Gillette

“Well, what happened is they, three years into it, they were trying to buy Gillette, and Gillette owned Oral-B and Braun. And the deal was being held up because the tooth, the oral B and the spin brush were a monopoly. It was well over 50% of all the toothbrush…”

“This is, you know, Gillette at the time had, you know, an effective monopoly on this particular consumer product in this category.”

“That's a playbook that big competitors, big incumbent competitors can do, you know, to make you look unattractive to capital, to make you look unattractive to potential acquirers.”

“There's a few products that are like this, like the one I usually tell is like, is Gillette where, you know, usually the woman in the relationship is the one that buys the Gillette. It's like, I think about 70% of the purchases of Gillette are by women. Don't,…”

“Gillette ran an advertisement. They realized they had to move on, perhaps, from the best a man can get, despite the fact, obviously, that their customer base is overwhelmingly male for fairly obvious reasons. And they produced an ad which I would argue, and ev…”

“If you think about why, why did something like Warby Parker work or Harry's work? It's because they price disrupted Luxottica and Gillette respectively.”

“We passed for all of the reasons that one might think at that time didn't make sense about Shaving, you know, size of the prize. How do you take Gillette on? Who's gonna buy this stuff? You know, sort of direct to consumer.”

“There is a single player that really dominates this industry. And that was also true of Warby Parker. And one of the reasons why prices were so inflated is that there was effectively a monopolist.”

“Gillette who had dominated the industry had sold to Procter and Gamble for like over fifty billion dollars.”

“Before they sold, they would report their, you know, kind of financials. They were like one of the most profitable CPG companies ever built.”

“Gillette globally had, you know, 70% market share, like truly insane.”

“Every cohort of customers since the beginning of Harry's, the majority of customers who try Harry's stay with Harry's.”

“The vision really evolved from, hey, we're gonna build, you know, a next generation Gillette or a next generation Old Spice, you know, from a Harry's brand standpoint to, hey, we're gonna build a next generation, you know, Procter & Gamble. Like, we wanna, we …”

“Gillette paid us 60,000 dollars for a project, and we thought that was a trillion dollars.”

“In the U S a Gillette razor cartridge sells for three, three and a half dollars. So Dollar Shave Club could come in at one and a half, two dollars with 80% quality and build out a scalable business. India, a Mark III cartridge you get for 80 bucks is like 1.1 …”

“It's easier for me to compete with Gillette and Nivea on Amazon or on Google, as opposed to in Two million stores.”

“Gillette at the time had, you know, an effective monopoly on this particular consumer product in this category.”

“That's a playbook that big competitors, big incumbent competitors can do, you know, to make you look unattractive to capital, to make you look unattractive to potential acquirers.”

“And one or two of them said they actually rather like selling paper bags. It's like, you know, Gillette selling a razor blade. They can make a lot of money out of bags. So, essentially, they were curious, but didn't want to license it.”

“Gillette had not still to this day has not reacted in a competent way that put any pressure on Dollar Shave Club.”

“Almost all of these hundred-year-old companies do not have any capability to sell direct, and when they try, they aren't very successful. Look at Gillette and their incredibly originally named Gillette Shave Club. You know, not very successful.”