Still up on Dollar Shave Club's own channel, uploaded 6 March 2012, and past 29 million views. No backup link needed for once.
Shaving in 2012 was a category running an arms race nobody had asked for. Gillette and Schick had spent two decades adding blades, then lubricating strips, then vibration, then pivoting heads, and pricing each addition as a premium. The result was a product that cost a fortune, sat locked in a plastic security case at the supermarket, and required you to find a member of staff to release four replacement cartridges you were faintly embarrassed to be paying that much for.
Every man buying razors already privately suspected the same thing: this is nonsense, I am being had, I do not need a vibrating handle. Nobody in the category could say it, because they were all selling the vibrating handle.
So the opening was not a product opening. It was a permission opening. The first brand willing to say out loud what the customer was already thinking would inherit all of that stored-up irritation for free.
The founder walks through his own warehouse for ninety seconds and tells you, in plain language, that the razors are good and cheap and the competition is ripping you off.
That is the whole ad. One man, one take-ish, one warehouse, a machete, a bear, a toddler and a leaf blower.
It cost about $4,500 and was shot in a single day in the company's actual warehouse. Michael Dubin, the co-founder, wrote and performed it. He had done improv at Upright Citizens Brigade for years, which is the detail that explains the whole thing: this is not a businessman gamely doing a piece to camera, it is a trained comic performer who happens to own the company. Lucia Aniello directed, before she went on to Broad City and Hacks, and it was reportedly her who pushed him to open on the line the film is named after.
The mechanic is that the film is also the funnel. It went live the same day the site did, with a single clear offer at the end and nothing else to do. The site fell over within about an hour under the traffic, and by the end of the first forty-eight hours the company had roughly twelve thousand paying subscribers. No media budget. No agency. No launch plan beyond posting a video and telling people about it.
And the scrappiness is not incidental, it is proof. A polished film would have contradicted the offer. The whole promise is that you are not paying for marketing, so the marketing cannot look expensive. The cheap production is doing the same job the mould does in the Burger King work: it is evidence.
The stupid: launch a consumer subscription business against Gillette, one of the most heavily defended brands on earth, with $4,500, no agency, no media, no research and swearing in the title. Put the founder on camera, which is almost always a disaster, and let him do jokes about polio. Bet the entire company on one video, on a channel you do not control, with no plan B if it does nothing.
The smart: the film is not a commercial, it is the sales pitch you would give at a party, and it does the full job in ninety seconds: what it is, what it costs, why the alternative is silly, and where to click. The founder is the right casting because the argument is a trust argument, and a person is more credible than a brand when the message is "you are being ripped off". And the low budget is a strategic asset rather than a constraint they had to hide, which is the part most people miss when they copy this. Every dollar of production value would have made the claim less believable.
The steal: when your whole proposition is that the category overcharges, your advertising has to look like it did not cost much. Let the production value carry the argument. Spending more would have made it worse, which is a genuinely rare situation and worth recognising when you are in one.
We include this one with a caveat, because it is the most misused case study in modern marketing. A decade of founders have watched it and concluded that the lesson is "make a funny cheap video", and then made a funny cheap video that did nothing. The lesson is not the video. It is that there was a real, structural, widely-felt grievance sitting unclaimed in the category, and a real product change that answered it, and a founder who could genuinely perform. Remove any one of those three and you have a home movie.
What we like is the compression. Ninety seconds, one location, one voice, no music swell, no brand film language, and at the end of it you understand the product, the price, the enemy and the joke. Most brands cannot do that in a thirty-page deck.
Straight talk: the budget, the 48-hour subscriber number and the acquisition are all well documented and consistently reported, and the view count is simply the number on the video, checked today. The one figure we have left out is early view velocity, because sources contradict each other badly on it, quoting anything from 4.75 million in three months to 12 million in three days. Somebody is wrong and there is no way to tell who from here.
The honest caveat on the billion dollars: that is an exit valuation four years and a great deal of paid marketing later, not a result the video produced by itself. The video is what made the company exist. The company is what got sold. Those are different achievements and the case study usually blurs them.
We are being slightly cute with that block, but the underlying point is real: the most commercially consequential piece of film of its decade has a thinner awards record than work that sold nothing. Worth remembering the next time a shelf of metal is being used as evidence of anything.
Client: Dollar Shave Club, its own launch
Writer and performer: Michael Dubin, co-founder
Director: Lucia Aniello
Agency: none
Shot: one day, in the company warehouse, for about $4,500
Published: 6 March 2012
The original upload, Dollar Shave Club's channel
Inc, on the launch video and what followed
NBC News, how the ad went viral
Retail Dive, the razor war it started
Mainstreethost, from one video to the Unilever deal
The device behind this one, from our library of ways in: