods, after tracking down the phone number of Mohamed Al Fayed's personal assistant. “I got an order for 12 bottles, which wasn't the biggest order in the world at £1.29 a bottle, but it was an order. I could go to Boots and say, I'm in Harrods.”

King of Shaves benefited from the economic upturn and two emerging trends: the appearance of “lads' mags” such as Loaded and FHM, which raised interest in male grooming products, and the nascent internet. The first piece of editorial appeared in Boards, a windsurfing magazine. In 1995, he bought the domain name shave.com for $35, a process almost unknown then, but “one of the smartest decisions I've made, for the money spent. It was ahead of the curve.”

The site was first used for advertising and promotion - Will Carling, a user of the product, agreed to endorse it, and a picture of him half-naked was offered for downloading. However, the first sales over the internet had to wait until 1999.

During his time in marketing, Mr King had met Brian MacLaurin, a PR man, and he agreed to add King of Shaves to a client roster that included ... well, primarily Mr Blobby. Unable to begin to match Gillette, the market leader, in advertising spend, Mr King had realised that what is now known as viral marketing and eye-catching stunts were the way forward. “I had to sell 10 per cent of the company to raise the money to pay him.”

Mr King had already created his own holding company, KMI, for his various ventures. This now stands for Knowledge Merchandising Inc. It was to stand for Knowledge Merchants International, but he hit a snag. The matching initials are no coincidence. “I didn't realise that to have a company with international in the name, you had to be international. But I had already had the letterhead printed, and it cost £500.”

In 1997, KMI hooked up with Ted Baker - the fashion brand then in the throes of going public - and Ray Kelvin, its creator. They signed a licensing deal to create a range of fragrances using the Ted Baker brand name. “We had this surreal meeting at their offices, called ‘The Fortress' in those days. They were floating the next day and Goldman Sachs people were walking around, and accountants. He said, has anyone heard of this King of Shaves oil? Half a dozen people said, yes.” The deal was struck. King of Shaves product is sold through Ted Baker as well as other high street stores.

The razor market is one of few where the product becomes steadily more complicated, with more and more blades, buttons and bells and whistles added on. This has allowed Gillette and other makers, Mr King claims, to push prices steadily higher for what is essentially a commodity product.

“If Gillette were in the business of making plasma TVs, they would have launched at £10,000, and now they would cost £50,000,” he says, with perhaps just a trace of bitterness. “Everybody assumes King of Shaves, because it is King of Shaves, is going to be the most expensive kit on the block. That's wrong.”

While launching Azor, Mr King came across 20,000 patents protecting variants on the simple razor. “The reason there are 20,000 patents out there is because the business of shaving men's hair is extraordinarily profitable. I estimate Gillette's gross margins at 94 per cent. It's effectively a global monopoly.” He admits that one of the most common questions he is asked is when he will sell out to the market leader, owned by Procter & Gamble, the consumer products combine.

You wonder whether he is obsessed with his huge rival. “I talk about them in the same way that perhaps Steve Jobs [founder of Apple], in a much bigger way, would talk about Microsoft. It seems to me that with the existence of a monopoly even in a simple market like shaving, there's the opportunity to disrupt it.”

For now, he has made some inroads in the UK, where King of Shaves has about 13 per cent of what he calls the “software” - oils, gels and foam - second to Gillette's 55 per cent. His sales, £14 million in 2007, could reach £35 million this year, and the brand is already overseas in New Zealand, moving to America later this year and then to Japan and elsewhere.

“If I can get it on to a trajectory, a glide path, that gets King of Shaves tracking towards £100 million by 2012, there's a good chance it will then get picked up by a private equity business. It would be a good fit for a consumer packaging company.

“My son would be about 14 - he's nine now. I want to see him grow up. I would have a yacht manufacturing business near where I was brought up in Lowestoft, because it's not got much going for it,” he says. “I would design and build yachts - for people like me, for a start.”

CV

Born 1965, Lowestoft, Suffolk
1987 Graduates from Portsmouth Polytechnic with 2.2 in mechanical engineering
1987 First job selling advertising space for Haymarket
1988 Moves into conferences and events management
1992 Made redundant, launches King of Shaves
1993 Sets up KMI
1998 Trading deal with Ted Baker
2008 Launches Azor, first razor
Family Divorced, one son