The Ledger
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Equal co-founder equity is crucial for aligning long-term economic incentives
“I think that's actually been really important for us to like having the same economic incentives all the time, same ownership. Like it's just good, you know, equal partnership. That's I'm really glad we did that in retrospect.”
Harry's captured over 50% of Target's razor category market share overnight
“When we launched in Target, we took over 50% market share of the category at Target overnight.”
Meaningful physical product improvement is difficult without owning the manufacturing process
“It's, it would be really difficult to meaningfully inflect product improvement without actually owning the manufacturing process.”
The majority of customers in every Harry's cohort have remained subscribers
“Every cohort of customers since the beginning of Harry's, the majority of customers who try Harry's stay with Harry's.”
Dubin: Startup competition is wonderful because it validates your market category
“The presence of competition pushes you to define yourself more specifically, and focuses you on the things that you want to do, and You know, definitely makes you work a little bit harder. So, you know, most people, when they first start a company, and then th…”
Dunn: Warby Parker and Harry's succeeded by price-disrupting incumbents
“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.”
Raider: DTC allows brands to iterate products before scaling manufacturing
“That's where I think direct-to-consumer is so powerful. Because as opposed to just making, you know, millions of something and trying to assume that everyone's going to want it, what we can do is start on direct to consumer, start to sell to a few people, see …”
Razor blade prices were historically inflated by an effective monopoly
“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.”
Expanding beyond shaving into all consumer packaged goods removed Harry's growth cap
“Even if we got to, you know, huge market shares everywhere, like there's going to be some cap on our growth and shave. And so if we thought about it, we thought, Hey, like, you know, if we could increase our addressable market, not just to kind of men's groomi…”
Consumer hardware like razors cannot launch with a software-style minimum viable product
“There isn't really like an MVP here. Like we need this thing to work out of the gate. Like it's a razor. We need the product to be good. We need the inventory.”
Multiple early Warby Parker investors passed on investing in Harry's
“But we had a bunch of Warby Parker investors who, I, you know, in retrospect are gonna do great on Warby Parker, who invested early at Warby Parker, not invest in Harry's.”
Harry's was the only vertically integrated direct-to-consumer shaving company
“I think we sort of at one point said, said we were kind of the only truly vertically integrated company in the shave industry and that we literally grind steel and make razor blades and deliver them to your door vis-a-vis our own kind of e-commerce platform.”
Hedrick: Tecovas launched with 5,000 emails using Harry's tool
“I had seen their launch playbook, and they had created this, actually this open source email gathering tool that I think they had gathered like a 100,000 emails for before they launched, and so I found the code for it, And put Decovis on it. And, you know, tha…”
Raider: 'Handsomer, sharper' ad was Harry's top performer for years
“We created an ad that said handsomer, sharper, or less expensive. And we put razors under each of those words. We put it out and that was our highest performing ad in the company for our first couple of years.”
Raider: Harry's finances large retailer receivables using debt
“It's an issue we struggle with at Harry's. You know, we sit on a And have a bunch of receivables from large retailers, and the way that we pay for that is with debt financing, because people know at the end of the day that, like, their money good. Like, their …”
Over half of Harry's early capital funded expanding its German factory
“I would say at least half of that capital, those kind of early rounds of capital went to Germany to you know, sort of build out the factory, the plan.”
Harry's raised $100M in debt and equity to buy its German manufacturer
“And so we were able to get commitments for. Sixty five million dollars of equity. We then went to Germany to raise. Thirty five million dollars of debt, which was a whole different challenge to convince these, like, very conservative German bank lenders to len…”
Harry's initially explored partnering with private equity to acquire public competitor Edgewell
“I actually talked to a couple private equity firms about, because Edgewell was a public company, but a reasonably small public company, about trying to buy them
Take them private and fold it into our business.
That was actually how it started.
And we could nev…”
Harry's generated up to $10M in annualized revenue before buying its factory
“We went, you know, from a, you know you know, a sort of technology enabled startup You know, that was doing, I don't know what we were doing at the time, Jeff, you know, five or ten million dollars of revenue on an annualized basis to like a fully vertically i…”
Despite category trends, Harry's did not originally launch as a subscription business
“We always thought of Harry's as a brand first, and so the way that we started was not on subscription, actually, but we made these shave sets.”
Harry's evolved its corporate vision from a single brand to a next-generation P&G
“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 …”
Harry's achieved profitability and became EBITDA-positive during the COVID-19 pandemic
“And then our online business, you know, DTC, also started to grow in a significant way because people weren't going to stores, and so I think we actually, we also turned the business to profitability. We were EBITDA positive”
Razor blades require complex manufacturing unlike other commoditized consumer packaged goods
“Most consumer packaged goods are reasonably commoditized. There's probably a hundred manufacturers, you know, throughout the world that can make, or, you know, thousands that can make soap or, Hairstyling products or whatever. And razor blades, not so. There i…”
A feature on men's blog Uncrate crashed Harry's website shortly after launch
“We sent him a sample, right after we launched I just got an email from him that says, hope you have a good server, son, and then he posted the link to the Uncrate article, and like, our whole website, like, blew up”
Harry's founders signed a contract for one million blades before raising capital
“And then we committed to buying a million razor blades. Like, we signed a contract to buy a million razor blades, which for them at the time was, like, a meaningful number.”
Razor blade manufacturing complexity comes from high-velocity precision edge grinding
“The grinding process, Which is really where the secret sauce of razor blade manufacturing comes in. It's the actual grinding of this very thin steel to get that edge and get that shape is a very hard process to perfect, and to get billions of these things made…”