MICHAEL DUBIN HAS LEFT THE BUILDING
“Not sure what that says,” Michael Dubin swirls his finger at a scribble of graffiti on a pair of garage doors. “But, anyway, this is it.”
It’s late March, and the co-founder and longtime CEO of Dollar Shave Club has brought me to an alley in Venice, California. To the place where it all started. In January, Dubin announced his departure as CEO of the company he’d sold to Unilever for $1 billion in 2017. A week later, he signed off on an all-hands Zoom, closed the laptop, and entered the life of an entrepreneurial empty nester. “I was like, ‘So, good luck, everybody,’” Dubin recalls.
Now he stands before padlocked doors, behind which lies not some industrial-chic office space or bustling warehouse, but an actual two-car garage that was once, a decade and a lifetime ago, Dubin’s home. It was here, inside this technically illegal rental, that Dubin, after being fired from an ad agency, parked himself and plotted the launch of a revolutionary direct-to-consumer razor company–a billion-dollar baby conceived on a concrete floor, and then nursed on a well-worn lounge chair and picnic table outside.
“So that was the first one,” Dubin says, nodding slowly. “Not that I spent tons of time thinking about Dollar Shave Club landmarks, but ….” He shrugs and nods again, his expression brightening. “There’s no office to go to right now. So I figured, let’s be out in the world.”
By the time Dubin asks, “Do you want to walk?” he’s already begun heading out of the alley, sidestepping a toppled recycling bin and errant cinder block in his path. Though it was Dubin who suggested we meet here and revisit Dollar Shave Club’s origins, he seems eager to keep moving. “By the way,” he adds as he steps off the sidewalk, “I’m a walk-in-the-street guy.”
Indeed, Michael Dubin seems to thrive when at risk of being run over. Gillette and Schick, massive brands owned by conglomerates, controlled some 90 percent of the men’s shaving market when Dubin launched DSC in 2011. He took them on with a now-legendary web ad that cost all of $4,500 to make. He shot it in a day. Serving as spokesman, he delivered deadpan lines: “Are the blades any good? No. Our blades are f**king great” and “Your handsome-ass grandfather had one blade... polio.” The video became a viral sensation (it currently has more than million views on YouTube), and he awoke to learn that the consumer response had crashed the company site. Within two years, DSC had claimed a 10 percent share of the razor market and amassed 3.2 million subscribers. By the time Unilever acquired it, DSC had expanded its offerings beyond shaving to deodorant and personal wipes, hair care, skin care, and dental care; sales had grown to nearly
