In the last year, Dollar Shave Club, now based in Santa Monica, California,
increased its full-time staff to 24 employees; began to sell three types
of blades that are sourced from overseas manufacturers and sold for $1,
$6 and $9 a month; and introduced a product called shave butter.
Mr. Dubin declined to disclose the company’s revenue or to say how many
subscribers it has, but in October, he landed a $9.8 million investment
from Venrock,
a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that expects him to use his
marketing skills to compete with personal care giants like Gillette (he
had previously raised $1 million from a group of investors that included
Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers).
In March 2012, a video promoting a razor-blade business called Dollar Shave Club
took YouTube by storm. It featured the company’s founder, Michael
Dubin, who had spent the bulk of his career in digital media and
marketing and had performed improvisational comedy as a hobby, walking
briskly through a warehouse as he issued off-color wisecracks and
encouraged men to buy his razor blades on a subscription basis for as
little as $2 a month.
The traffic attracted by the video, which has now been watched almost 10
million times, crashed the company’s server in the first hour. Frantic,
Mr. Dubin placed calls to his hosting company and almost every
programmer he had ever met. Once he got the server back up, he enlisted a
team of friends and contractors to help him print labels and pack boxes
by hand in a warehouse in Gardena, Calif., in an effort to fulfill the
12,000 orders that arrived in the first 48 hours.
Source: DollarShaveClub.com
