Schick's parent company is growing in Mexico, but new location of Connecticut jobs a mystery

Officials at Shelton-based Edgewell Personal Care remain tight-lipped about where the manufacturing work currently being done at the company's Schick manufacturing facility in Milford will be relocated, less than week after Edgewell officials announced their plan to shut down the Milford factory by 2027. 

Edgewell officials have repeatedly refused to comment on where the work currently done in Connecticut will be moving to once the Milford plant closes, citing what company executives say is a "competitive reason." And much of the focus right now by Connecticut and Milford officials is how to help the nearly 300 employees of the factory find new jobs when the closing occurs.

While Edgewell sells razors all over the globe, the two manufacturing facilities the company has that are closest to its Shelton headquarters are in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Aguascalientes, Mexico.

The Knoxville facility is part of American Safety Razor, a company Edgewell acquired in 2010. The Aguascalientes facility is located in north central Mexico, about six hours north of Mexico City.

Edgewell announced in August 2024 that it was investing $115 million in a factory of nearly 593,000 square feet, according to published reports at the time the investment was announced. The facility, according to a company federal Securities and Exchange Commission filing made in November 2024, was being built to allow Edgewell to consolidate production from Mexican facilities in Obregon and Mexico City into a single production facility.

State officials here in Connecticut said they received no advanced notice of the Milford manufacturing plant closing. Jim Watson, a spokesman for the state's Department of Economic and Community Development, said Monday that agency officials "can not provide any additional information" about the Milford factory's closure.

John Boyd, whose Florida-based company evaluates locations for corporations, said "this is a difficult climate for companies to do relocations in.

"There are a lot of hidden costs in relocating to Mexico," Boyd said. "The tremendous savings that companies expect out of moving operations to Mexico. And there are hidden costs when an iconic American brand looks to some of its operations outside the United States."

A smarter move, he said, would be relocating the Milford manufacturing to Knoxville, which Boyd said "offers significant savings when compared to Connecticut," without as much of the potential negative publicity that would come with moving manufacturing operations outside the United States.

Donald Klepper-Smith, an economist with South Carolina-based DataCore Partners, said if it turns out that the manufacturing currently being done at the Schick plant in Milford is moved to Mexico or anyplace else outside the United States, it could backfire.

"There's a double-edged sword here," Klepper-Smith said. "Certainly the labor down there (in Mexico) is cheaper, but whatever savings are achieved through the move might be mitigated by tariffs. They have to look at both sides of the equation, but with these tariffs, you don't know how they're going to land, where they are going to land."

In addition to its Shelton headquarters, Edgewell also has presence in Chesterfield, Missouri, outside of St. Louis and Coppell, Texas, near Dallas. But Edgewell officials confirmed that the company's operations in those two communities are offices supporting the company's operations.