FICTION · An Unfair Advantage Intervention
Fiction. Real history. Sourced below.
Dollar Shave Club had more than three million subscribers when Unilever paid a billion dollars for it in 2016. It had more than one million when Unilever sold control seven years later. The competitive response window stayed open for roughly five years, which is more than double what the doctrine allows, and the company spent it acquiring subscribers instead of building anything that would hold them.
I am Timothy Matthews, and I want to object to how this case is normally filed. It is taught as a marketing case, because the marketing was extraordinary and marketing cases are pleasant to teach. I do product. From where I sit the marketing was never the problem and was never going to be the solution, and treating a ninety-second video as the lesson has sent a decade of founders chasing the one variable that was already working.
Full fiction disclosure and sourcing note
Timothy Matthews is a fictional character from The Unfair Advantage by Todd Hagopian, analyzing the documented history of Dollar Shave Club from the present day. He has never met, advised, or corresponded with Michael Dubin or anyone else named here, and no dialogue, thought, or motive is invented for any real person. The launch video is described rather than reproduced. Facts come from the public record, including Unilever’s own announcements, and are accurate as of 2026; the analysis is invented. Contested points are flagged: published accounts give the current chief executive’s first name variously as Larry and Doug, and the terms of the 2023 sale were not disclosed.
The Video
In March 2012, Michael Dubin wrote, directed, and starred in a ninety-second film that cost about $4,500 and produced roughly 12,000 orders in 48 hours, crashing the company’s servers. It deserves its reputation. The reason it worked is worth stating precisely, because it is the transferable part: the humour came from a real and specific frustration, the faintly insulting experience of buying overpriced blades out of a locked display case, articulated better than the customer could articulate it themselves.
That is a genuine skill and Dubin had it. Know the frustration rather than the need, and build the message from something the customer already feels. I have no quarrel with any of it. My quarrel starts one sentence later, with what the company did during the years that insight bought.
Speed as Moat
Speed-as-Moat holds that being first and fast is a real advantage and a temporary one: it is a moat only for as long as it takes competitors to arrive, and its entire value lies in what you build during that interval. The doctrine puts the competitive response window at 14 to 22 months.
Dollar Shave Club got far more than that. Harry’s arrived in 2013. Procter & Gamble sued over blade patents at the end of 2015, which is a company paying attention rather than a company asleep. Gillette on Demand, the direct answer to the subscription mechanic, did not launch until 2017. Call it five years of open water, which is more than double the window the framework allows and about as generous a runway as a consumer startup has ever received.
Here is my objection to the marketing framing. During those five years the company had the attention and the cash to build something a competitor could not copy: a proprietary blade, a manufacturing position, a genuine cost advantage, anything with an engineering fact underneath it. The razors were sourced. What got built instead was a larger subscriber list, which is not an asset in the way people assume. A subscriber is a person who has not yet cancelled. Scale that and you have scaled a relationship that leaks, and the leak gets more expensive to replace every year as competitors bid up the same acquisition channels.
The Window
Unilever bought the company in July 2016 for a reported billion dollars in cash, with more than three million subscribers, one year after a $75 million funding round. On paper it was buying direct customer relationships, a DTC capability, and a position against Gillette.
What happened next is usually blamed on corporate absorption, and some of it fairly is. The advertising was polished into something less pointed by 2017, and retail expansion was slowed over concerns about conflicting with existing channels. But the underlying arithmetic did not need a parent company’s help. By the time Unilever announced the sale of a 65 percent stake to Nexus Capital in October 2023, the subscriber base was reported at more than one million, and Unilever’s own characterisation was that the business, while marginally profitable, continued to decline in a fiercely competitive market.
Note the doctrinal reading, because it changes across the arc. In 2012 the company was a young business in no doctrine at all. By 2018 it was profitable and shrinking against a growing category, which is the definition of a WAR condition: stagnating rather than dying. It was treated as neither.
The Relaunch
The live part, and the reason to look at this now. Under Nexus, Dollar Shave Club moved its headquarters from Los Angeles to Durham in early 2025 and brought in a chief executive, Bodner, who has been explicit that the plan is to recover the irreverent voice the brand had before the acquisition, and equally explicit that Unilever diluted it. The company is pushing into retail it had previously held back from, including a Walmart-exclusive razor line, and co-creating campaigns with customers.
I would watch this closely, and not because I doubt the diagnosis. The voice really was the asset and it really was flattened. But recovering a voice and recovering a position are different problems, and only one of them is inside the company’s control. In 2012 the frustration Dubin named was unaddressed by anybody. In 2026 the category contains Harry’s, an incumbent with its own subscription, a dozen private-label programmes, and a customer who has heard the joke. A relaunch can restore the tone. It cannot reopen the window, and the window is where the durable thing was supposed to get built. Whether a brand can be rebuilt without one is the question this case is now actually running, and nobody knows the answer yet.
By the Numbers
- ~$4,500 and 12,000 orders in 48 hours — the launch, which earned every bit of its reputation.
- 14 to 22 months — the competitive response window in doctrine, against roughly five years of open water before Gillette on Demand.
- 3 million to 1 million — subscribers at the 2016 acquisition against the figure reported at the 2023 sale.
- $1 billion, then undisclosed — the 2016 purchase price, and the terms of the 2023 sale of a 65 percent stake, which were not published.
- Marginally profitable and declining — Unilever’s own description of the business it was selling.
About the Stagnation Assassin
Todd Hagopian writes about Speed-as-Moat because the mistake it describes is the one he sees most often: teams that win a market’s attention early and spend the resulting years scaling the win rather than converting it into something a competitor cannot copy. He is VP of Product Strategy and Marketing at JBT Marel and the author of the Stagnation Assassin series.
A subscriber is a person who has not yet cancelled. Scale that and you have scaled a leak.
Todd speaks to executive teams and conferences on response windows, defensibility, and what to build while the competition is still deciding you do not matter. Book a keynote.