Michael Dubin and Mark Levine met at a party in Los Angeles and got talking about how much they hated paying for razor blades. Dubin had spent years in media and marketing, and had trained with the Upright Citizens Brigade improv theater for eight years on the side. Backed by their own money and an investment from startup incubator Science Inc., the two of them started operating in January 2011 and launched a website in April 2011: a flat monthly subscription that mailed razors to your door for a few dollars, instead of the marked up price at a pharmacy counter.
For its first year the company operated quietly. Then, in March 2012, Dubin decided the way to introduce it wasn't a product page, it was a joke. He wrote the script himself, drawing on his improv training, and a friend from those same improv years shot it in a single day for $4,500. The video, titled "Our Blades Are F***ing Great," delivered the pitch in a flat, sarcastic deadpan instead of the earnest tone every razor ad had used before it.
They posted it to YouTube on March 6, 2012. Inside the first hour, the traffic crashed Dollar Shave Club's own server. Once Dubin got the site back up, 12,000 orders came in over the next 48 hours, more than the young company had planned to fulfill. He pulled in friends and contractors to hand pack orders out of a small warehouse in Gardena, California, before the company had real logistics in place.
The video did what a media budget couldn't: it made the pitch instantly shareable on its own, instead of something people scrolled past. Dollar Shave Club had grown to 3.2 million subscribers by 2016, the same year Unilever bought the company for a reported $1 billion.
- One writer, one improv-trained performer, one location, shot in a single day for $4,500.
- The tone was comedy first and product pitch second, which is why people forwarded it instead of skipping it.
- The checkout was already live before the video went up, so the traffic spike converted into orders immediately instead of landing on an empty page.