Titusville’s own Matt Semple and his business partner, Anderson Camp of Delaware, have invented a new way of shaving and started a new business to market it. The two used resources publicly available in San Diego, where they are currently stationed as they near the end of their naval careers, to design, prototype, and launch a funding campaign for the Razor Rinser, a water-efficient shaving aid.
Semple went to Hopewell Valley Central High School, then joined the navy where he met Camp. On deployment, they found that shaving was “an absolute pain,” according to Semple. On a ship, water pressure is always low. “When you have a sink, you’re using a large amount of water but it’s not moving very fast,” he said. “We were regularly woken up to other men literally banging their razors against the sink.” Semple and Camp looked for a product that was specialized to clean razors, but the only ones they found were electric instead of mechanical. So, Camp set about designing one of his own.
The Razor Rinser is similar to a cup rinser at a bar, which shoots a high-pressure stream of a small quantity of water. It’s designed with a central water basin and an outer catch. Using purely mechanical energy, you can force a jet of water through the blades of a razor. This water and any hair clinging to the blades will flow into the outer basin. A filter allows water to be reused and the mechanism can be disassembled and cleaned easily. The device is small and requires very little water to function – the basin holds four ounces, and can easily be dumped into the toilet to avoid clogging the sink.
“We had really no capital to work with, we just kind of had an idea,” Semple explained. After deployment, Semple and Camp were stationed in San Diego. The San Diego Public Library includes a maker space with plenty of equipment available to the community. Camp was the main engineer, and was able to do all of the basic design in the library; from there he could send samples out to manufacturers. The library was even able to help them with a provisional patent application.
The primary difficulty with a full commercial run is the cost of mass production; crafting each Razor Rinser individually would be prohibitively expensive. If their Kickstarter is successful, it will allow Semple and Camp to make molds. With specialized molds, it will be relatively inexpensive to make and sell the product at a wider scale to the known markets. The campaign will begin at the end of April with a goal of $10,000. 200 of the first 2000 units produced will be donated to a few community organizations in San Diego as a service to the houseless community.
You can read more about the Razor Rinser on their website.
