Gillette

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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 …”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”