1
Our Blades Are F**king Great
At 6:15 in the morning on Tuesday, March 6, 2012, Michael Dubin woke up and immediately checked his computer. He was puzzled by what he saw—actually, by what he didn’t see. Before going to bed, he had posted a video about his start-up, a company that virtually no one had ever heard of.
His venture’s website wasn’t working that morning. Even though everything had been fine the night before, the site had crashed, and all he saw now was a blank screen. So, he quickly hopped in the shower before heading to sort things out at the cramped office he shared at a start-up incubator with a bunch of other entrepreneurs striving to get off the ground.
Dubin was thirty-three years old. He was at this point an unsuccessful—well, failed—entrepreneur. A few years earlier, after the financial market meltdown, he had gotten laid off from a digital marketing job at Time Inc.’s Sports Illustrated Kids and had applied to Columbia, New York University, UCLA, and a few other business schools to get an MBA. He was turned down by all of them. Frustrated, he’d moved to Los Angeles, where he stayed rent-free at a cousin’s apartment initially, while deciding what he wanted to do.
Tall and charming, with an easy smile and a winning personality, Dubin had studied improv on and off for eight years at Upright Citizens Brigade in New York City while dabbling in entrepreneurial ventures. As a side project, he started a social media network for travelers in 2006, not long after Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook. It never went anywhere. “My basement has a corner of what I call the failed business corner,” his mother would later tell a journalist. “And we have a number of things that we have bought and he made me invest in that he thought would be very successful businesses, which obviously they weren’t.”
After leaving Time Inc., he used his marketing skills to do some consulting work for friends who had a Christmas holiday decoration business. Then he worked at a digital marketing firm in Los Angeles, developing and placing promotional videos online for corporations such as Ford. After less than a year, he departed after a disagreement with his boss over the company’s strategy.
His friends wondered if he’d ever find anything he was both good at and liked.
Now Dubin was working on his most ambitious idea yet. In the eyes of many friends, it was grandiose. Or perhaps quixotic would be a better word to describe it. His start-up was Dollar Shave Club, a David taking on a Goliath known as Gillette. Dubin had already spent more than a year on it, but rather predictably, the business had gotten off to a slow start.
What happened on the morning of March 6 would change that, thanks to his start-up’s one-minute, thirty-three-second video. As he headed from the converted garage where he was living to his nearby office in Santa Monica, California, the good news was that the video was going viral—a whole lot of people had been watching it. The bad news was that so many people were trying to watch it that the website server was crashing or, when it did work, was sluggish.
The tech company managing the Dollar Shave Club website had put an expert to work trying to fix the problem—then a second, then a third, with little success. At 10:30 that morning, the head of the tech firm sent an unnerving email to Dubin and his colleagues: “We have been working for three hours already to keep it working stable. And we need more work here.” Hours later, the website was still crashing. One of Dubin’s colleagues shot off an angry email to the tech firm: “Can you please come to our office right now?… it’s 2 p.m. guys. It’s 2 p.m. and dollar shave club is still down … this is unacceptable.”
Dubin was in a panic. A week earlier, he had told the tech guys he thought his video was going to generate a lot of traffic and had urged them to be ready. Now this. With the website working intermittently, few people could watch the video, and it was also hard for them to place orders. It was a disaster in the making. After all his false starts, this was his big chance.
What he didn’t know at the time—what no one knew—was that the humorous video, painstakingly written and rewritten over months and then shot in a single day at a total cost of just $4,500, would humble one of the most dominant and storied consumer companies in the annals of American business.
Against all odds, Dollar Shave Club would go on to succeed wildly, taking a big chunk of its giant rival’s market share and forcing it to cut prices for the first time in memory. More than that, Dubin, in the process, helped announce a disruptive business model for twenty-first-century entrepreneurs to take on previously unassailable consumer brands.
In most ways, Michael Dubin, the founder of Dollar Shave Club, could hardly be more different from King C. Gillette, the founder of Gillette, his century-old rival. But each man was emblematic of the capitalist zeitgeist of his era—the changing nature of innovation, the way consumer brands were produced, how and where they were sold, and even how wealth was created.
Like a lot of entrepreneurs of his epoch, King Gillette was an inventor. The turn of the twentieth century was a time when America’s industrial prowess was emerging and combining with marketing to feed the nascent middle class’s growing appetite for consumer goods. Make a product better and you could become rich. Levi Strauss had amply demonstrated this decades earlier. In the 1870s, his company started making denim trousers using an innovation suggested by a customer: it strengthened them with copper rivets in places where the fabric was most prone to ripping.
King Gillette wasn’t the first to come up with the idea of a safety razor to replace the straight razor that needed sharpening with a leather strop. But after several years of tinkering, he invented a way to dramatically improve it. On December 3, 1901, he submitted a patent application (later approved) with elaborate drawings showing a razor handle with a thin, disposable double-edge steel blade—“two cutting edges, so that the life of a blade may thus be doubled”—designed to provide a close shave while protecting the face from cuts. There was no need ever to sharpen it because the consumer could throw the blade away and easily replace it—which meant another sale for Gillette every time he did.
Copyright © 2020 by Lawrence Ingrassia
