The brand decreased in visibility and eventually became the property of the American Safety Razor Company. Its well-known advertising signs were removed at that time. Sales declined in the 1950s, and in 1963 the company was sold to Philip Morris. Sales increased at its peak, Burma-Shave was the second-highest-selling brushless shaving cream in the US. The result was the Burma-Shave brand of brushless shaving cream and its supporting advertising program. Sales were sparse, and the company sought to expand sales by introducing a product with wider appeal.
The company's original product was a liniment made of ingredients described as having come 'from the Malay Peninsula and Burma' (hence its name). For the song by Tom Waits, see Foreign Affairs (Tom Waits album).īurma-Shave was an American brand of brushless shaving cream, famous for its advertising gimmick of posting humorous rhyming poems on small sequential highway roadside signs.īurma-Shave was introduced in 1925 by the Burma-Vita company in Minneapolis owned by Clinton Odell. This article is about the brand of shaving cream.