A little over a year after Dollar Shave Club’s online video ad went viral and nicked the U.S. razor market, the upstart company is back and operating from the same budget-marketing playbook for the launch of its newest product: a high-end alternative to toilet paper.
Dollar Shave CEO and lead pitchman Michael Dubin calls them “butt-wipes,” underscoring the startup’s ethos that consumer goods aren’t as fancy or expensive as giant companies like Procter & Gamble and Unilever would have shoppers believe. “I’ve been a butt-wipe user for years. I just think it’s a better experience,” Dubin said. “And of course, the video just writes itself.”
Dubin’s online pitch for what he’s calling One Wipe Charlies, released Tuesday morning, isn’t just a winking bid for clicks and laughs. His Venice, Calif.-based company is aiming to disrupt the link between consumer packaged goods and retailers by shipping products to customers on a schedule through various membership plans. Subscribers to the Humble Twin plan, for example, get a monthly shipment of five two-blade razor cartridges for $1 per period, plus shipping costs. The executive package includes four cartridges of six-blade razors each month.
“The razor was a great beachhead,” Dubin said in an interview before the launch of butt-wipe video. “There are some other obvious personal care and grooming products we can hit pretty quickly, and I’d love to hit as many as we can.”
The arch video introducing the razor-subscription system garnered more than 10 million clicks and has convinced about 200,000 people to pay for monthly shipments — 5,000 of whom signed up the day the video went up. Although Dollar Shave tried to keep its users chuckling with a steady stream of content — social-media jokes, a lively blog, virtual cards — growth waned quickly after the initial spike of attention. The hope is that Dollar Shave’s expansion to wipes — 40 for $4 — can also recharge demand for its razors and “shave butter.” Eventually, as Dubin explained, Dollar Shave hopes to “own the bathroom,” or at least muscle some of the space away from consumer goods giants.
There are no shortages of new companies doing an end-run around bricks-and-mortar retail. Many of them are even selling goods via web-memberships. Bark Box, for example, shops its subscribers a box of dog treats and toys every month for $19 and up. Even Amazon.com is now offering discounts on goods that its prime members agree to have shipped on a regular basis.
While customers get to enjoy the convenience, the model allows entrepreneurs to lock in a revenue stream and more easily manage their inventory. Dollar Shave has tried to go a step further and become a sort of lifestyle brand that connects with its target demographic — men — through the brand’s humorous sensibility, Dubin said
Dollar Shave also has some buying power of its own at the moment, flush from a $9.8 million round of venture-capital funding closed in October. The pool of investors, led by Venrock and including Silicon Valley kingmakers like Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has allowed the company to buy space for more traditional ads on on television and radio. (Bloomberg LP, owner of Bloomberg Businessweek, is an investor in Andreessen Horowitz.)
But the question remains: Why butt wipes? Of all the male-oriented grooming products, why pitch an item strongly associated with babies?
Dollar Shave did some survey work and found roughly half of the men surveyed used wipes in addition to or in lieu of toilet paper. Almost one-quarter of wipe-using gentlemen acknowledged hiding their wipes. The company concluded that there could be millions of potential customers in the U.S. and Canada who would much rather buy wipes over the Internet than at a store. “This is something guys are using, but it’s not really talked about,” Dubin said. “It kind of hit on all levels for us.”
