![]() Without spending anything on marketing, we were able to sign up our first 1,000 members. I spent the first six months driving down to San Diego and trying to connect with bloggers to spread the word. We initially ran the business out of my apartment. Mark and I struck a deal and I invested my life’s savings, about $35,000, to build the Web site, which launched in July 2011. Guys are so used to milking their blades for as long as possible because they’re so expensive, and they’d forgotten how awesome it can be to shave with a fresh razor each week.Ī. I saw a market need to solve that problem by making it easy for guys to get it done. If you ask most guys how they buy razors, they talk about being frustrated with the price and the experience of going to the store to buy them. What got you thinking about selling by subscription?Ī. I knew immediately I didn’t want to sell them the traditional way. He told me he had about 250,000 twin razors and he wondered if I could help him sell them on the Internet. At the time, I was helping companies make promotional online videos, and Mark had a lot of experience in product development and wholesaling. It actually dates back to a party in September 2010, where I met Mark Levine, who was my friend Gina’s father. Where did the idea for the business come from?Ī. Dubin spoke recently about making the transition from YouTube sensation to real business. In a conversation that has been edited and condensed, Mr. Dubin declined to disclose the company’s revenue or to say how many subscribers it has, but in October, he landed a $9.8 million investment from Venrock, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that expects him to use his marketing skills to compete with personal care giants like Gillette (he had previously raised $1 million from a group of investors that included Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers). In the last year, Dollar Shave Club, now based in Santa Monica, Calif., increased its full-time staff to 24 employees began to sell three types of blades that are sourced from overseas manufacturers and sold for $1, $6 and $9 a month and introduced a product called shave butter. Once he got the server back up, he enlisted a team of friends and contractors to help him print labels and pack boxes by hand in a warehouse in Gardena, Calif., in an effort to fulfill the 12,000 orders that arrived in the first 48 hours. Dubin placed calls to his hosting company and almost every programmer he had ever met. The traffic attracted by the video, which has now been watched almost 10 million times, crashed the company’s server in the first hour. It featured the company’s founder, Michael Dubin, who had spent the bulk of his career in digital media and marketing and had performed improvisational comedy as a hobby, walking briskly through a warehouse as he issued off-color wisecracks and encouraged men to buy his razor blades on a subscription basis for as little as $2 a month. I have shaved my chest if the mood strikes, but did my legs once and that was enough - at 6-5, with a 38-inch inseam it took forever and my legs were very itchy once the hair grew back.In March 2012, a video promoting a razor-blade business called Dollar Shave Club took YouTube by storm. Do prefer another guy's chest to be hairy or smooth? Do you body shave, and if so, what parts? In the videos I watched of the series, "she" or "her" was used often enough to assure straight guys that it is totally 100% hetero to body shave typical - we can't have anyone think our product is gay. They even have one that discusses how best to shave your genital area, using all sorts of cute code words ("trimming the bush to make the tree look taller"). Gillette has come out with a series of online animated videos that tries to convince guys to use its products when they are manscaping. It has long been popular among gay men and has made its mark among straight guys trying to emulate the models and actors they see splashed on magazine covers or on screen, almost all who are sans body hair. The rest of mankind does it for aesthetic reasons. Athletes like swimmers, bodybuilders and triathletes do it for competitive reasons. Body shaving is one of those things that a lot of people do, but few really talk about.
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