Dollar Shave Club changed how razors are sold, and the category followed

Dollar Shave Club was founded in Los Angeles in 2011 by Michael Dubin and Mark Levine. In March 2012 it launched with a video in which Dubin walks through a warehouse explaining, with deadpan jokes, why paying a lot for razor blades makes no sense. The video was cheap to make and spread quickly: within two days the company reportedly had about 12,000 orders. The offer was simple, blades delivered by post every month, starting at one dollar a month plus shipping.

The market it entered was led by Gillette, owned by Procter & Gamble, with around 70% of the US razor market at the start of the decade, expensive cartridges and, in many drugstores, blades kept in locked cabinets. Dollar Shave Club grew fast and added other grooming products. In July 2016 Unilever bought it for a price widely reported at about one billion dollars. Gillette answered with its own online shave club and, in 2017, with price cuts. In October 2023 Unilever announced the sale of a majority stake to the investment firm Nexus Capital Management, keeping a minority share.

The channel became the offer

Gillette’s strength was the shelf: distribution, shelf space and the advertising budget that kept both. Dollar Shave Club went around it, straight to the customer’s mailbox. In our method that is a channel decision, and it reshaped the whole proposition. The subscription solved a job customers already had (running out of blades, remembering to buy them, waiting for someone to open the locked cabinet) and turned a recurring errand into a parcel that simply arrived.

Going direct also gave the company the relationship. In a store, the retailer owns the moment of purchase. A subscription business holds the customer’s address, order history and attention every month, and can add shaving cream and other products to the box along the way.

A price that carried the argument

One dollar worked as a message. On the Value Stick, a brand can raise the customer’s willingness to pay or work on price and costs. Dollar Shave Club pushed the price down and used it to change how customers judged the whole category. The video’s argument was that the expensive multi-blade razor charged for marketing and features the customer did not need. Once that frame took hold, every trip to the drugstore turned into a comparison with “a dollar a month”.

The price made the claim, and the brand voice backed it, a sign that the company was on the customer’s side. A large incumbent can cut prices, and Gillette eventually did. Taking on the same irreverent tone without sounding strange was much harder for a brand built on decades of serious, technical advertising.

When the challenger rewrites the premise

The most lasting effect was on the category itself. After Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s, buying razors online on subscription became an ordinary option that every serious player had to offer, the incumbent included. In category design terms, the challenger rewrote the premise of buying a razor: online, recurring, cheaper, from a brand that spoke like a friend.

A new premise gets copied once it works. When subscriptions became common, the channel stopped being a difference and became a requirement, and competition moved back to product, brand and margin. The 2016 sale banked the advantage close to its peak. The 2023 sale of a majority stake came after the format had become standard, and how the brand develops under its new owners is still an open story.

If the channel or the price in your category feels fixed, it may be the premise a challenger is about to rewrite; train your team to look for it before someone else does.