From bizarre advertising stunts to his unique brand of self-promotion, King of Shaves's Will King is a bold entrepreneur. But, as he launches his first razor to the market, can he take on shaving's heavyweights and come out unscathed?

There is a video of Will King on YouTube. It shows him standing on a soapbox at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, London, ranting through a megaphone about the cost of shaving. A bemused crowd looks on while he delivers awkward political puns about "stealth shaving taxes" and being "tough on stubble, tough on the causes of stubble". He asks listeners to "lend him their beards" and at one point even makes the V sign for victory. A tad premature perhaps, but the battle has begun. The King of Shaves Company, which King started with his partner Hiten Dayal in 1993, has just launched its first razor, beginning its assault on one of the most lucrative consumer markets in the world.

In King's eyes it's a "duopoly" waiting to be broken. Together, Wilkinson Sword and Gillette control a mammoth 92 per cent of the world market for razors and blades. According to Mintel, the two companies already account for 86 per cent of the UK market, but Gillette is by some distance the more dominant, having steadily accelerated away from its rival since the launch of the fantastically successful Mach 3 brand in 1998. It controls almost three-quarters of the total global market. Back in 2005, Procter & Gamble recognised that dominance by paying 33 times earnings for Gillette, making P&G the largest consumer products company in the world.

King doesn't seem fazed. He believes in the product and he believes in himself. In fact, even off-camera, he behaves very much like his YouTube incarnation: relentlessly enthusiastic and full to the brim with positivity. He also tends to talk in advertising slogans. He does this so often, it's hard to tell whether he's being ironic. In one post-interview email, he tells me to "get the King of Shaves without the Ransom. Your face (and finances) will thank you for choosing the King!" Twice he refers to his main rival as "the best your Dad can get." Dayal says of his partner: "He'll drive you nuts but his buzz is what makes the difference between a good company and a fabulous one."

King's off-the-wall approach to product marketing is in direct contrast to Gillette's earnest, superstar-led campaigns. "I love a bit of humour," says King. "I have great fun with it. Normally you might ring up an ad agency and say, 'I'm launching a razor, can you help me?' I'm not like that." Branding expert Jonathan Gabay agrees with the strategy. "He's got to do something to be distinctive from Gillette. He needs to focus on whacky, interesting viral campaigns."

So instead of paying superstars such as Tiger Woods and Roger Federer to stride manfully across our screens, King will rely on a dedicated Facebook group, on backing an unsigned band called Beanius, whose first single is about "the folly of five"—blades, presumably—and the odd marketing stunt, such as the sponsored skydiving exercise in which one of the skydivers receives a hair-raising, mid-air shave. He'll also be touring the country on his branded battlebus,  attempting to persuade "the shaving electorate" that his new "Azor" razor shaves "closer, longer, and for less".

King is aware of the likely reaction from his competitors: "They're just going to spend money at me," he admits. It will be interesting to see how much. In 2001 Gillette splashed £100m on promoting its Venus razor for a single year. And that was without access to P&G's huge marketing arsenal. King has £35m to play with over the next five years, although he says he'll spend more if "things accelerate faster". The company will "never go crazy marketing", he says. "You don't need to these days. My slingshot marketing campaign on Facebook has done 100 million impressions and we're still four weeks from launch."

In some ways, King's high visibility approach is almost Bransonesque. And there are parallels with other famous business figures, notably Victor Kiam. Kiam was Remington's biggest advocate, famously liking the brand so much he bought the company. King's endorsement style is similar, although instead of buying in, King was forced to create the type of product he wanted to see on the shelves. After being made redundant from Hedges Wright Creative in 1993, he decided to concentrate on developing a shaving oil that could prevent shaving rash. Despite investment from his family and friends, the fledgling start-up was desperately short of cash. To save a couple of grand, King even filled the first 10,000 bottles of oil himself over the kitchen sink. But against development costs of £30,000, first-year sales were a paltry £300.

King kept himself going, inspired by a book he'd read about Kiam's success with Remington. The book's message, recalls King, was "to go for it". And that's just what he did, persuading Will Carling to endorse King of Shaves, and enlisting the help of Sophie Rees Jones (now the Countess of Wessex) at PR firm Brian MacLaurin Associates to push the product to the media. With the injection of £100,000 from a government loan scheme, the company secured a firmer financial footing, and by 2000 King and new partner Dayal were able to expand their range of shaving "software" and reach the US market. Success prompted one of two recurring questions: "People would either ask me, 'When are you going to launch a razor?' or 'When are you going to be bought out by Gillette?'" King decided he didn't want the latter—"They would never be interested in me anyway," he says—so he set about launching a razor instead.

It helped that one of Gillette's most important patents, concerning how the blades get rid of clogged hair,  had run out. But King wanted to produce a product free of what he calls "sham science", the questionable belief that ever-increasing numbers of blades will shave closer—"how many do you need, 20?"—or that innovations such as microchips and vibrating handles are actually what the consumer wants. "Look at this," says King, picking up Gillette's Fusion model with evident distaste. "Fat and ugly. Big and brutal." He switches his attention to the Azor. "We're about shaving simplicity."

But while the product itself strives to be simple, the market is far from straightforward. There are currently as many as 20,000 different patents covering the razor blade market. To put that figure into perspective, that's eight times as many as the humble microchip, according to the European Patent Office. Jonathan Radcliffe, an intellectual property partner at law firm Nabarro, says patents acts as a huge barrier to aspiring entrants. "The reason you don't see more competitors like King of Shaves coming in is precisely because that patenting strategy is so effective."

Radcliffe says the majority of patents cover the replacement blades, one of the most valuable cash cows in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) world. As Radcliffe explains: "You almost give away the platform, in order to protect what is effectively the driver of that profitability, in other words the spare blades."

And because the patents expire after 20 years, manufacturers need to keep coming up with new product, says Radcliffe, with Gillette's five-blade technology firmly in mind, "otherwise your aftermarket-based marketing strategy falls out the window."

Another reason patents play such a central role, according to Nick Wallin, a partner at patent lawyer Withers & Rogers, is down to profit margins. Razors are high-volume, low-cost items, he says. "Such items tend to do very well for their manufacturers under the umbrella of patent protection, as the manufacturer can charge a monopoly price, at least early in the product life cycle, knowing that the patent should help to at least delay competitors from making the same innovation." In other words, it's a make-hay-while-the-sun-shines type of strategy. As King says: "As soon as [a] generic [product] gets into the market, the margin drops right down."

David Vinjamuri, president of New York-based brand consultancy Third Way and a marketing lecturer at New York University, has followed Gillette's dominance of the market. "My perception is that the razor market has effectively looked like a monopoly for a number of years," he says. "Look at the price increases in this market, the slow pace of significant product upgrades compared to any other consumer packaged goods category and I think you will see that this resembles the Microsoft Windows marketplace more than any competitive marketplace we know."

Gillette's external relations manager Aimee Goldsmith says the company welcomes "any healthy competition from existing brands or new launches..." King's pricing strategy should make things interesting. A pack of four replacement cartridges for the Azor will cost £4.99—40 per cent cheaper than a pack of Gillette's Fusion cartridges. King also intends to reduce the price of his products as volumes increase. "That is not a Gillette business model," he says.

There is of course a simpler way of looking at Gillette's dominance. Yes, the company has used patents to protect itself—there aren't many successful FMCG companies who don't—and yes its products carry a high margin, but Gillette spent $750m on developing the Mach 3 alone, and as King readily admits, it's "a great product". He used a Mach 3 to shave his own beard right up until the first King of Shaves prototype was complete. Now King must try and convince the market that not only is his product cheaper, it's better too. He says independent research will help. The company blind-tested 51 men, shaving half their faces with the Azor, and the other half with a Fusion. "Sixty-four per cent of the men preferred our shave," he says.

But how do you break product inertia? Persuading consumers a product may be superior is one thing, persuading them to replace a razor they're perfectly happy with already is quite another. King says he's aiming to take market share piece by piece. In the first year, he reckons somewhere between £2m and £4m turnover would be a start. "It's a marathon. If I can get one per cent in the first year... I reckon in five years I can hit 20 to 25 per cent market share. Those numbers are believable."

If you ignore the salesy rhetoric and the slogan fetish, King is believable. Whatever you think about the product, it's hard to overstate the impact of a capable entrepreneur appealing directly to the consumer. You could hardly call King of Shaves a faceless organisation. But even so, the intense competition will make it a far tougher journey than King is ready to admit—as Radcliffe says, "I'm sure Gillette will be looking at what they can do to stop it." King is not prone to giving up easily. "I've never really looked at obstacles," he says. "The preconception [that there are] barriers, I've never really had that. My view is that if you want to take control of your life, just do it."