Some of you may remember (going back 15 years) my Razor & Brush website and my Barbieria Italiana webstore. So I've been in this for a long time. The Denali and the Rex originated from my idea to revisit the L'Essor/ Gibbs adjustable of 1937 (and the British Personna of the 1950s). It seems that the idea was good, as now I see several new clones coming into the scene.
As someone wrote, there were three of us at the beginning. The other two wanted to clone the FatBoy, I steered them to the updated Gibbs. We started development as a group of three friendly partners. You can see some of our early prototypes in the picture. My version was called Valiant and I sent a prototype around to Michael Ham to try and he reviewed it about five years ago. Matt decided to go into production with his superb Rex Ambassador. My other partner and I wanted a slightly less aggressive razor, so we continued the development in that direction. That eventually became the Denali. There are common roots, therefore between Rex Ambassador and Denali. They came from the same original idea and even shared some of the early development. The end results are similar in appearance, but different in performance (not necessarily better or worse, just different). My personal way to describe them (and Matt, who remains a friend, may not agree - or perhaps he may agree!) is that the Rex (to me) feels like a Merkur Futur, the Denali feels like a FatBoy Gillette.