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.”
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.”
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 …”
Raider: Early Startup Culture Is Tribal and Dictated by First Hires
“In the early days, lots of it is like really tribal culture. You know, it's people looking to you and the other early employees are For signals of how to act. And so I think taking a tremendous amount of care in who those people are really, really, is really, …”
Gillette was one of the most profitable CPG companies ever built
“Before they sold, they would report their, you know, kind of financials. They were like one of the most profitable CPG companies ever built.”
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.”
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…”
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 …”
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: Brands should use customer phrasing directly in ad messaging
“And so I think there's like so much magic in learning about how people talk about your product and your brand. And then turning that into the messaging that you can put out in advertising communications and on your site, etc.”
Raider took student loans to fund Warby Parker despite sponsored Wharton tuition
“I'd worked at Charles Bank, as we mentioned. They had paid for me to go to business school, and then I'd agreed to come back afterwards for a couple years, and so I had business school paid for it, so what we did, what I did was took out loans that otherwise I…”
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.”
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.”
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”
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 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”