AutoStrop seems to have had some odd marketing going on in the early part of the last century, like the animated display we looked at two years ago. But even that is peanuts compared to the freaky wooden doll they advertised that they were using fore advertisements.
Well, mostly they were advertising that you could get five hundred shaves out of a dozen blades. Guaranteed.
The freaky wooden man was just a bonus, as it were.
And if you should fail to get 41 and ⅔ shaves out of each blade, you could send the faulty blades to Autostrop, and they would send you enough blades to make up the shortage.
Which sounds good, expect I fully expect the blades were delivered by the freaky wooden man. Likely at night, possible with a side order of mayhem. Anyone with a head that big and a grin like that is up to no good.
On a more serious note, I suspect the wooden doll worked much the same as the other animated display. A motor of some sort – likely clockwork – moved one of the arms back and forth. This would move the strop through the razor, letting the head flip over, thus imitating the motion of stropping the blade.
Still, they could have made the wooden man less freaky…