How Dollar Shave Club's Founder Built a $1 Billion Company That Changed the Industry
Michael Dubin occasionally allowed himself to envision the moment when everything paid off. He’d be ushered into a grand ceremony, where some conglomerate, eager to own his massively successful company, would offer him a fortune for the pleasure. “I thought we would pass a really nice pen around in a wood-paneled boardroom with portraits of men with white hair,” he says.
When the moment actually came, on July 19, 2016, there was none of that. He was in his pajamas, lying on a bed at the Skytop Lodge in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. His lawyers had been working through the night, and now the sun was up and Dubin had his cellphone pressed to his ear. In two hours, he was set to take the stage in the hotel’s ballroom, where leaders of the multinational conglomerate Unilever would gather for its biannual conference. There, they’d announce that he was now part of their team: Dollar Shave Club was being acquired for $1 billion. But first, the deal had to be finalized. Dubin listened as, one by one, the executives on the phone gave their approval. Then it came down to him.
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Today, Dubin swears he hadn’t been looking to sell the company so early. (He declines to say whether other offers had come along.) The way he saw it, his five-year-old Dollar Shave Club was only getting started. When he launched it in 2012, the razor market was dominated by Gillette, which claimed 72 percent of the U.S. market and had been purchased by Procter & Gamble for $57 billion in 2005. Schick was a distant second. But Dubin saw an opening. He could start by undercutting the big competitors on razors, and then build out something that felt less like a shaving supply company and more like a full-scale men’s club -- a subscription-based grooming brand with personality, that men actually identify with.
“If anyone else had brought me the idea, I would have said, ‘Well, it’s a tough category with lots of global competitors,’” says venture capitalist Kirsten Green, founder of Silicon. But Dubin quickly convinced her to be one of his company’s early investors. Spend any time with Dubin and it’s easy to understand why. Tall, sandy-haired and preppy, the 38-year-old entrepreneur can vacillate between guy’s-guy sarcasm and serious, intense shop talk. He’s also a voracious reader, giving every new employee copies of two of his favorite books: Thich Nhat Hanh’s and Peter Drucker’s . “Within the first 10 minutes of meeting Michael, I was completely drawn into his idea and vision and him,” Green says.
