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Dollar Shave Club: Breaking The Razor Blade Monopoly

This article is more than 10 years old.

Front page of Gillette's razor patent. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A good shave is not cheap these days. I spend $40 a month on razor blades, grudgingly handing over wads of cash for any kind of innovation that promises to lift my face hairs or open my pores or do something with "precision." Why? Because the act of scraping a blade across my cheeks every morning is so horrible that I'll pay anything to make it better. Hence my buzzing, five-blade Escalade of a razor.

Michael Dubin wants to save me, and men everywhere, from this madness. The CEO of Dollar Shave Club, Dubin most recently came to attention as the star of his company’s much lauded online video. If you aren’t yet one of the 4 million people who have seen it, by all means, take a look:

The company sells razors in monthly subscription packages for dirt cheap: $2 for five twin-blade razors, $6 for four-blades, and $9 for three six-blades. Because they design, manufacture and ship the razors themselves (and spend a fraction of Gillette’s behemoth marketing budget), Dubin and company sell their products for almost half the price of big name competitors. The Executive, the most expensive of the company's offerings, sells for $3 per unit including shipping - a more than meaningful discount against Gillette's Fusion ProGlide, for which I pay over $5 per razor (tax included) at  Walgreen 's in New York. There's a reason razors are the fifth most shoplifted product in the country.

Though Dubin will only say that he manufactures "overseas," he does admit: "It's not too hard to copy the techniques of the big guys. Razor technology is out there for anybody to duplicate."

The idea for the company came when Dubin, 33, met his co-founder Mark Levine, 56, at a party in 2010. The two griped about the cost of razor blades, realized that Dubin's experience in branding and marketing paired nicely with Levine's background in manufacturing, and began working on the company full-time in January 2011. They bootstrapped Dollar Shave Club with $45,000 of their own money to pay for product, web development and marketing before accepting $100,000 from LA's Science incubator.

Costing only $4500 to make, much of the video's success has been attributed to Dubin's time as an improv actor at New York's Upright Citizens Brigade. It's worth noting that his experience as Marketing Director at Feed Company, responsible for seeding online videos for the likes of  Capital One, Ford and even Gillette, is perhaps even more relevant. Dubin also personally takes care of his website's clever copywriting. One notable line: "This razor does not front."

With $1 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins, Andreesen Horowitz, Shasta Ventures and others, Dubin is looking to grow his company, now with five employees, into a 15-person operation by the end of the year. Though he won't give away exact numbers, he assures me that "tens upon tens of thousands of people" currently pay monthly for his razors, 35% of whom opt for the cheaper twin-blade plan. Assuming that 50,000 customers pay an average of $4 each, Dubin is raking in $200,000 a month. Like he says in the video, "This train, makes hay."

In addition to expanding the product line to include shaving cream, moisturizer and other grooming products, Dubin intends to soon move into the women's market. More personalized monthly plans (additional razors for example) will accompany a possible expansion to the UK and Canada in the coming year.

"There's a real sense of relief that someone is finally doing something about the price of name brand razors," he explains. "Our customers feel like they've made a decision to liberate themselves from brand name slavery."

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