What Gillette Teaches Us about Decoupling and Business Disruption

The Gillette lesson on decoupling, disruption, business culture, and value-led sales thinking

For most of a century, Gillette ran one of the most studied business models in the world: sell the razor cheaply, then make the money on the blades. The handle was the entry point, the blades were the recurring profit, and the habit was the real business.

That model became famous because it changed how companies thought about value. The first product did not need to carry all the profit. It could act as the door into a longer customer relationship. But the deeper lesson is not only that Gillette sacrificed razors. It is what happened when the same logic was turned against them.

Gillette’s original thinking was powerful: reduce friction at the start, build usage, capture value over time. But once that model became too rigid, too expensive, and too dependent on protecting the bundle, it created the opening for disruption. Dollar Shave Club did not need to out-engineer Gillette. It asked a sharper question: what does the customer actually want, and what are they being forced to tolerate to get it?

That question is where decoupling begins.

The original genius: sacrifice one part to win the system

The simple version of the Gillette model is “sell the razor, make money on the blades.” The strategic version is more important: lower the barrier to adoption, get the customer into the system, create repeat demand, and build long-term value through ongoing use. That is not pricing. That is business design.

Gillette understood that the customer did not really want a handle. The customer wanted a clean shave, convenience, confidence, and a simple routine. The handle helped them start; the blades kept them in the system. Which is the first lesson for business leaders: the most profitable part of your business may not be the first thing you sell.

Sometimes the first sale should reduce risk, build trust, make adoption easier, or let the customer feel value before the business captures it. That is a strategic sacrifice — and the difference between a strategic sacrifice and a random discount is intent. A discount weakens a business. A deliberate sacrifice strengthens the model, because the recurring engine behind it is built on purpose. For Gillette that engine was the blade.

The strategic question every business has to answer is the same one:

After the customer enters, what valuable reason do they have to stay?

If you cannot answer that clearly, the model is weak no matter how clever the entry point looks.

When the model becomes the weakness

The same model that made Gillette strong also made it vulnerable. Over time, razor-and-blades stopped being a strategy and became a bundle to defend. Customers could no longer simply buy what they valued most. They had to accept the system around it: the premium brand, the retail markup, the locked-in cartridge format, the inconvenience of remembering refills, and the high price on replacement blades.

That is where Dollar Shave Club saw the opening. It did not invent shaving, create a revolutionary blade, or match Gillette’s advertising machine. It looked at the customer journey and pulled apart the weak link. Customers wanted sharp blades delivered reliably and cheaply; what they tolerated was everything attached to that need. So Dollar Shave Club decoupled the core need from the friction around it — blades, by mail, for a few dollars a month.

Not glamorous. Not technical. A refusal to accept the incumbent’s bundle as fixed.

It is worth being honest about why this worked, because framing was not the whole story. Dollar Shave Club also started with structural advantages Gillette could not easily copy: no retail margin to protect, no legacy brand to cannibalise, no shareholder expectation built on the old price point.

Framing told them where to cut. Their position let them cut without bleeding.

Both mattered — and a competitor coming for your business will usually have the same kind of edge.

What decoupling actually means

Decoupling is the deliberate separation of the steps in a customer’s journey. Every product or service is really a chain of activities — awareness, evaluation, purchase, onboarding, use, support, repurchase, renewal, expansion. Incumbents bundle that chain into one complete offer and defend the whole thing as if every part is equally valuable.

Disruptors think differently. They do not attack the whole fortress. They find the one part of the journey that creates the most value or the most frustration, and they separate it.

Netflix decoupled watching from owning and returning DVDs. Spotify decoupled listening to a song from buying the album it sat on. Dollar Shave Club decoupled getting blades from paying for the brand and retail system around them.

In each case the incumbent had forced customers to buy friction in order to get value, and the disruptor simply stopped forcing them.

This is the thinking behind decoupling the customer value chain — a business model dynamic popularized in Harvard Business Review’s research on disruptive innovation: identify the customer value chain, find the friction, separate the weak link, and build a better offer around what customers actually value.

At Lumen, this is the type of thinking we apply when reviewing CRM strategy, sales processes, customer journeys, and business model design. The goal is not to make the existing model look better. The goal is to identify where the customer experience can be improved before a competitor finds the weakness first.

For a fuller treatment of this thinking, see Lumen’s articles on identifying and leveraging decoupling offers for market disruption and decoupling as a route to disruptive innovation.

In B2B, many decoupling signals already exist inside the CRM: stalled deals, repeated objections, poor conversion, slow onboarding, low adoption, support issues, and churn. A well-designed CRM should not only record activity. It should reveal where customers feel friction and where the offer may need to change.

The thought process businesses can copy

The mistake is to copy the razor-and-blades model without understanding the thinking behind it. The real lesson is not “sell one thing cheap and make money on another.” It is: understand where the customer sees value, where they feel friction, and where the business should capture value over time.

That can be turned into a practical process — and it lands harder when run through the kinds of businesses Lumen actually works with.

1. Map the customer’s activity chain. Do not start with your product. Start with the customer’s journey. How do they discover the problem, compare options, buy, implement, and use what they bought? Where do they get stuck, complain, renew, or leave? This map reveals the real business model — not the one in the brochure, the one the customer actually experiences.

2. Separate value from friction. For every step, ask whether it creates value, reduces risk, or speeds the outcome — or whether it is just something the customer tolerates for lack of a better option. This is where companies get uncomfortable. They discover that what they call “value” is sometimes friction, and that customers are not loyal to the full bundle but to one or two outcomes hidden inside it. Dangerous for incumbents; an opportunity for challengers.

3. Find the most detachable link. The best opportunities share three features: the customer values the outcome, the current process frustrates them, and a competitor can remove that frustration without rebuilding the whole system. This is where most B2B companies are quietly exposed. A software company may think customers value the whole platform when they really value one reporting function. A consulting firm may think customers want a full transformation when they first want a low-risk diagnostic. A CRM provider may think customers want software implementation when they really want better sales performance, cleaner data, and management visibility.

The question to sit with is uncomfortable:

Which part of our offer would customers happily separate if someone gave them the chance?

4. Decide what to sacrifice. This is where strategy becomes real. A business may need to sacrifice margin, complexity, control, or tradition in one part of the offer to unlock greater long-term value — a diagnostic before a large project, a fixed-scope starter package, a low-risk pilot, a simpler onboarding path, a subscription instead of a large upfront cost.

The rule is that the sacrifice must lead somewhere: trust, adoption, customer insight, repeat usage, expansion, or a stronger relationship. Without that destination, it is just discounting.

Decoupling yourself is not optional thinking. Someone will pull that link apart eventually. The only real choice is whether it is you, on your terms, or a competitor on theirs.

Where the wrong way of thinking sends you

The instructive part of the Gillette story is the counterfactual. Run the same situation through the wrong mental model and you get a very different result.

The wrong frame asks: how do we protect our margin? That produces defensive moves — lock-in, proprietary systems, complex pricing, loyalty schemes, legal pressure, more advertising, more effort to protect the old bundle. Those moves buy time, but they do not remove the customer’s frustration. Often they reveal the weakness more clearly, telling your eventual disruptor exactly where the soft tissue is.

The right frame asks: what is the customer enduring, and who will relieve them of it? Same market, same customer, same data — a completely different strategy. This is why two competent teams can look at identical facts and reach opposite conclusions. The data does not decide; the frame decides.

Wrong thinking says “we need to defend the bundle” and “customers should understand our value.” Better thinking asks “which part of the bundle is becoming a liability?” and “what value are customers actually trying to get?”

That is the difference between defending the past and designing the future.

This is a culture problem before it is a strategy problem

Most incumbents do not miss decoupling opportunities because they lack intelligence. They miss them because their culture protects the current model. The people closest to the bundle are often paid to defend it. The pricing structure, reward system, internal language, and quarterly targets all point inward at the product instead of outward at the customer’s experience.

Asking “what is the customer merely tolerating?” challenges the sales team, the product team, leadership, and the model that currently pays the bills.

That is why decoupling is an organisational capability, not a slide in a strategy deck.

A strong business culture lets uncomfortable questions be asked out loud. It rewards initiative and honest discussion, treats mistakes as information, and gives people permission to challenge the old way before the market does it for them.

A weak culture does the opposite: it protects the status quo, explains away customer frustration, and rewards people for defending yesterday’s model.

The market always gives signals before it disrupts. The problem is that many companies train their people not to hear them.

Value-led sales discovery: how sales teams uncover decoupling opportunities

Your sales team is one of the richest sources of decoupling insight in the business. They hear the objections, the hesitation, the workarounds, and exactly what customers like, avoid, delay, and tolerate — but only if they are trained to listen properly.

A team trained only to push the existing bundle defends it in front of the customer, talks over the friction, and tries to overcome objections instead of understanding what those objections reveal.

A team trained in value-led sales discovery does something different. It asks better questions. It listens for the gap between what the customer values and what the customer is forced to endure. It turns sales conversations into strategic insight.

Current-state questions reveal the customer’s existing process: how do you manage this today, what systems are involved, who is responsible, how often does this happen?

Friction questions reveal what is harder than it should be: where does the process slow down, what causes rework, what frustrates your team, what do customers complain about?

Impact questions reveal the cost of the friction: how much time does this waste, what does the delay cost, how does it affect sales performance, how does it affect customer experience?

Value questions reveal what improvement would mean: what would improve if that step were easier, what would faster onboarding mean, what would better visibility give management, what would change if this friction disappeared?

This is where value-led sales discovery connects directly to decoupling. Better sales conversations help the business hear the customer’s real pain; decoupling turns that pain into a sharper offer. The sales team should not only sell the current solution — it should help the business discover the next one.

The two lessons from Gillette

Gillette teaches two lessons, not one.

The first is the original genius: you can sacrifice one part of the offer to create a stronger long-term business model — the razor-and-blades lesson.

The second is the later vulnerability: if you stop questioning your own bundle, someone else will decouple it for you — the Dollar Shave Club lesson.

Together they are far more powerful than either alone. A business must know when to sacrifice and what to protect, what to separate and what to keep, what customers value and what they merely tolerate — and when the old model has quietly become the opportunity for someone else.

Conclusion: do not copy the model, copy the thinking

The Gillette story is not a pricing story. It is a thinking story. It shows how a company can reduce friction to create long-term value, and how that same company becomes vulnerable when it defends the old system instead of listening to the customer journey.

For business leaders the message is clear. Map the customer journey. Separate value from friction. Use CRM to identify where deals stall and customers hesitate. Use value-led sales discovery to hear what customers are really saying. Build a culture that welcomes uncomfortable questions. And decouple your own offer before a competitor does it for you.

You cannot outspend this kind of thinking forever, you cannot hide customer friction forever, and you cannot protect a weak bundle forever.

You can only ask the hard question first:

What part of our business would a smart competitor decouple?

That question belongs in strategy meetings, sales meetings, CRM reviews, and customer interviews. It belongs in the culture.

Because the bundle is not a fortress. It is a list of things your customers may be waiting for someone to take apart.

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