In 2012 the razor business belonged to a few giants, above all Gillette. Blades were expensive, locked behind plastic in drugstores, and sold with TV ads full of slow-motion technology. Dollar Shave Club wanted to sell cheap razors by mail, and it had almost no money to tell anyone.
The video
Co-founder and CEO Michael Dubin had trained in improv comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade. Instead of hiring an agency, he wrote and starred in a short video, directed by Lucia Aniello, a friend from his comedy days who ran a small production company.
It opens with Dubin introducing himself and his company: razors delivered to your door for a dollar a month. Are the blades any good? His answer became the video’s title: “Our blades are f***ing great.”
What follows is a rapid run of gags, from a machete-wielding CEO to a shaving toddler to a goofy dance number. Along the way, Dubin mocks the big brands’ expensive, over-engineered razors.
The launch
The video went up on YouTube on March 6, 2012, the same day the service launched. It drew so much traffic that it crashed the company’s server in the first hour. Once Dubin got the site working again, he had to recruit friends and contractors to help fulfill the 12,000 orders that arrived in the first 48 hours.
The video cost about $4,500. Aniello estimated that a polished video like it would run most companies $50,000.
Why it worked
- It said what customers thought. Many men felt they were overpaying for razors. The video said so, bluntly and funnily.
- The founder was the brand. Dubin’s deadpan delivery made the company feel like a person, not a corporation.
- It explained the business in seconds. Price, product, delivery and a reason to believe, all in the first few lines.
- It was built for sharing. Profanity, jokes and a clear target made it the kind of video people sent to friends.
What happened next
Investors took notice. The company raised $9.8 million in series A funding in October 2012 and expanded to Canada and Australia late that year. It grew quickly, and by the time of its sale it had taken a significant share of the U.S. razor market. Gillette’s owner, Procter & Gamble, sued over patents in December 2015, a sign of how seriously the giants took the upstart.
On July 19, 2016, Unilever acquired Dollar Shave Club for a reported $1 billion in cash. In 2023 Unilever sold a majority stake to a private equity firm.
Legacy
The Dollar Shave Club video became the model for a generation of direct-to-consumer startups: founder-led, funny, cheap and made for social media. It showed that a clear idea and a strong voice could compete with the biggest ad budgets in a category, at least long enough to build a business worth buying.