Dollar Shave Club Quotes

Were Dollar Shave Club razors that different from Gillette or any of its competitors? Not at the time. But they targeted a different person, and it worked. In 2016, Unilever bought Dollar Shave Club for $1 billion. It wasn’t valued on the strength of repackaged razor blades from China. It was valued on Dollar Shave Club’s ability to get the attention of its audience and turn it into customers.

Like Kirsten Green, Bell understood that e-commerce had set in motion a structural shift in the world of retailing and brands. Especially attractive, he believed, were categories whose leading brands combined high price, little meaningful innovation, and a bad customer experience.

Warby Parker, Glossier, Dollar Shave Club, and many new direct-to-consumer brands recognize that as important as a good product is, creating a good customer experience fosters loyalty, and loyal customers spread the word on social media and bring in more customers. “In the digital economy, your audience has an audience,” says David Bell.

AIMEE is a computer program, short for “Artificial Intelligence Mohawk E-commerce Engine,” designed to identify products with the potential to become top sellers on Amazon, a platform that many start-ups have deliberately avoided.

The other valuable X factor that AIMEE measures, by automatically browsing buyer reviews, is what customers are saying about existing products. Accurate reviews are a constant challenge for Amazon, as some sellers, especially Chinese companies, try to skew results by generating fake five-star reviews. But AIMEE focuses more on bad reviews. If shoppers complain about the quality, or don’t like the features, or even express an interest in different colors or sizes, that presents a potential opportunity for a new brand. “We use natural language processing to parse through thousands of reviews to identify any pain points customers have,” Sarig explains.

You call Warby Parker, and we want somebody to answer within six seconds. So many e-commerce sites were trying to hide their 1-800 number, and they viewed customer service as a cost center that should be minimized,” explains Blumenthal. “We’ve always viewed it as profit center, as an investment in our brand. Our customers are our biggest driver of traffic and sales because of referrals. We make somebody happy, and it benefits the company.

We often use the quote that ‘Happiness equals reality minus expectations.’ So how can we be constantly creating a reality that’s above customers’ expectations to keep them happy?” Blumenthal says.

The good news for brands, new and old, is that the market for consumer products isn’t just tens of billions or even hundreds of billions of dollars a year, but several trillion dollars a year in the United States alone. That leaves plenty of room for start-ups, with the most successful ones joining the billion dollar brand club.

Of the three smart luggage start-ups, Away was best positioned to deal with the issue. Because it had marketed itself as a lifestyle brand, it wasn’t identified primarily as a tech-laden suitcase. Even more important, it had reengineered its suitcases months before. Like Raden, Away’s initial design allowed the battery to be removed only from the inside of the case, with a tiny screwdriver it supplied with its suitcases. But early customers told Away that it really should be easier to remove the battery, and Away listened.

They didn’t want to wear a behind-the-ear hearing aid, which is the most common model, because other people could see it. Then Michel had an idea while tying flies for fly fishing, one of his passions: What if you could make a hearing aid about the same size and shape? It could be inserted in the ear using small fibers akin to the tiny feathers used to make fishing flies, which would hold the hearing aid in place but allow air and sound to go through and be amplified. It would nestle snugly and almost invisibly in the ear.

The people at Away understood that there’s a real difference between a product idea and a brand,” says David Sebens, the luggage industry consultant, when asked why this company succeeded but its competitors failed. “Brands survive. Product ideas come and go. Those two women [Away’s founders] are really, really smart.

When it comes to customer experience, almost no detail is too small to measure. To determine how long it took a salesperson to enter every bit of information when a customer was buying glasses at one of its stores, Warby Parker used timers to calculate which steps could be speeded up. “Trying on glasses can be fun, because that’s a social experience. Checking out is not fun. Once you’ve made your decision, it’s time to get the fuck out of there,” Blumenthal notes. “But we need to know your address, your email address, your billing information, what have you. I call these low-value interactions, whereas finding the right frame for you is a high-value interaction.” In examining the data, Warby Parker zeroed in on something that took several seconds longer than necessary: entering the person’s email address. “It’s a real obvious one,” says Blumenthal. “Why don’t we create a button, so that instead of doing @-g-m-a-i-l, we just created one button for @gmail.com. It’s super, super simple and easy, right? Is that going to turn us into a $100 billion company? No. But if we do a billion of those things, it will.

Brands that convey a sense of authenticity, rather than simply selling a product, can create a devoted community and take business away from bigger mass-market brands that by their very nature have a hard time identifying with consumers—for example, Dollar Shave Club, whose customers loved Michael Dubin’s irreverent, stick-it-to-the-man (i.e., Gillette) attitude.

The best opportunities are where the innovation is slow to be appreciated by incumbents,

I bought their pitch about eyeglasses being a fucked-up industry,” says Ben Lerer, a managing partner at Lerer Hippeau. “They showed you don’t need innovation around what you sell. You can succeed with innovation around the way you sell it. Leverage the traditional supply chain and sell direct to the consumer. Take your savings from the wholesale channel and pass it on to the consumer.

The model used by Hubble for contact lenses and Dollar Shave Club for blades is the simplest form. You buy what the supplier already produces, put your brand name on it, add your marketing special sauce, and target the weakness of the established players—price, convenience, image, whatever.

In the end, Warby Parker, Dollar Shave Club, Hubble, and other direct-to-consumer start-ups are innovating not with a fundamentally different or better product but with better something else: a better price, better value, a better experience, better customer service.

It also got a boost from a new online “Fit Finder” quiz, which replaced the smartphone sizing app in 2016. Because the app was tricky to use and was available only for iPhone owners, lead designer Ra’el Cohen worked with ThirdLove’s data team to develop a detailed questionnaire that was as accurate as the app in determining a customer’s size. It walked website visitors through a series of questions about their current bra—the maker, the size, the fit of the cup (cups gape a little … cups overflow a lot), band, and straps. And it asked them to select, from a series of drawings of different-shaped breasts, which pair most resembled theirs. Among the nine options: Asymmetric (one breast is larger than the other), Bell (slimmer at the top, fuller at the bottom), East West (nipples point outward, in opposite directions). By 2018, eleven million women had taken the Fit Finder quiz,

What kind of experience do you want to deliver to your customers? Starbucks wanted to bring the Italian coffee-drinking ritual to customers in the USA and around the world. How do you want to stand out by offering a better experience to your customers? What’s the experience they want to have in every interaction with your brand? Can you craft an experience around how your customers want to feel? Do they want to be delighted, nurtured, listened to, pampered, or something else? How are you going to get them there? How does your customer experience differentiate you from your competitors? Instagram’s simplicity and the fact that social sharing was built into the user interface offered users a different level of engagement with the app than that provided by other photo-sharing apps. How does experiencing your brand, from the first point of contact to the last, make your customers feel? How could you make that experience something that your customers can’t wait to share? Dollar Shave Club customers feel savvy and they want to share the discovery of the secret with their friends.

video attracted so much attention that it crashed Dollar Shave Club’s servers. Within 48 hours of the video’s release, the company received 12,000 orders.