For a company that has called South Boston home for more than 125 years, Gillette is not going quietly into its next chapter. It is going with a nearly billion-dollar construction crane and a nine-story building on the Fort Point Channel waterfront.
Procter & Gamble’s Gillette division announced Tuesday that it plans to purchase the 232 A Street site in South Boston to build a new global headquarters and Technical Innovation Center — a nearly $1 billion investment that will anchor the company’s long-term presence in the city where it was founded. The decision to build from the ground up, rather than lease an existing space, says something important about how Gillette is thinking about its next hundred years in Boston.
The planned facility is a nine-story, 320,000-square-foot building that will serve as both Gillette’s global headquarters and its innovation center. The site at 232 A Street — already permitted for a research and development building — is currently owned by Breakthrough Properties, a joint venture between Tishman Speyer and Bellco Capital that acquired it from P&G Gillette for $80 million back in 2021. The company is now buying it back, along with the newly obtained lab building permission, to build something purpose-designed for the kind of consumer research and product development work that defines Gillette’s corporate identity.
Building from the ground up with lab approval turned out to make the most sense. “We could have leased a preexisting building but it wouldn’t have been ideal,” said Gillette CEO Alex Coombe. “We want to create the right infrastructure and capabilities that allow us to delight consumers and innovate.”
The move is part of a broader transformation that has been years in the making. Gillette broke ground in April 2025 on a new 200,000-square-foot advanced manufacturing facility in Andover, and beginning in 2026, blade and razor production will shift from South Boston to that new site. The roughly 750 corporate and research workers who have been the intellectual backbone of the South Boston campus will move into the new Fort Point building, keeping Gillette’s brain trust firmly in the city even as its manufacturing footprint migrates north.
Together, the headquarters project, the Andover expansion, and related redevelopment efforts will represent roughly $1.5 billion in total investment across Massachusetts. Mayor Michelle Wu called it a major vote of confidence in the city, noting that the new development will keep hundreds of high-tech R&D jobs in Boston. Governor Maura Healey echoed that sentiment, framing the decision as evidence that Massachusetts continues to attract global companies seeking talent and innovation infrastructure.
The community benefits attached to the project are also significant. Plans include 1.5 acres of publicly accessible open space along the Fort Point Channel, new sidewalks and bike lanes, Harborwalk improvements, a waterfront park, funding for public art, and shuttle services to improve connectivity. Coombe has also hinted that the iconic Gillette rooftop sign — a South Boston landmark visible to thousands of commuters daily on the Southeast Expressway — could find a new home on top of the Fort Point building.
For a neighborhood that has watched the Seaport transform around it over the past decade, Gillette’s decision to plant its flag here rather than anywhere else is the kind of institutional commitment that changes a neighborhood’s trajectory. The razor company that started on West First Street in 1904 is still, unmistakably, a Boston story.
