Jewish Buddies Who Founded Dollar Shave Club Cash In With $1B Unilever Deal

Image by YouTube

By Laura E. Adkins July 20, 2016

Dollar Shave Club, a 5-year-old company founded by two Jewish friends who were grousing over the high price of razors at a party, has been bought by Unilever for $1 billion, pending regulatory approval.

The Venice, California-based firm delivers razors and facial cleansing and styling products to consumers by mail.

It was started in 2011 by Mark Levine and Michael Dubin, who met at a party and shared a frustration with the high costs of retail razors. They are famous for their kitschy ads with straightforward messages, such as their 2012 viral Youtube video, “Our Blades Are F***ing Great,” which has been viewed over 22 million times on Youtube.

In the announcement of the deal last night, Unilever noted that Dollar Shave Club had grossed over $152 million in sales last year, and was valued at $615 million last June.

Niche startups built on a direct-to-consumer model, such as Dollar Shave Club threaten the market share of traditional consumer packaged goods (CPG) giants, such as Procter and Gamble (who owns Gillette) and Unilever (who until now owned no razor brands). Consumers are willing to spend more for these distinctive products, online distribution is only getting easier and cheaper, and barriers to market entry are crumbling, making it much easier for a small company to gain large traction in a short amount of time. In the words of one executive of a major CPG company, the big traditional players are “kind of f***ed.”

Laura E. Adkins is a senior director at Jewish Women International and the former opinion editor of the Forward. Email her or follow her on X.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

This year, we have stood together in strength and sorrow. Our Forward team has worked around the clock to help you find clarity amid the chaos.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO