The Gillette Flexbot: Launching a Razor With a Robot That Draws With the Razor Itself

The audience was the youth, and the youth at a music festival love selfies: solo selfies, couple selfies, group selfies, loads of selfies. Gillette needed to launch its new Flexball razor to exactly this audience, at Sunburn, the mecca of music for the youth, one of India's largest EDM festivals. The question ibs Fulcro had to answer directly: how do you showcase a razor to a crowd that came for music, lights, and their own Instagram feed, not a shaving product demo?

ibs Fulcro travelled to Sunburn and asked festival-goers to do what they were already doing anyway: click selfies and upload them to Twitter. That single, low-friction ask, tagging a photo with #FlexballFacesOfSunburn, was the entry point into everything that followed.

While the selfies came in, ibs Fulcro's technical team was building something the audience had no reason to expect: The Gillette Flexbot, a custom-engineered sketching robot, the result of more than 800 hours of precision fabrication. Described simply, it was an artist, a robot, an ArtBot, capable of taking any uploaded selfie and sketching it live, on paper, in front of a crowd.

The consumer mechanic was displayed as three simple steps at the activation itself: upload your photo on Twitter using #FlexballFacesOfSunburn; witness the Gillette Flexbot work its magic on it; walk away with a cool souvenir. Each uploaded selfie was transformed into a real, hand-sketched portrait on paper, sketched live by the Flexbot in front of the person who submitted it, then framed and gifted to them on the spot.

Consumers who would normally have walked straight past a shaving brand's activation at a music festival sat up and took notice instead. Before the team fully realised what was happening, #FlexballFacesOfSunburn became the only trending hashtag of the entire festival, organically, ahead of the artists, the stages, and everything else competing for attention that night.

The Flexbot went from misfit, a razor brand at a music festival, to the coolest act in the arena, and the mechanism for that shift wasn't luck. It was building the activation's core mechanic directly out of the product's own defining feature, rather than treating the product as a prop next to an unrelated gimmick. A robot that drew with an actual Flexball razor made the flex-hinge technology tangible and memorable in a way no product demo at a counter ever could, and it gave an audience with zero interest in razors a genuine reason to participate, share, and ultimately buy.