Podcast appearances and mentions of michael dubin

Welcome back to another episode of The Barber's Brief! Where Marc and Vassilis discuss marketing and business news that has caught their eye, they highlight our marketing moment, get into audience QA, and finish off by highlighting an ad of the week. Enjoy the show! Our Hosts: Follow our updates here: ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/company/sleeping-barber/⁠⁠ Get in touch with our hosts: Marc Binkley: ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcbinkley/ Vassilis Douros: ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/vassilisdouros/⁠ Timestamps 0:00 - Introduction 2:38 - Update to Google's Pmax Reporting 5:37 - Using the Playting to Win Framework for Competitor Analysis 9:37 - Google Cancels The Cookie Deprivation 12:55 - The Power of Aunthicity 19:02 - The Marketing Moment - The Dollar Shave Club 26:25 - Ad of The Week 30:04 - Coming Up Next Week, Dan Ariely Links: Story #1 Title: Google adds new PMax reporting, generative AI tools Source: Search Engine Land Link: https://searchengineland.com/build-modern-digital-marketing-plan-444367 Story #2 Title: The Best Strategy Icebreaker Source: Roger Martin Medium Link: https://rogermartin.medium.com/the-best-strategy-icebreaker-0c9b6ae58461 Story #3 Title: Google Won't Kill Off Cookies, Consumers Will – And That's How It Should Be Source: Adexchanger Link: https://www.adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/google-wont-kill-off-cookies-consumers-will-and-thats-how-it-should-be/ Story #4 Title: Nike: AN epic saga of value destruction Source: Masimo Guanaco on LinkedIn Link: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nike-epic-saga-value-destruction-massimo-giunco-llplf Marketing Moment: Dollar Shave Club's Viral Launch: A Marketing Masterclass Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUG9qYTJMsI The Birth of Dollar Shave Club Founded in 2011 by Michael Dubin and Mark Levine, Dollar Shave Club aimed to solve a common consumer pain point: overpriced and inconvenient razor purchases. The company's subscription-based model promised high-quality razors delivered directly to customers' doors at a fraction of the cost, challenging the traditional retail model. The Viral Video: "Our Blades Are F***ing Great" Key Elements of the Video: Authenticity: Michael Dubin's natural and relatable delivery made the brand feel genuine and trustworthy. Humor: The script was packed with memorable jokes and absurd scenarios that entertained while conveying the product's value proposition. Simplicity: The video clearly explained the problem (expensive, inconvenient razors) and DSC's solution in an easily digestible format. Shareability: The entertaining nature and concise length made it highly shareable across social media platforms. Immediate Impact: Within 48 hours of its release, the video amassed over 12,000 orders, crashing the company's servers due to the unexpected traffic surge. Results and Growth The viral success of the video translated into exponential growth for DSC. Customer Acquisition: The company gained a massive influx of subscribers, building a strong customer base rapidly. Investor Confidence: The buzz attracted substantial investments, fueling further expansion and product development. Industry Disruption: DSC's success challenged established brands, leading to shifts in marketing strategies and pricing models within the industry. Acquisition: In 2016, Unilever acquired Dollar Shave Club for a reported $1 billion, highlighting the monumental success achieved through innovative marketing. Ad of the Week McDonalds - first full AI-generated video that I'm aware of via john james https://www.linkedin.com/posts/officialjohnjames_ai-advertising-ugcPost-7231841679882731520-_Hcq/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android Mcdonalds Japan has released a polished ad using AI that cost the creator $50 in tools. The implications for worldwide advertising supply chain are huge

Guitarist for Thursday, Steve Pedulla joins us to talk about the band and its history as well as his other gig as a director of photography for cool, food shows (among other reality shows). There's also a lot of "Jersey" talk and of course the mandatory AI discussion.photo by Michael Dubin Support the show via Patreon! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The David Alliance   TDAgiantslayer@Gmail.com      Michigan wins the title… smoked Washington… I loved hearing Jim Harbaugh give God credit, talk about listening to the leading of the Holy Spirit… You might doubt his integrity… but as Jesus said If they are for me… they are for me!    How to make 2024 a better launch… a better life.   Honesty Delete Systems Risk Keep Jesus #1     In 2012 Dollar shave club risked it… started by Michael Dubin… he bought a huge inventory of razors… and wanted to sell them on line… as a subscription… stupid, risky and now a company that sold for 1Billion… Risk… are you up for it!    The greatest pastors, evangelists, soul winners.. you name it. They all practiced risk. They all took chances on trusting the word of God- and when things did not turn the way they had hoped… they kept trusting and risking.    We call it faith… true, but we still need to take that step of faith which is where the risk comes in.    Why Risk? One of the best reasons is you find your tribe. You quickly find out who you are connected to in your walk and in your calling.  Have you ever been around someone and just been bored by them? They seem like they want to live a safe, stale life… and you just don't want to …  When someone takes risks and I hear about it, I know that is a person I want to do life with.  They prayed for someone to be healed out in public. They shared the gospel, they sacrificed money or time or both. They risked starting a ministry or business… Now I want to do life with that person. They understand what makes for a beautiful life.    Secondly Risk is the greatest and fastest door to growth in any area, but especially in your spiritual walk. When Christ says take up your cross daily, its not just seen as a sacrifice, but also a call to risk. To be like Christ, to take up your cross is to live a life of risk. We learn from mistakes… mistakes come from risk. When we choose his will over ours we must take risks. Our will- likes comfort, ease, and the dependable. For far too long too many Christians following that example have produced weak imatiated followers of Christ.  Risk is living on the edge… I like what Kurt Vonnegut Jr. said.   RISK i WANT TO STAY AS CLOSE TO THE EDGE AS I CAN WITHOUT GOING OVER OUT ON THE EDGE YOU SEE ALL KINDS OF THINGS YOU CANT SEE FROM THE CENTER.  kURT VONNEGUT JR.       Life is about experiences, memories and stories. Risk gives you a mountain of great experiences, memories and stories. I can't tell you how many times I was faced with risk…and I would tell myself “either way, its going to be a great story”. I was with our youth group years ago up in Minnesota by Jay Cook state park. There was a bridge there about 90 feet off the water… rapids actually. And some young guys where jumping and some were just watching. I had to do it… When I climbed up over the ledge to jump a young kid about 20 said “you are not hesitating for a second”. I replied no, the sooner I jump the sooner I can tell the story!    Finally…  Remember Jesus rewarded the risk takers not the rule keepers. Rule keepers don't learn much of anything new, they don't have stories to tell and they will never grow abundantly in their walk of faith.    A calm sea does not produce a skilled sailor.    Here is the best advice I can give you. Risk, faith, guts… whatever you want to call it… its simply a muscle that needs to be exercise to build. So start with smaller risks, build the muscle and go from there! You don't start out on bench with 500 pounds… you also don't start out by raising the dead… but at least start.

La storia di Michael Dubin e la sua Dollar Shave Club. Quando coraggio, creatività e alcune lezioni di improvvisazione teatrale fanno decollare la tua azienda. ▫️ Acquista il biglietto per l'evento di Hacking Creativity il 7-8 ottobre a Bologna: https://bit.ly/44r82q9▫️ Entra nella nostra community: https://bit.ly/3jUs8Ez ▫️ Vuoi ricevere gli Appunti (la nostra newsletter)? https://bit.ly/3RJkbA5CONTATTI▫️ Email: info@hacking-creativity.com▫️ Instagram: https://bit.ly/2HVP8D4IL MERCATINO DELL'AFFILIAZIONE▫️ Usa il codice HACKING50 per ottenere 50 euro di sconto sull'abbonamento a Fiscozen: https://bit.ly/3v7lReZ ▫️ Risparmia 40 euro sul tuo reMarkable 2: https://bit.ly/3FU7MUy▫️ 3 mesi di conto Qonto gratuiti con il voucher esclusivo CREATIVITY29X3: https://bit.ly/3OSl5g5

We had a great conversation with our friend Michael Dubin. Although Michael is mostly associated with his photography in some circles, in many other  circles we talk about the many other projects and music-oriented stuff he is known-for. We talk about how he started and ran Fadeaway Records in 1999 (with the help of Neil),which released the first Movielife and which was active for 4 years. After a 10 year break, the label was relaunched as a non-profit with the "Friends" Comp. A 3xLP comp featuring 37 unreleased songs with 100% of the proceeds being donated to cancer research (http://www.fadeawayrecords.com/indexFRNDS.html).   Dubin discusses his Radio show on K-Rock (one of the biggest rock radio station in the country) for 6 years 2004 - 2010 which was  recorded in his house.   Micahel also discusses the traveling music photo show featuring the work of 5 photographers from the 90's through the early 2000's called " Sti;; Screaming"  Which featured galleries in Philly, Boston, DC, Venice Beach, Oakland, NYC and Montclair, NJ.    Dubin talks about some of the bands hes managed and (and helped in an unofficial manner)  and also the band he is currently managed now, a band from Brooklyn called Common Sage.    Archive Account instagram.com/longislandhardcorescrapbook   Current Work instagram.com/michaeldubin ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Please consider Supporting  George's Jewelry Company:  515 Jewelry Studio  

Twenty Minute VC Mike Cessario is the Founder and CEO @ Liquid Death, the man hacking the healthy beverage market with the first hilarious water brand. It is working, Liquid Death's latest valuation was over a staggering $700M and Mike has raised over $200M since founding the company from the likes of Science Inc. Away's Jen Rubio, Dollar Shave Club's Michael Dubin, Swedish House Mafia and Tony Hawk to name a few. Prior to founding Liquid Death, Mike was in the advertising industry at a number of dirrect firms including VaynerMedia. In Today's Episode with Mike Cessario We Discuss: 1.) From Canned Water to $700M Business: How did rockstars' hydration problems lead to the founding of Liquid Death? How did growing up with guns and heroine needles around him at school, impact how Mike sees the world today? What is he running from? What is he running towards? Everyone said, "canned water, that is a stupid idea". What does Mike tell to all entrepreneurs who are told their idea is stupid? How does Mike advise on picking your idea? 2.) How to Build a Truly Great Brand: What does the term "brand" mean to Mike? What does he mean when he says, "truly great brand transcends functional value"? What are the single biggest mistakes Mike sees founders make today on branding? Why does Mike believe people will always hate your brand, if it is good? What are the biggest brand mistakes Mike has made with Liquid Death? What brand does Mike most respect and admire? Why that brand? 3.) Marketing: The Secret to Reaching Millions of People with Little Budget: How does the Liquid Death team come up with the ideas they have for content? Why does Mike believe the label "storytelling" is kinda BS? Why does Mike believe people will always hate your marketing? What was Mike's biggest lesson from their Superbowl commercial with kids drinking Liquid Death, looking like beer? How does Mike decide which channel to prioritise? How has the rise of TikTok and short form video changed their approach to content? How does Mike approach resource allocation for new pieces of content? Do they spend big on few bits of content or spend little on many and see what works?  

Twenty Minute VC Mike Cessario is the Founder and CEO @ Liquid Death, the man hacking the healthy beverage market with the first hilarious water brand. It is working, Liquid Death's latest valuation was over a staggering $700M and Mike has raised over $200M since founding the company from the likes of Science Inc. Away's Jen Rubio, Dollar Shave Club's Michael Dubin, Swedish House Mafia and Tony Hawk to name a few. Prior to founding Liquid Death, Mike was in the advertising industry at a number of dirrect firms including VaynerMedia. In Today's Episode with Mike Cessario We Discuss: 1.) From Canned Water to $700M Business: How did rockstars' hydration problems lead to the founding of Liquid Death? How did growing up with guns and heroine needles around him at school, impact how Mike sees the world today? What is he running from? What is he running towards? Everyone said, "canned water, that is a stupid idea". What does Mike tell to all entrepreneurs who are told their idea is stupid? How does Mike advise on picking your idea? 2.) How to Build a Truly Great Brand: What does the term "brand" mean to Mike? What does he mean when he says, "truly great brand transcends functional value"? What are the single biggest mistakes Mike sees founders make today on branding? Why does Mike believe people will always hate your brand, if it is good? What are the biggest brand mistakes Mike has made with Liquid Death? What brand does Mike most respect and admire? Why that brand? 3.) Marketing: The Secret to Reaching Millions of People with Little Budget: How does the Liquid Death team come up with the ideas they have for content? Why does Mike believe the label "storytelling" is kinda BS? Why does Mike believe people will always hate your marketing? What was Mike's biggest lesson from their Superbowl commercial with kids drinking Liquid Death, looking like beer? How does Mike decide which channel to prioritise? How has the rise of TikTok and short form video changed their approach to content? How does Mike approach resource allocation for new pieces of content? Do they spend big on few bits of content or spend little on many and see what works?  

Mike Cessario is the Founder and CEO @ Liquid Death, the man hacking the healthy beverage market with the first hilarious water brand. It is working, Liquid Death's latest valuation was over a staggering $700M and Mike has raised over $200M since founding the company from the likes of Science Inc. Away's Jen Rubio, Dollar Shave Club's Michael Dubin, Swedish House Mafia and Tony Hawk to name a few. Prior to founding Liquid Death, Mike was in the advertising industry at a number of dirrect firms including VaynerMedia. In Today's Episode with Mike Cessario We Discuss: 1.) From Canned Water to $700M Business: How did rockstars' hydration problems lead to the founding of Liquid Death? How did growing up with guns and heroine needles around him at school, impact how Mike sees the world today? What is he running from? What is he running towards? Everyone said, "canned water, that is a stupid idea". What does Mike tell to all entrepreneurs who are told their idea is stupid? How does Mike advise on picking your idea? 2.) How to Build a Truly Great Brand: What does the term "brand" mean to Mike? What does he mean when he says, "truly great brand transcends functional value"? What are the single biggest mistakes Mike sees founders make today on branding? Why does Mike believe people will always hate your brand, if it is good? What are the biggest brand mistakes Mike has made with Liquid Death? What brand does Mike most respect and admire? Why that brand? 3.) Marketing: The Secret to Reaching Millions of People with Little Budget: How does the Liquid Death team come up with the ideas they have for content? Why does Mike believe the label "storytelling" is kinda BS? Why does Mike believe people will always hate your marketing? What was Mike's biggest lesson from their Superbowl commercial with kids drinking Liquid Death, looking like beer? How does Mike decide which channel to prioritise? How has the rise of TikTok and short form video changed their approach to content? How does Mike approach resource allocation for new pieces of content? Do they spend big on few bits of content or spend little on many and see what works?  

A 23 ans, elle a explosé tous les compteurs grâce à une vidéo LinkedIn face caméra. 3 millions de vues, 200 000 précommandes sur sa campagne de crowdfunding. La marque Respire est lancée sur les chapeaux de roues. Justine Hutteau et Thomas Meheut visent gros. Amoureux des défis, ils se lancent dans un pari fou: concevoir une marque de soin et d'hygiène, éthique, bio, responsable et Made In France. Objectif ? Devenir mainstream et sensibiliser aux alternatives respectueuses de l'environnement. Ça, c'était il y a 3 ans. Depuis, la marque s'est imposée dans les rayons des grandes enseignes, mais pas seulement. Justine et Respire s'attaquent aux réseaux sociaux pour raconter leur histoire commune. Une conversation passionnante, pétillante et amusante, à l'image de Justine, sans faire l'impasse sur le revers de la forte exposition médiatique dont elle a fait l'objet. On y découvre son cheminement à la fois professionnel et personnel: Comment elle fait face à la critique en se concentrant sur le constructif, Sa volonté de développer des produits toujours plus efficaces, agréables et désirables, La place qu'elle a fait à la course à pied dans sa vie, Comment elle appréhende sa représentation sur les réseaux sociaux, entre partage et préservation. Un échange instructif qui remettra en question tous les produits qui composent votre trousse de toilette. N'hésitez pas à partager cet épisode débordant de bonne humeur à vos proches. Ils vous en remercieront ! BONUS: Je vous ai négocié en direct, un code promo de -10% sur l'ensemble du site internet Respire, avec le code DOIT ! TIMELINE : 00:02:30 - Présentation 00:14:00 - La vidéo 00:27:14 - R&D de déo 00:40:00 - Greenwashing 01:07:45 - Brevets et concurrence 01:27:55 - Acquisition et influenceurs 01:42:30 - Retail et distribution 02:01:50 - Critiques et mental 02:32:07 - Le sport On a cité avec Justine plusieurs anciens épisodes de GDIY : #4 Bruno Levêque - Prestashop #213 Adrien Roose - Cowboy #224 Timothée Rambaud - Legalstart #230 Arthur Auboeuf - Time for the Planet #263 Jean-Marc Jancovici - Carbone 4 #265 Maud Caillaux - Green Got #272 Mike Horn - Aventurier & explorateur #276 Mathilde Thomas - Caudalie #295 Arnaud Jerald - Apnéiste #300 Mathieu Blanchard - Ultratrail Avec Justine, on a parlé de : Michael Dubin & Dollar Shave club sur le podcast How I built this Association HOPE Justine vous recommande de lire : “Le monde sans fin, miracle énergétique et dérive climatique” de Jean-Marc Jancovici On embrasse Vincent et Valérie Clerc, des partenaires de course en or ! La musique du générique vous plaît ? C'est à Morgan Prudhomme que je la dois ! Contactez-le sur : https://studio-module.com. Vous souhaitez sponsoriser Génération Do It Yourself ou nous proposer un partenariat ? Contactez mon label Orso Media via ce formulaire. Vous pouvez suivre Justine sur Instagram et LinkedIn.

This week's guest is Michael Dubin, founder and former CEO of Dollar Shave Club, a business that revolutionized direct to consumer marketing and created ripple effects throughout the global economy. Michael tells Justin the key insight that led to the creation of Dollar Shave Club and gives insight into what it was like being CEO. Justin asks about Michael's priorities for making an impact outside of work. One of those priorities fits into Montana pretty well — a nonprofit to raise awareness about fuel mitigation and forest management. Michael talks about what he sees as the unique parts of entrepreneurialism in Montana and shares his advice regarding the business world today. Check out Michael's wildfire nonprofit here: https://safewoods.com/ Transcript here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X0OfDLMdcj5YnaWL-z_XsE-4H2t4KxVr3tdQM0rRVUQ/edit

While marketers are obsessed with all things digital, direct mail marketing is alive and well. There's huge value in being able to target people by their physical addresses. As important, brands that leverage direct mail marketing are seeing impressive ROI. In this episode of Marketing Spark, Postie CEO Dave Fink talks about why direct mail is viable option for many brands and how it liberates marketers from dealing with tech giants like Facebook and Google. Dave also talk about his experiences as one of the first investors in Dollar Shave Club and what it was like to work with founder Michael Dubin.

Michael Dubin sold Dollar Shave Club to Unilever for $1 billion. So Ryan invited Michael to The Capitalism Conference to tell his story about the challenges of scaling after the momentum from their viral video content. Many companies break when they scale too quickly and Dubin's success taught him many lessons about how modern advertising and selling physical products direct to consumer. Come to the next event Sept. 23rd & 24th, 2021 www.Capitalism.com/CapCon5

A New Jersey high school principal and wrestling coach is listed as the head of a company whose stock is trading at levels that give it a valuation of more than $100 million—and all it owns is a single deli in NJ. Something is not adding up. Also, a Bethel, CT coffee shop has its Pride flag stolen, burned, and returned and the town is rallying around the shop owners. Finally, Michael Dubin of Dollar Shave Club fame offers some sage business advice.Apple Podcasts: apple.co/1WwDBrCSpotify: spoti.fi/2pC19B1iHeart Radio: bit.ly/2n0Z7H1Tunein: bit.ly/1SE3NMbStitcher: bit.ly/1N97ZquGoogle Podcasts: bit.ly/1pQTcVWPandora: pdora.co/2pEfctjYouTube: bit.ly/1spAF5aAlso follow Tim and John on:Facebook: www.facebook.com/focusgroupradioTwitter: www.twitter.com/focusgroupradioInstagram: www.instagram.com/focusgroupradio

A show devoted to friends and "movement," Cantore is joined by childhood friend Michael Dubin (and his producer Gal Bushy.) Proving true friendships never die, Cantore and Dubin wax nostalgic while discussing their common bond: MUSIC.    Following the interview, an acoustic performance of Love Shines - Single by Michael Dubin. Produced and mixed by Gal Bushy at Room 2 in Los Angeles.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A show devoted to friends and "movement," Cantore is joined by childhood friend Michael Dubin (and his producer Gal Bushy.) Proving true friendships never die, Cantore and Dubin wax nostalgic while discussing their common bond: MUSIC.    Following the interview, an acoustic performance of Love Shines - Single by Michael Dubin. Produced and mixed by Gal Bushy at Room 2 in Los Angeles. 

In this episode we talk pet subscriptions, with Canada's largest and fastest growing dog subscription box company.  Both being good Canadian boys who love their hockey, we could have spent the entire interview talking hockey!  And we sort of did off line, but luckily for you, this is a business podcast, and we did get into everything subscription boxes.  We discuss tricks and tips to growing your subscription base, your audience and how to optimize your website to convert.  From my home country, all the way from Montreal Quebec, co-founder and CEO at Woof Pack, Hani Auran!Ever think you have just the perfect idea, only to realize your perfect dream concept is in a super crowded niche, and that it's probably saturated, and there's probably zero chance of you making money in it.  Why would you, the big players already have the niche covered right?  Wrong!  Think again. Think in abundance!  That's exactly what Hani and his business partner Francis were up against when they had their idea… a dog subscription box back in 2017.  By then the likes of Bark Box, PupJoy, Bullymake and tons more already had the market dominated.  But they decided to go through anyway, and today, Woof Pack is Canada's leading dog subscription box company.  They found a way and put in the time, a lot of it, turning their idea into a success reality.Just how, well, you'll have to tune in to find out exactly how. Today, Woof Pack has been featured on CdnBox Addict, Les Belles et les Betes, Canada's Dragon Den, A Year of Boxes, and much much more.  In this episode Hani will show you how you can start and grow a subscription box in any niche, regardless of how crowded and saturated you think it might be!Frequently asked questions he get asked from his customers: Allergies or "Which size should I pick?"Who he would hire as his mentor/coach: Elon MuskThe most influential person he knew in the subscription box industry: Michael Dubin from Dollar Shave Club49:32 "Just start something. Spend your time on your idea. This is the time now to do it. Don't wait, nobody's going to do it for you. There's no magic trick, it's just hard-work."Website: https://woofpacks.ca Instagram: @woofpacks.caEric's Recommended Affiliate Courses:Megan MacNeill'sIndustry Leading LinkedIn Course: https://relevant-personal-branding.thinkific.com/?ref=fbfbc7 Julie Ball's Subscription Box Bootcamp 2.0 Course Link:https://ericmusick.krtra.com/t/h67apnWbBQ9cThe Subscription Box Experts Academy Course By Liam Brennan Link: https://ericmusick.krtra.com/t/jIw4to2rXSoQ Host Links:The Subscription Box Show Website: https://www.thesubscriptionboxshow.comConnect with Eric Musick: https://www.thesubscriptionboxshow.com/contact2The Subscription Box Show Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/thesubscriptionboxshow.comEric Musick's email: eric@thesubscriptionboxshow.comEric Musick's Instagram: @thesubscriptionboxshow or https://www.instagram.com/thesubscriptionboxshowThe Subscription Box Show Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2960087864057955/To request being on TSBS, please book a call with Eric at: https://www.calendly.com/thesubboxshow

This week the pimps welcome Michael Dubin on a remote Zoom recorded episode of the podcast!  Follow Main x Hastings on social media:   Main x Hastings IG - https://instagram.com/mainxhastings   Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/40kRjCE9aV8DMurBlbS8iI?si=-hiq9ifDT-mEuZtYTcsfbA   YouTube - https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCTgLwI55q0YUuiAhXy6xj6Q

This week the pimps welcome Michael Dubin on a remote Zoom recorded episode of the podcast!  Follow Main x Hastings on social media:   Main x Hastings IG - https://instagram.com/mainxhastings   Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/40kRjCE9aV8DMurBlbS8iI?si=-hiq9ifDT-mEuZtYTcsfbA   YouTube - https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCTgLwI55q0YUuiAhXy6xj6Q

Michael Dubin founded Dollar Shave Club in 2011 in his apartment with his meager savings. Five years later, in 2016, his company was acquired by Unilever for $1 billion. How the heck did he do it. Let us see how he did it.

In this show, I'm going to do something I've wanted to do for a long time and that's do a little breakdown of how two of the most successful viral video adverts used humour for massive success. Then I'm going to show you how you can apply the same humour success principles to your talks and other marketing content. I often reference these two brands when I'm showing people how valuable humour is, because undoubtedly it played a massive part in the results that they achieved with their video ads. They are Dollar Shave Club and Squatty Potty. Both of their videos were very funny, both went viral and gave them massive brand recognition and sales growth. Dollar Shave Club is a mail order razor company and its founder Michael Dubin's first video promo launched the company in 2012. 24 hours later they had 12,000 new subscribers and four years later Dollar Shave Club was bought by Unilever for £1bn. After Squatty Potty's video went viral sales increased by 600% and that video has now had 100 million views. So, if you're interested in getting some tips for adding humour to your message for more impact and business growth then listen up! Enjoy! What you'll discover: The benefits of using humour in your talks Some specific humour tricks that were used to create viral ads The fundamental rule of comedy The connection between laughs and knowing your audience The rule of three examples How to use contrast for big laughs How to apply viral video humour tricks to your talk Some key locations for humour in your talks Why self-deprecation works Resources: Squatty Potty Video Dollar Shave Club Video Framing Your Talks for Bigger Impact – Episode 050 The Shocking Truth About How to Open and Close Your Presentations – Episode 065 Humour 101 for Public Speaking – Episode 019 How to Make Your Content Funny Without Forcing the Gag - Episode 28 https://www.facebook.com/groups/thespeakingclub/ https://www.facebook.com/SarahArcherSpeak/ https://www.saraharcher.co.uk https://www.thespeakingclub.com/masterclass https://www.standoutpitch.com Thanks for listening! To share your thoughts:                                                  leave a comment below. Share this show on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. To help the show out: Leave an honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and review really help get the word out and I read each one. Subscribe on iTunes.

EP207 - "Billion Dollar Brand Club" author Lawrence Ingrassia h Lawrence Ingrassia (ingrassia.larry@gmail.com) is the author of "Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy". (Amazon Affiliate Link) In this interview with Larry, we discuss many of the brands covered in the book including Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, eSalon, Mohawk, Anker and Tuft & Needle, as well as many of the ecosystem companies that developed to enable the DTC movement including Facebook, Quiet Logistics and Locus Robotics. We discuss the trends of DTC companies turning to brick and mortar.  New ways to leverage data to identify product niche (what Larry called the "money-balling of DTC), and what the future may hold for DTC. We also cover events that happened after the book was published, including the FTC's blocking the Harry's acquisition, Caspers IPO, management challenges at Away. Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 207 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Tuesday, February 11th, 2020. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Google Automated Transcription of the show Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 207 being recorded on Tuesday February 11th 20/20 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:40] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners Jason as you all know one of our favorite topics here on the show is the big move where brands are going direct to consumer and of course we spend a lot of time talking about digitally native vertical brands also known as DMV bees today on the show we are really excited to welcome Lawrence and Gracia. Larry has been a business journalist at top Publications including Wall Street Journal New York Times and LA Times Larry is the author of the book billion dollar brand Club how Dollar Shave Club Warby Parker and other disruptors are remaking what we buy the book was just published in January and we are really excited to have Larry on the show Welcome Larry. Larry: [1:20] Thank you guys. Jason: [1:22] Very we are excited to have you in the topic of your book is super relevant and pertinent to our audience so before we jump into it can you share with our audience a little bit about your background and how, you know you sort of came up to the point where you wanted to write a book. Larry: [1:41] Yeah you know I worked at newspapers for many years I was the senior editor really loved it retired a few years ago and when I retired and I wanted to delve deeply into something that I thought was interesting and I've been fascinated by the world of, entrepreneurs and startups and. I actually had a kernel of an idea when I retired so and it goes back to 2011 and that was before most people actually at even, I thought of the idea of direct to Consumer Brands and back then I heard about a company. Dollar Shave Club it was actually before it had the name Dollar Shave Club it was an idea of a friend of my daughters. Now I had been business journalists as as you guys noted for long time and eating had covered Gillette at one point. It is one of the most powerful Brands not just in the US but the world has great products as great advertising, and it's maintained a 70 percent market share for decades I think that's worth repeating because that's just unheard of in any consumer product 70%, market share in the US for decades and so I didn't tell Michael Dubin who was the founder of Dollar Shave Club but I thought to myself, this is the dumbest business idea I have ever heard. [3:03] You're going to compete with Gillette by selling razors and Blades online like really. So then you know kind of fast forward to 2016 I'm driving to work at 7:00 a.m. I'm listening to NPR, and there's a story about Unilever buying Dollar Shave Club for 1 billion dollars. [3:24] And after grabbing the steering wheel tightly to keep from swerving into the lane next to me I said to myself out loud he did it Michael, expletive deleted did it and I had two thoughts quickly first, oh my gosh was I wrong not just me but lots of so-called smart people who scoffed at the idea you know Venture Capital investors who turned him down competitors including Gillette that had ignored and dismissed him. And second in this is where really the idea kind of grew was how did this happen how did The Impossible or what most of us thought impossible become possible, because nobody thought that the razor business could be disruptive in fact after my book was published I got a I got an email from an executive at a big consulting firm who does Consumer products and he said if somebody had told me that. Ten years ago that the razor business is going to be disrupted told them that they were crazy so it was the same reaction that I had. And you know what it was disrupted gillette's market share fell too low 50% range within about four or five years just unbelievable. [4:33] And so as I started reporting I quickly realized that the Dollar Shave Club story well while amazing was really part of a much bigger story it was a story about, Revolution that has changed what we're buying and how we buy things and it's not just razors its eyeglasses mattresses bras contact lenses sneakers luggage cosmetics. Dog food vitamins hearing aids you know you've named it and you can buy a new brand and often several new brands that have been launched online and so that was kind of where I got going is a let me kind of find out about this world and why this was happening. Scot: [5:09] Rico we're glad you you wrote the book on it so it's been great so so you do spend a lot of time in the book on Dollar Shave Club. What do you think was the magic there you know they had the viral-video the subscription model with what do you think was the lightning in the bottle that they capture. Larry: [5:28] Yeah so let me you know kind of pan up to it like 5,000 feet and then go back to Dollar Shave Club so you know a couple things that these companies. Had in common but I found early on you know first of all the main formula for Success was actually quite simple. These entrepreneurs and their young and trumpeters mostly in their 20s and 30s spotted a problem and figured out a way to fix it. [5:58] But by offering a lower price or better value or improving the customer experience or just eliminating the hassle. You know these problems now may seem blindingly obvious but the big companies had never fix them. [6:12] And the second thing that is really interesting about most of these companies is that the founders knew little or nothing about the products that they were introducing them when they actually started their business. How can that be well actually you know kind of it turned out to be an advantage rather than this advantage and the reason for that is that they. We're thinking outside the box, you know kind of thing they were constrained by oh we can't do this or that or the other thing because you know that's not how the way things are done in our business, conventional wisdom can be a real problem for companies. So Michael Dubin was an out-of-work internet marketing guy was looking for his next thing but he thought razors were ridiculously expensive and frustrating to buy because they're often locked behind a glass case so his solution raises it to half the price shipped right to your home with the monthly. And often it's not one thing it's often several things that lead to the success and you mentioned the video which went viral. Which you know kind of our blades are blanking great. Shot for about $5,000 1 minute and 30 seconds I've had Marketing Executives and marketing professors tell me that they've watched it so many times it's taken basically recited by line. Jason: [7:31] I've quoted a lot of it to him which he finds really annoying. Larry: [7:35] To Michael. Jason: [7:39] Yeah every time I see him my first sentence is I'm good at tennis. Larry: [7:43] That's right and that you know kind of but if you look at this Warby Parker to you know this was the pioneering online eyeglass company that was started as a class project. For students who are getting an MBA degree at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School. And you know kind of a figured well if it doesn't become a business at least we'll get class credit for it but they wondered as many people, probably have why does a pair of glasses cost, $700 so their solution was classes for his littlest $95 with five frames shipped to you at home so you could try them on before buying them. Again kind of in retrospect a very easy solution in a simple solution to a problem that a lot of people had but it was people outside the business that thought of it. And then you have the founders of all these mattress companies including tough to needle which actually was the first one it was before Casper. [8:43] These guys were software Engineers who got tired of working for software companies and one of them had bought a mattress and you know what as I'm sure, both of you guys would agree at everybody I talked to buying a mattress going into a mattress store is a truly miserable experience your stock by a Salesman, tries to steer you to the most expensive mattress you lie down on it for 30 or 60 Seconds, get it home and realize you don't really like it your back is killing you and so you call the stories they can I return it and they say yeah. 20% restocking fee plus a hundred dollars shipping and at that point you can't go out maybe I'll keep it so you know kind of their idea was a foam bed in a box, reasonable price free shipping and if you don't like it free return after 30 to 60 days if you don't like it so you know kind of, all these startups the most successful ones spotted a problem, so I need and pink the way to fill it and I think that's what was the Real Genius of Dollar Shave Club and then of course they have to figure out a way to Market it to get attention which Michael Dubin did with his video, it helped in his case that you had a giant that was in Gillette that was a bit. [9:57] Complacent even arrogant. Pick one of the tidbits in my book is that early on one of Dollar Shave Club investors called Joel and said hey would you guys be interested maybe in making an investment in Dollar Shave Club and they were dismissed out of here. It was like nope you know didn't even take a meeting. Well that came back to kind of be kind of what they ruled that day because for five years later to let did. With a hood nobody can remember it having done it lowered its prices because it was losing so much market share and again it's because, Michael Dubin saw that they were vulnerable and then attacked it on his terms rather than competing on gillette's terms. Scot: [10:40] Cool the haven't seen a lot of people talk about the exit and detail were you able to get any details of you know why they sold win and was there a bidding war or anything around. Larry: [10:51] He had taught he had talked to a few people but I think that Unilever came up with you know kind of this outrageous number and it was kind of like yeah right I'll take it, you know kind of I wondered if they overpaid I think they were buying you know a growing business, I think they were buying on an entrepreneur who might help them think about how, e-commerce is changing the way that products are being sold so there is a combination of those things. Scot: [11:22] Yeah it's interesting because you know something like six to twelve months later P&G had an activist in their really disrupting things because they didn't buy Dollar Shave Club so it kind of made me feel like maybe they'd either totally missed the boat or they had kind of low-balled it ended up not winning. Larry: [11:38] Probably at that you know at that point probably PNG couldn't have bought Dollar Shave Club for any trust purposes it might have been able to invest in them you know kind of the first year to because it was so small but you know kind of by the time Dollar Shave Club had you know ten percent market share in volume you know kind of or maybe even a little bit more it might have been very hard for that to pass muster with antitrust regulators. Jason: [12:04] Yeah and we may get an opportunity to talk a little deeper into the antitrust issue because there's there's been some recent developments there but one of the things I really enjoyed about the booklet is I sort of feel like, it would have been sufficient. To just have like some great biographies of these d2c companies that have caught our attention and we're all talking about and and you certainly do have, some nice biographies of the you know the origin stories for some of these these Brands and in you know. Most I would is I was already familiar with but for almost every one of them you you know you uncovered some interesting tidbits or had some, some good background that was news to me so it was it was fun to read those biographies and I particularly like you you sort of introduced a framework for these companies I you highlighted the fact that, you know some of them really entered the market by trying to have a better experience than their predecessor so you know Dollar Shave Club being an easier way to get razors then, go to the store. Larry: [13:09] Not just priced yes. Jason: [13:10] Yeah defeat product jail like some of these like we're about price you know and you know Finding finding Windows of opportunity, somewhere about like dramatically improving a the product from what was previously available and then someone about using data to uncover sort of an unmet need. Larry: [13:33] Yeah that's that's a really good point so when I started looking at the book I didn't want the book to be like one chapter after that kind of telling the story of this company that company other company I wanted to to matically, slow and and you know getting back to that moment when I was sitting in the car and said to myself oh maybe there's something here, and then kind of why is this happening you know kind of and why now and the answer I quickly Learned was technology. [14:03] Technology had leveled the playing field and made possible what had not been possible you know 10 or 15 years ago so if you go back to I mean all these, problems that these entrepreneurs all had long existed I mean mattress stores have been kind of ridiculous places for a long time Gillette has long you know added you know kind of little features and so that they can justify increasing the price, but it was very the barriers to entry were much much higher, 10 or 15 years ago especially if you wanted to create a brand that was a national brand so you know kind of 2005 even up to about 2010 you want to introduce a new brand you know kind of you have to go to a retail store you have to say mr. Walmart or Ms Walgreen, you know can will you carry my product and they like why I don't need to carry your product first of all have limited shelf space and save all have all these other brands that are doing quite well you know kinda is a pretty cozy relationship so, dinner that comes along and that means that you know can e-commerce allows companies to introduce products introduced new brands in ways that would have been really difficult before, the internet has unlimited shelf space you know kind of your website is yourself space. [15:20] And then second okay so you've got that she'll straight how do you get anybody to notice you again go back to you know kind of 10 or 15 years ago and you would need a multimillion-dollar, advertising campaign really you know kind of tens of millions of dollars advertising campaign on TV you know kind of radio newspapers if you wanted to get any attention, Gillette spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year but all of a sudden you know kind of Technology first with Google but then most importantly with social media, like Facebook allows a company to spend your thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to Target those customers who. Are most likely to buy your products. And because you have this relationship online and you're kind of selling all your products on lied you're learning a lot about your customers Behavior, and you can keep fine-tuning the product the message whatever. Again so and the final technology that really you know that Leap Forward that really made all this possible was in logistics so. [16:25] It's hard to remember but in the early days of e-commerce you ordered something and you know you were happy to get it in a week or two right and thanks because thanks to Amazon, push the envelope and forced everybody else it got to the point where you could order something it's something within it two days or even one day. And again the convenience factor of getting something going on and getting something made possible, this revolution is taken in front in front of our eyes so you had kind of Technology changes and it's going to continue changing, is made you know these. Companies these startups possible and enabled them to challenge much bigger much more deep-pocketed companies in ways that would have been unimaginable. Scot: [17:12] Yeah I agree what you think about so there's been a lot written I've written a couple books and I realized that a lot has happened since you probably put the book to bed but. Larry: [17:24] Yeah when you're when you're writing something when it's live and it's actually kind of evolving you know kind of it's really you know interesting interesting challenge. Scot: [17:33] Yeah so a lot has been written and I think Andy done at bonobos to set a lot around you can get these businesses up to 100 maybe 200 million and then the conventional wisdom has kind of fallen over that you need to open stores so so we've seen away as open stores sometimes they're called guide shops but they're essentially stores to go experience. Larry: [17:53] Warby Parker. Scot: [17:54] Warby has it cetera. Larry: [17:56] Third love is dabbled in it tough to needle and Casper both have as well yeah and so when I started seriously working on the book two years ago I think you know basically there was Warby Parker, with stores and you know kind of, one or two others it was kind of really small and as I got into the reporting and more open it up I said you know what I have to write have to have a chapter on retail and where does retail fit in this I mean it was something that you know that that clearly was becoming, a trend among some of these startups and for just the reasons that you say so a couple things were happening, one social media marketing was so successful. Everybody started doing it so it became a bit more expensive now it's still one of the most effective ways to acquire customers. [18:56] But it's more expensive than it was in the past so the cost of that is going out second you have you know kind of the type of people who are most likely to buy online and to respond to a social media ad you're getting to saturation point now that may be a little bit of an exaggeration but a lot of the people are most likely to do it I've done it. And finally then you get to like that eighty to ninety percent of retail in this country is still done in physical stores. [19:24] And some categories is even higher, Neil Blumenthal one of the cofounders of Warby Parker told me it's like 95% in eyeglasses so there's no surprise that they were one of the first, startups actually go to physical retail so the new thing that you hear a lot of is multi-channel, that yes you can build you know kind of a brand it might be depending on the product that might be 20 million it might be 50 million it might be a hundred million sales but to scale it up you're probably going to have to be, multichannel I think most of these Brands still have more than fifty percent of their sales online and over time I think you know the percentage overall of retail that online is going to continue to increase but that's why these brands have moved their oh and the final thing is that you had a lot of traditional retailers having problems and going out of business so guess what retail space became a lot cheaper. So you know a company could kind of test retail in a way that was it going to cost them an arm or a leg they can see how it worked without really kind of going all in. Jason: [20:31] Yeah and you know it's interesting you mentioned the the evolution of Facebook and that that you know emerged as a new tool that allowed more efficient marketing, there was one of the in a blurs for a lot of these companies but you also covered a lot of other aspects of this sort of, product development through you know go-to-market ecosystem that that sort of evolved to create this this opportunity so you covered some of the. Larry: [21:02] The infrastructure as it were right. Jason: [21:03] Yeah yeah exactly so I. Larry: [21:05] The things that people don't see very often I you know as a business journalist I got really fascinated by that stuff. You know kind of the company that you know kind of figured out that you know face could, Facebook could really be a way to reach Target audiences and of ampush, based in San Francisco found by kind of three College friends roommates who went to Wall Street and got bored I'm doing Wall Street and said hey let's start a company and they figure that out you know kind of done very well. And then there's you know the logistics companies which I found extraordinary fastening go into a modern warehouse and it's not like what you would have seen. Five or 10 years ago certainly not 10 years ago, where are you know kind of a lot of forklifts and people carrying things around and racing around you know a lot of their automated to a large extent they're a lot of robots there people there and they tend to tend to do the things that robots aren't yet good at. But the amount of innovation that's going on there to make that. Product that you quick on and then get it within 24 to 48 hours is amazing it's kind of cool it's actually kind of cool. Jason: [22:16] For sure and so you you had some interesting stories in there so like one of the companies you profiled in that ecosystem quiet Logistics I was familiar with them but I didn't really know the back story, they were early adopter of these first robots for automating warehouses in the robot they adopted was this Kiva systems robot. And then you tell the story of how they were subsequently he though. Larry: [22:41] So keep your hat size yes so this is is I love that story coming Kiba was acquired by Amazon, in Amazon you know kind of not long after acquiring Kiba said to the people that keep it been selling to is like basically we're not going to support we're not going to you know after a few years we're going to stop, you know kind of servicing the robots that you have and these guys at quiet Logistics who had built the nice business who had spotted the e-commerce, Revolution coming and built a business totally on having an automated Warehouse they've been in the warehouse business for years and it sold a another warehouse company they had built up a decade earlier but they say hey this is a new opportunity they're like. What you're not going to surface the robots anymore what are we gonna do you know kind of that's our own business model and so they had the idea, why don't we build our own robots and so they went about kind of hiring, engineers and higher robotics experts so they built their own robots and lo and behold that business is so successful that they spun it off and it's now sewing robots, two other Warehouse companies and two ups and all over the world. Jason: [23:57] Yeah that that was funny and I'm trying to remember Scott were you an early investor in Kiba. Scot: [24:03] Thanks Big thanks for watching that. Had the opportunity and at that point it was just random pitched it was described as ant algorithms in a warehouse full of robots and it didn't make sense to me but I was wrong. Jason: [24:19] Dab to teasing you you at least four on the list of people they called. So that was a great story Larry another one that I think is in some ways one of the most important Trends in the whole book is you described a number of entrepreneurs that, really leverage data that previously probably didn't exist. To help Define the products that they offer so I'm thinking like E Salon or Mohawk or or anchor could you talk a little bit about one of those. Larry: [24:50] Yeah so I think this is one of the things when you have a disadvantage when you're competing against a bigger rival. You need to have some other Advantage you need to play by different rules and actually you know kind of you guys remember the the book and in the movie Moneyball by Micheal Lewis. So Moneyball basically was about how. A small-market baseball team the Oakland Athletics. Couldn't compete with big Market teams like the Yankees who are rich in could you know kind of pay for more Talent so they had to figure out how we going to compete and they came up with the idea of data analytics to find players who were undervalued. And within a few years after embracing data analytics they became highly competitive. And and you know kind of vague were you know going toe-to-toe with the Yankees in many ways so. To me what is happening in retail in the creation of Brands is kind of the Moneyball. [26:04] These companies in addition to seeing a problem in looking for a way to fix it also recognized that you could use data. Technology barley but also data to spot opportunities to improve your products to connect with your customers so a lot of people call it this is direct to Consumer businesses also say it's connect to Consumer businesses, so early on before they get big enough that they decide they need to offer you know kind of have retail stores as well. These companies are doing all their business with people online. [26:39] People are coming to the website they know everything where did you come from how much time did you spend on the website what are you looking at. What are you ordering how many times you come back before you order they can just gather a lot of data to learn about their customers and to improve their products. [26:58] In some cases one of the things that some of these brands of do he's having more customized products and that's where he's Lon as come on E Salon offers customized are coloring. That is you know just about as good as Salon but what more expensive but better than the off the shelf. Hair coloring that you would get from one of the big name brands and how does it do this its Gathering data all the time from its users has a questionnaire. It's using AI to analyze that data when we mix this for these for the woman who answers the question are this way. This is what she like sometimes we will tweak it and give her a slightly different than what she thinks that she wants because our experience has shown over hundreds of thousands millions of people answering the questions and of this is what is going to work best. And so their product is like 20 or 25 bucks depending on what kind of subscription you have and you know it's a lot less than you might spend at a hair salon and it's and it's a very good product again that would not be possible. [28:08] Without being able to collect the data and you know kind of fine tune. It's a product but also it's the marketing it's the pitch kind of to see somebody comes to your website you know kind of how long you're going to stay there. Every you know kind of incremental Improvement in each step along the way. [28:28] Means that you're going to have more customers and more customers stay with you so initially they started I think they told me like you know fifty percent of their customers were coming back because they were still trying to figure out the formulation and now 70%. Come back after the first purchase they get people past their third purchase they know they're going to have until 8:00 purchases if they get past their 8 purchases they're going to have them like just about forever again and they know this because they're measuring every bit of data. Jason: [28:56] Yeah I mean one of the examples in the book that really struck me was when a woman ask for the lightest possible blond they know that she actually doesn't want the light as possible blond and that she maybe want something with a slight bit of blue tint in it. Larry: [29:11] Yes because because I know from people who've gotten the lightest possible Dom who fit the profile that she fits that they have a lower kind of Second Coming Back conversion rate than they do when they kind of tweaked it a little bit, it's you know kind of it really is a type of rocket science put it into a computer for retail purposes. Jason: [29:32] But I like that metaphor so you could almost think of them sort of anchor money bald Belkin right like the the you know the traditional accessory providers. Larry: [29:44] Yeah well one of the challenges I think for some of the startups is that you know, what happens when the Yankees starting you could start using data analytics right they got money and data analytics. So now you know having said that I think the Oakland A's are year in year out Fielding better teams. Did they ever did before data analytics going to watch. So so even though it may be harder now that everybody is using the same tactics and I think a lot of the big companies are starting to learn some of them are buying some of these companies, some of them are buying expertise, so so that's going to make it a bit more challenging for companies but still you know I think that there's a lot of potential because you have the technology out there that makes it easy to introduce a. Jason: [30:39] Yeah and you know what you know finding that metal part maybe just one step further that's a great point you make that when the Oakland A's are the only ones using the Moneyball system they were they were suddenly identifying valuable players that other teams didn't want because they didn't know they were valuable, so they had this competitive Advantage but once the whole world adopted this this Quantum metric, system suddenly everyone knew those value and so it was it was harder to gain an advantage from that and then in some ways it feels like. DDOS is playing out very similar when you were the only ones leveraging this like targeted audiences on Facebook. You had this great competitive Advantage but now that everyone's using it they you know bit up the prices and it's it's less of an advantage than it was for that first mover. Larry: [31:29] Right right there's no doubt about that there's no doubt about that. Scot: [31:33] Cool one one thing I wanted to talk about is so a way has been interesting and this probably happened, post publication of the book so they've had one thing that's interesting is so so Amazon is kind of cloned their model so there's an Amazon basic suitcase Target just announced Their Own Line of suitcases that look very away ish and then they had their own kind of implosion with the CEO, sending some unsavory slack messages internally kind of kicking yourself upstairs and then re kicking yourself back downstairs what do you make of the tumultuous times there. Larry: [32:10] Yeah so I think implosion is probably to stronger word clearly embarrassing for the CEO to be berating her, employees the way that she did in a very demeaning way and I think that she has said she's embarrassed but you know one thing I would point out. These are startups most of these people have not run companies, and often you have you know entrepreneurs who aren't great managers you know witness Steve Jobs at Apple, right or Elon Musk at Tesla I mean both of these executives. Were incredibly incredibly difficult to work with and the second thing I would say is that you know, especially when you're in the mode that away is in you know competing first of all with other startups which it ended up as the leading, new luggage company and now competing against other existing players trying to get into its pace and copy what it's doing, you know it's a life-or-death situation for a company and so you know sometimes emotions boil over I think the big question there is. [33:30] Will that bad publicity affect ways image overall and you know you go on social media and you see people saying oh I'm never going to buy it anymore and oh I wish I hadn't bought it and. You know what week later those same people are outraged by something else. So I'm not sure I mean I think time will tell how much it's going to affect them but, you know they have a good product at a at a good price it's a value price right it's not the most expensive and it's not the best product but it is you know a good product at a good price, and I think it could end up being one of the winners only time will tell but I think it could be. Jason: [34:07] Yeah yeah another one you know I feel like demonstrating how liquid all this is like obviously you you you know the you mentioned our shave club was sort of one of your your first interest in this space and their well covered in the book and you alluded earlier to gillette's prodigious market share so like the the interesting news from last week and this week as last week the FTC filed the complaint and said that they were actually going to oppose, Harry's acquisition by Edge well because they felt like number to March it. Larry: [34:45] Which own chick. Jason: [34:47] Yeah exactly so Schick number to acquiring Harry's which some people think is number four behind our Shave Club I actually have some data that looks like Harry's may have a bigger market share today than Dollar Shave Club. So calm three or four number two by his number three or four and the FTC was concerned that that would dramatically a road, price competition so they they block the merger and and then this week Edge well announced that they weren't going to fight it so there are. Larry: [35:17] To the consternation of Harry's well you know like I'm not sure what the most recent data is the data that I got from an independent source, that tracks sales said that Dollar Shave Club sales and market share was quite a bit bigger than Harry's but separate from that, I think it was an interesting decision I'm not a little bit of a puzzling decision you know kind of the FTC is letting Sprint, and T-Mobile merge. And put not Harry's and sik or Edge well merge the barriers to entry in Mobile. [35:54] Communication is much higher than the barriers to entry in razors and actually one of the things I think you know getting back to the whole point about how easy it is to introduce a new brand we let's say that Harry's, you know starts raising its prices and starts doing business more like chicken Gillette had long done it that cozy relationship, to me that would prevent a you know kind of two things would happen because of the way that the world has changed one dollar she would help Dollar Shave Club being in there as you know kind of offering this alternative view of the world. And second, it's quite possible that another brand would come in and say Hey you know kind of these guys you know kind of are leaving their customers behind they're not being true to what they were and obviously there is a market for what they were doing. [36:42] And I think that's one of the kind of long-term getting back to the Money Ball issue kind of one of the long-term benefits of what's happened is that we as consumers have more choice and likely will have more choice in most consumer products going forward because it is so easy to introduce a new brand there's been a democratization which leads how did the fragmentation I don't think we'll ever see a prey on that you know kind of like Gillette has 70% market share in the future but that's good you know that's not bad, you know I kind of finally I think part of the reason that that edge well sik backed out was it paid I thought the price that it offered was quite a rich price it was like 1.3 billion was even more than Unilever paid for Dollar Shave Club, so although there was an awfully Rich price maybe they kind of at the end got cold feet and said oh maybe we're paying too much for it you know kind of let's let's let that. Jason: [37:36] The I think the investors must have agreed with you because I feel like Edge well stock is up since the merger was called off. Larry: [37:43] Right right, but long-term long-term sik Edge well is going to have to figure out how to better service its customers right because it was distant distant distant you know kind of number two to Gillette forever and it had, combined combined Harry's and Dollar Shave Club I think had more market share than Schick so that says something about the way they were doing business before the way they need to think about doing business going ahead. Jason: [38:10] Oh for sure and like I mean two things, hey like it's going to be interesting to watch it because you know in many respects when they announced this merger they said and we're going to put the Harry's guys in tired of our strategic plan going forward so they sort of announced to the world, that we don't have any good ideas and we're trusting them to take the brand forward and so now what do you do when you don't have those guys. Larry: [38:34] Right I mean you know you maybe you try to hire that talent but sometimes that entrepreneurial talent and that just kind of feel for what the customer wants is not so easy to duplicate in focus groups and such. Jason: [38:44] No but so I'll admit very personally selfishly I'm disappointed that they're not going to litigate with the FTC because per your point, in the ftc's complaint they made a lot of interesting claims and one of the claims was that, Harry's was able to capture significant market share and become a relevant player but they sucked up all the opportunity to do that and that it would be much more difficult for anyone to follow in Harry's, footsteps and therefore it was important not to allow this merger and like well as we discussed already in some ways it probably is harder to be the third or fourth mover, in other ways, like the the friction is considerably less like and it's hard to imagine that Amazon couldn't be a significant player or Target couldn't invent a razor. You can play or so. Larry: [39:44] Well Amazon as you noted earlier I think you mentioned it with. Jason: [39:48] Yeah they're already in the space. Larry: [39:49] In the space but they have there are at least 200 new brands at Amazon has introduced, over the last few years and I mentioned this in my book that are there have amazonbasics Brands but this is separate from that these are brands that you don't know her necessary Amazon Brands unless you really drill down, they actually have a shoe brand called I think it's called Collective 206 kind of crazy name for a shoe brand but anyway they introduced a knockoff of all birds, wool Runner Shoes recently and all birds took a shot of them and say oh your stuff is not sustainable materials and but in some ways Walmart is I mean she's me Amazon is validating. What all birds is doing and it's somebody's it's giving a threat so you're going to have, all sorts I mean the opportunity to introduce new products new brands is you know kind of higher than ever before and then getting back to my point if Harry's changed the way it did business. So that it charged higher prices and and you know kind of acted more like chick that would create an opportunity for somebody else in the marketplace I truly believe that. Scot: [41:04] Yes can be interesting to see you know if more of this gets blocked and what's going to happen one one other topic I wanted to just touch on quickly that happened kind of post the book is the Casper IPO so you know I think Casper raised money as a private company at around one to 1.2 billion and then they really struggled price in the IPO the kind of, we're talking about a 15 to 17 range and a pricing it at 12 its trading off of that it's interesting because I've seen a lot of people argue that these brands should get kind of one times revenue and then other folks have argued that a lot of these brands because they're more efficient they should get two three four times so this one ended up kind of going right in I think they're trailing 12 months Revenue are about 400 million and now their market cap is right around 400 million so they. Larry: [41:55] Or 500 or something like that but pretty close to it. Scot: [41:58] Get a pretty quickly zeroed in on that one X do you think that's going to throw kind of a wet blanket on things or do you think that that I. Larry: [42:04] So yes but with a caveat so let's look at the mattress space overall and how disrupted that has been. So if you go back five years I met mattress business retail mattress business in the u.s. is about 15 or 16 billion dollars a year. If you go back five years about 50 million dollars was done direct-to-consumer the bed in the Box friends. [42:30] Last year it was two billion dollars and if the. Barriers to entry fell in a lot of categories the barriers to entry in the mattress. Category collapsed because it's so easy to make a mattress and sell a mattress you get somebody to sell you foam you know you get somebody just to so the bits together the top together and then you kind of get a machine that crams it down and puts it in a box and send it you had dozens does is I've actually heard hundreds but you know dozens of doesn't serious serious players and I think that they're probably going to be, you know kind of maybe a half-dozen that emerge so in this in this you know kind of, fiercely competitive free-for-all bare Knuckles free for all the way I described in the book Casper raises a lot of money and, besides that it has to spend a lot of money to try to knock the others out of the box and become the leading and and I think that. They made a strategic mistake I think they spent so much that it validated the whole category, right so when you went and searched for mattresses online you found Casper but you also found tough to needle and purple and others, and the second thing I think that they thought maybe that you know is like a network effect you know we spend moral kind of get others you know kind of have to drop out it hasn't you know kind of those others have thrive, so if you guys heard much about purple innovation. [44:00] Okay so purple is a public company it stock is traded. It came it actually didn't start selling mattresses until like 2016. Its stock has doubled in the past year it's market cap is now 700 800 million I think it's sales are 4,500 roughly the same as as Casper and tough to needle, which was sold about a year and a half to go to Sur to Simmons for four to five hundred million dollars we started as I mentioned by these kind of too. Software Engineers who just decided they wanted to make a product they raised virtually no money they had no Venture Capital Mike they had to be profitable from the start. And they were and they sold the company they each together they had 90% of the company so you know kind of both of them did very very well so I think that Casper you know kind of rather than being a poster child for all DTC companies is more of a poster child for, kind of format a poorly managed DCTC. You know I mean we're going to see time will tell but when you have profitable companies in that space and their unprofitable then you know kind of it says that somebody doing something right compared with them. Jason: [45:20] Yeah it's it's a funny so a number of these guys have been on the podcast so Joe Mega bow who's the CEO of purple has been on in JT Marino has been on and one of the cool stories JT told us was, um that yeah you know that you know he mentioned that he hadn't raised any money that you know some of these these Venture funds that we're starting this emerge specializing in data see all wanted to invest and they didn't take the money and that his his version of the story was Casper was specifically created as a, alternative to tough to needle that could be Venture funding. Larry: [46:01] Right right yeah though I I talked to him too as you know in the book and he told me that same thing but he was you know can it again they were high they had to be very disciplined. Right because of the way they spent. Jason: [46:14] Yeah no I really admire that. Larry: [46:16] And I think that that Casper was undisciplined now that you know the final thing I would say about it is that you got you ever heard of a company called Tesla. So a year ago. Jason: [46:27] Single-handedly is keeping them afloat. Larry: [46:29] So year ago. Tesla was like almost given up for dead right oh we can't get the production right you know kind of they have they can't get you know kind of mass production of cars right it's you know kind of he's running out of cash you know he's got so much debt and now it's stock is at all-time high. And they're making money and why because they fix their fundamental problem which was you know they had a great brand name and a great product but they were kind of Highly inefficient the way they made it but they appear to have gotten that under control Casper's has still has a great branding I don't know if they can pull off a Tesla. But you know sometimes the the rigor and the discipline imposed On You by public markets can focus the mind and make you be a lot more efficient than you were and we'll see but I wouldn't count them out quite yet. Jason: [47:18] No I think that's that's certainly fair so, you had this front row seat to all of these interesting Evolutions obviously so you know most of them are still sort of playing out like if, if you had to put your prognostication hat on like how is all this going to play out like is are these got companies a blip on the radar and Joe Ed and p and g are going to keep on tickin for for another hundred years or you know like are we seeing the start of a. Change. Larry: [47:48] Great question so I think that there will be billion dollar brands. That have you know market cap or kind of they go public and there will be a billion dollar brand so they Corby Parker probably wants to go public you know kind of I don't know that they're making money but I think they're a lot closer to it than for example Casper, there will be other brands that will be you know kind of modestly successful. And then there will be other brands that will be Niche brands that will be successful and niches have you guys ever heard of a company called lens simple. This is one of my favorite one so so if you have a pair of eyeglass frames. [48:29] That you really like maybe what a couple pair of designer frames a couple years ago and you need a new prescription and you kind of go back to the, optician and you say hey can you know can I got a new prescription just put new lenses in my frames they look at you like you're crazy I don't know we want to sell you another pair of frames, this company you send them the frames and they put in your new prescription they send it back to you. So I think that they're going to be a lot of Niche players like this and then they're going to be companies that fail in the in the luggage space you know kind of away emerged as the leader among the startups and there were a couple of companies rate in and blue smart that ended up going out of business. So you're going to have you know kind of a whole array of this but I think the the ability to you know getting back to it bent or bury the ability to introduce Brands means that you know kind of. Things have changed forever just like Moneyball started with baseball and now data analytics is used in every sport. So you know can a big companies will fight back none of those companies are going to disappear but if unless they figure out a way to connect to Consumer better, they're going to have lower market shares and you know again I don't think that's a bad thing actually maybe as an investor in those companies that's a bad thing but for consumers. That's a good thing because in the end more choice is better it keeps the big companies honest it makes them he's like Gillette lowering its. [49:58] Prices by an average of 12 to 15. A couple years ago I mean unheard of that never would have happened without Dollar Shave Club at Harry's coming along City. So we kind of we're in the early stages of this Revolution and I think the revolution like all revolutions you're not exactly sure where it's going to end up but you are pretty sure that it's not it's going to look quite a bit different than where we started. Jason: [50:26] Yeah no I would totally agree with that and I feel like we're lucky to be sort of in the in the front row at a time when we are going through this revolution because it's it's not the status quo. Larry: [50:38] Yeah very fun to very fun to watch. Jason: [50:41] Yeah for sure and so until you write the sequel that's going to be a great place for us to leave it tonight because we've once again used up all our a lot of time but in the event that listeners have questions or want to continue the dialogue we always encourage you to jump on Twitter and send us a note or leave us a message on our Facebook page I'll be sure to put a link to Larry's book in the show notes so that listeners can find that without doing anything dangerous while driving. Larry: [51:08] And and you can send me an email to my email address is on my wedge page web page which is www Larry ingrassia.com so. Jason: [51:18] I will I will put that in the show notes Larry thanks very much for being on the show tonight we really enjoyed our conversation. Larry: [51:25] Guys Jason Scott very fun thank you so much for having me. Scot: [51:29] Thanks I appreciate you taking time to fill us in on your book and hope everyone orders a copy ASAP. Jason: [51:35] And until next time happy commercing.

Michael Dubin created a brand around a problem that he was experiencing himself — the dreadful task of buying razors. Learn about how Michael Dubin's story and how Dollar Shave Club went from a tiny online business into a $1 billion brand.  Twitter - @brandoriginsfm Email - chris@partizan.ph This episode is made possible by Brandbaker and Allday Customer Support

In this episode, we’re joined by Mike Cessario, the founder and CEO of Liquid Death, a canned water brand whose heavy metal vibe and edgy marketing has generated considerable online buzz and attracted  funding from a range of prominent investors. As part of our interview, Cessario spoke about the rapid rise of Liquid Death, which earlier this year raised $1.6 million in a seed round that included Dollar Shave Club founder/CEO Michael Dubin and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, and how his experience as an ad exec and as a creative director for Netflix played into the creation of the brand. He also explained why he views Liquid Death as a rebuke to extreme marketing, and how the company attempts to communicate authenticity. Show notes: 1:18: We Open With Hope and Beth -- NOSH’s Beth Kaiserman, who joined the team in April, discussed her experience as a food writer and reporter, and, along with the show’s regular hosts, riffed on non-alcoholic beer, better-for-you Bugles, non-dairy dip, and negronis, among other topics. 13:33: Interview: Mike Cessario, Founder/CEO, Liquid Death -- In a call with BevNET reporter Brad Avery, Cessario discussed the development of Liquid Death, which was born out of his passion for music, design and counter-culture. He spoke about cutting his teeth in the beverage industry as the founder of a brandy company and how he drew upon his experience for the creation and launch of Liquid Death. Later, he explained why upstart CPG companies must “do and say things that big brands would never do,” and how his team is attempting to dissect and harness broad appeal for Liquid Death. Finally, he talked about the surprising reaction to the brand’s “Sell Your Soul” campaign. Brands in this episode: Infinite Session, From the Ground Up, Hope Foods, Picnik, Prymal, MALK, Granny Squibb’s, Liquid Death, Hendrick’s Gin, Sailor Jerry Rum, Monster Energy, Red Bull, Full Throttle, Bang Energy, LaCroix

This episode features the brains behind one of the most successful subscription services in America, known as Dollar Shave Club. Dollar Shave club was founded by Michael Dubin in January 2011. The brand debuted in a hilarious viral YouTube video that has reached approximately 26 million views to date. Listen as Jeff and Michael discuss how that video ignited Dubin’s career and how the brand has made it easy for consumers to look, feel and smell their best.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

When I heard about a water brand called Liquid Death that comes in tallboys, reminiscent of beer cans, that behaves like a death metal band, that boosts insane (and insanely great) copy and imagery, and on top of it is 100% mountain water from the Austrian alps, I had to reach out to Co-Founder and CEO Mike Cessario to make some sense of it all, to the extent that is possible. By now I assume you have visited the Liquid Death web site and you got a taste of what you are in for. This is a story about a Creative who comes from the advertising and branding world, who spent his career creating brand stories for greats like Netflix and Gary Vee, and found that it was time to create his own story, his own brand. And it had to be authentic, good for the planet and crazy as hell. If you want your head blown (I do have to use some Liquid Death lingo here) and hear about how his idea was crafted, why people go crazy over it and how his waters help kill plastic bottles along the way, all while poking major fun at marketing, and, yes, branding, as a whole, give this episode a listen. If you like what you hear you can grab some Liquid Death waters on Amazon or you can jump back onto the Liquid Death web site and join their Country Club, but you will have to sell them your soul first. True story. ____Full Transcript: Fabian Geyrhalter: Welcome to Hitting The Mark. In our last episode, I talked with creative extraordinaire Michael Lastoria, who after selling his New York based agency to beauty powerhouse Shiseido in 2017, is now co founder of the counterculture pizza chain &pizza. A pizza joint that was named one of the world's 50 most innovative companies the second time in a row by Fast Company. Today we continue that mini series of advertising creatives turned into entrepreneurs using their background to flip the commodity type offerings into sought after cult brands. My guest today is Mike Cessario who founded Liquid Death, the first irreverent bottled water brand that can compete with the cool factor of unhealthy brands from beer to energy drinks. Inspired by the death metal and punk rock culture, Liquid Death takes an extreme approach to marketing in stark contrast to aspirational health and wellness brands. Prior to starting Liquid Death, Mike was an advertising creative director who worked on viral campaigns for clients like Organic Valley and Netflix. Some of his viral hits include Organic Valley's Save the Bros, which if you have not seen it, please head over to youtube right after this podcast and check it out for a good laugh. And he also did teasers for House of Cards, Narcos and the show you have all been binge watching over the past weeks, Stranger Things. Welcome to Hitting The Mark, Mike. M Cessario: Hey, how's it going? F Geyrhalter: Yeah, thanks for making it. So we chatted a little bit before. We're both graduates of Art Center College of Design. I know people in pretty much all of the agencies you worked at. We're both based in LA, yet I learned about you and your water company via the Los Angeles Business Journal, which is a strange way to connect. But when I read about Liquid Death, I knew it would make for a killer episode. See, it's so horribly easy to pull puns over puns with a death-themed brand, mainly because you'd think that those brands are all destined to die before birth. But tell us how you turned into kind of the arrogant bastard brand of water. It's a strange path to take. When did the idea come about? M Cessario: So it's interesting that you bring up arrogant bastard. I think one thing that I've always noticed is craft beer kind of gets to break almost all the rules of branding. And at the same time, it's one of the categories that people are insanely passionate about. Like people who like their craft beers, love their craft beers. You can find craft beers called Skull Crusher IPA or Arrogant Bastard Ale, because they know that there's a huge market for their audience that's at least 21 years old. So they don't have to really like pun-intended, water things down just to kind of please everyone. So there's always just this cool factor with craft beer that I felt was just kind of unmatched with everything else. And then that was sort of the inspiration for kind of the brand and packaging of Liquid Death. I grew up playing in punk rock and heavy metal bands outside of Philadelphia. And that scene is actually where I really got into health, believe it or not. And I think that's a thing that most of mainstream culture has not really seen or realized that in that world of heavy metal and punk rock and all that stuff, there's a lot of people who care a lot about health. We like to say there are probably more vegans at a heavily heavy metal show than a Taylor Swift show. Inside the world of metal and hardcore, there was this little subset called straight edge where they were very vocal about no drinking, no drugs. That's not exactly the market that we built this for. But it's just one example of how a lot of this culture does care about health and has so for 30 years. But you kind of look at the fact that the world is all moving towards healthier. Every new brand is all about health. All the unhealthy stuff soda has been in basically I think like a 13-year decline in sales. Beer has been in a decline of sales. There's all this data showing that GenZ and millennials no longer think it's cool to be drunk. They actually consider it pathetic and embarrassing. So all this stuff is kind of moving towards drinking less alcohol, being healthier, willing to spend a little more for healthier options, people being a little bit more aware of sustainability. It's getting broader and broader. But if you look at the health food industry, they only market their products in one tone of voice. They're kind of just going for what I think is like the cliche health food customer, and I think they're making big generalizations around what healthy people are into. Like, "Oh, you know, it's about yoga and it's about aspirational. So we're going to just show really good looking fitness models in our ads because that's why people are going to want to drink our product and be healthy because they want to look like this impossible person." And we just think that's kind of bullshit. And in reality, you look at what people are really into. Most people wouldn't know that the Walking Dead is, I think the number two or number three most popular show for women, a show about flesh-eating zombies. But you would never hear a healthy brand say, "Oh, our target is women. Let's do a whole campaign about zombies." It would never happen, even though there's proof that this is something that entertains this group of people and that they're into. So I think that's kind of what we're doing is sort of never taking ourselves too seriously. I think that's the biggest filter for our brand. If anything we do, I think we want people to realize like, "Oh okay, these guys don't actually think water is super tough." We're kind of making fun of 40 years of bad marketing. You know, it's like, and it still hasn't changed. It's like these big brands are still thinking about branding and marketing not much differently than they were thinking about it in the 1960s. And I kind of feel like the bar for branding and marketing is so low for how entertaining it has to be, how authentic it has to be, that people can do all this bad stuff and it seems like, "Oh, this is actually pretty good compared to this other really shitty thing that's out there." But if you really held it to the standard of entertainment, I know you have a book on how to make a brand. For us, I look at it like trying to make a book about how to make a great brand is almost like trying to make a book about how to make a hit TV show. It's like there's so much that goes into it that you almost can't reduce it to a formula, even though there's a lot of people to try. And because a lot of times the people, maybe they're not coming from the marketing background, you've got to figure out all these other things to run and operate the business. You don't have time to spend weeks and hours and days trying to get the nuance of brand and what's going to resonate with people. So I think that's ultimately at the core of our brand is we want to blur the lines between a brand and an entertainment company, and we want to hold everything we do up to the same standards as what you would hold a television show to or a movie. Because at the end of the day when you're putting stuff in people's social media feeds, you're not just competing against other water brands or other ads, you're competing against YouTube influencers that are making explosive, amazing engaging videos. You're competing against movie trailers. I think the bar is much higher to actually make people care about what you're doing than most brands can imagine really. F Geyrhalter: Totally. There was so much in what you just said and I'm kind of trying to rewind on some of those thoughts. One of the things that you said about not taking yourself too seriously, that is just this repeating threat that I see going on with all of, or a lot of my podcast guests where it's basically like I have a podcast about branding, but everyone talks about being the anti brand. And I think that's what's so interesting in today's age is that no, there is no formula. And even in my book I only basically talk about that your background story is bigger than your product, and that it's all about belief and cost and transparency and solidarity. And that is all exactly the formula that you took, just that you know it intrinsically because you came from the world of marketing and branding and advertising. But you do it in such an authentic way, and authenticity is such an overused word, especially by all the wrong marketers. But I mean that idea of not giving a shit and just being yourself and doing your thing and being out there to give value and entertainment to your tribe, I mean that's really what makes a brand. You mentioned the problem with all of these health and wellness, especially retail brands are looking at talking the same talk. A couple of episodes ago I had one of the early and main investors of Beyond Meat on this podcast. And they realized the same thing, that it's like, "No, our Veggie Burger should not be in the Veggie Vegan stamped compartment. This is a burger that real guys can flip on their grill." This is not about you having to be stamped into a certain kind of micro niche. But let's talk about that micro niche a little bit because I think it was fascinating when I read about Liquid Death. First, I was like appalled because it's totally not my lifestyle. And I'm like, "Oh my God, there're heads flying around and there's blood. And why is this water from Austria? That's where I'm from, this is totally not cool. I need to get this guy on." And then the more I read about it and the more I heard you talk about this street edge punk rock lifestyle, which I was totally not aware of, I'm a huge music buff, but I had no idea and it's actually a lifestyle that you already talked about a little bit. And people like band members of Metallica, Fugate, of Bad Religion and even J Mascis of Dinosaur Junior who I'm a big fan of, they're all part of this kind of like sub, sub, sub group. And I believe so much in that idea that if you go with a group that you understand really, really well, which you do, because it's the lifestyle that you come from, it sounds like. And you dive into that, that you can create a product that authentically will resonate with your audience. But how did the audience change over the past year or two years? Because you've been around for like a year or two years as a brand. And how do you ensure that that brand stays weird and out there and connecting with that particular lifestyle without feeling fake despite its success? M Cessario: That's a good question. I think that's a thing that most marketers or brands get wrong. Because I think as you know, like on the creative side, we think more emotionally and culturally. Whereas on the business side people then tend to think much more rationally and logically. What isn't necessarily a rational thing is if you can market and be very authentic to a very, very small audience, that does not mean that only that small audience is going to care. With Liquid Death, pretty much the filter that I've put every decision of the brand through is, "Would slayer think this is cool?" And even though that seems like a very, very narrow appeal, we have this huge halo effect of that. And we have a woman from the UK who is like, "I hate metal but I love this thing." That made me start thinking, okay, how do I quantify that? What is it? Why is it that I'm making like severed heads and blood flying, it's called Liquid Death, I'm being very authentic to heavy metal, but why are old ladies and people who have no care about metal in this world really resonating with it? And I think what I've come up with is, like you said, the word authenticity is kind of overused and people don't really know what it means or how to employ it effectively. But I think everyone knows that people are moving away from big food and big drink, and in favor of small and local and craft. That's just like a big thing, the shift that's been happening over the last decade and you're starting to see all the big brands kind of trying to appropriate this small hand-crafted look that people are willing to pay for and are more attracted to than they're like big mass produced kind of brands. So when McDonald's is now making things called artisan sandwiches that look like farmer's market kind of design, you kind of know that that old way of seeming small, from a look and feel standpoint, isn't really effective anymore. You can go to a grocery store now and find a bag of beef jerky that you don't know. Like, "Is this from a farmer's market or is this some massive corporate brand?" You don't really know anymore because the lines have been so blurred from that look and feel point of view. So my belief is that in 2019 when you have two to three seconds of someone looking at your product to make an opinion on it, the only way you can instantly communicate to someone, this is small, this is not big and corporate, is by doing and saying things that big brands would never do. You can't really just do it anymore from like, "Oh, I'm going to make it look like it's from a farmer's market and people are going to see it and say, 'Oh, that's small.'" No, because that's everywhere now. So now the bar has got even higher for how do you instantly signify that this isn't a massive, massive brand? I think that's really what people are connecting with. When people see a can of water that looks like beer, that's called Liquid Death with a skull on it, instantly they're like, "This is not coke, this is not Pepsi. There's real human beings behind this brand that maybe I'd want to have a beer with." So I think that's been, in terms of like an audience, how it's spread. It's like I just keep it very, very true to that small core and the halo just kind of keeps growing well beyond that because they respond to the authenticity and the uniqueness of this. It's something they've never really seen before in this kind of consumer packaged goods space. F Geyrhalter: And to play devil's advocate, it is extremely difficult, especially with the coolest looking microbrews to know that they are not part of the big conglomerates. Because they are changing hands day in, day out. It seems like it's a little silicon valley where it's constantly... the things are just being bought and being sold and being bid on. And I don't know if the cool craft beer with the skull on, if it's actually owned by one of the three big ones. And quite frankly, I will not know in two years from now if you actually sit in an island and you sold your soul to Coca-Cola and Liquid Thirst is now on the Coke. Because if there's money in the game, then they're going to put their skin in the game. It doesn't even matter what's on the bottle and what's on the can. So I think that is actually really important to defend the territory and to make sure people understand that. Because I as a consumer, I don't even know that anymore. That idea that just because there's a skull on it, it can't be owned by one of the big guys, I think it's changing. Because in the end money is what it's all about. M Cessario: Well I think that's why it's even beyond the skull. The fact that a brand is called Liquid Death, when someone tries to think about... Okay, maybe I can imagine a skull making its way through a corporate board room into a real product, but nobody believes that Liquid Death has made its way through a corporate board room into a real product. Now you're right, if it gets to a certain point where Liquid Death just becomes huge thing, of course all the big guys are going to be looking to cash in or make it a part of it. But I think one thing I've realized with Liquid Death since the beginning is we're always up against the fact that people think this isn't going to be the real deal. Right? So when I first came up with the idea, all right, I want to make a water brand that looks like beer because I want the healthiest thing you could possibly drink, which is water and most people don't drink enough of it. It's become this like utilitarian thing where it's like, "Okay, I drink water if I'm at the gym. Maybe I drink it in my cubicle sometimes." But it would never be common for someone to be like, "Oh, what do you drink when you go to the bar?" "Oh I drink bottled water." No it doesn't happen. Or, "What do you drink at a party?" "Oh I drink bottled water." It's become a utilitarian thing and it hasn't from a brand and occasion standpoint been accepted in this wide range of other usage occasions like soda is, or like beer is, or like alcohol is. So I think what we're really hoping to do is to change when people drink this thing, and like we know in bars, most people you're in bars to kind of meet people or interact with people. So there's data showing that the reason people walk around with a Guinness versus a Pabst Blue Ribbon versus some other kind of beer, they're trying to signal something about themselves in a social environment. They want something that's a conversation starter, they want to talk to people. And Liquid Death has been doing really well in bars and things like that because it's a complete conversation piece. People see this. Like, "What is that? Wait, that's water? What do you mean that's water?" It just kind of creates a conversation and people are attracted to that. But I think the Coca-Cola's of the world, it's going to take a lot for them to ever take that risk because they're just not built to understand or build really emerging brands. They are built to sustain brands that are already doing like half a billion dollars a year or a billion dollars a year. They can't make a decision without this old process of focus groups and testing. So when you start running Liquid Death through that old system of a focus group, it's never going to make it through. You ask people, "Oh, what do you think of this Liquid Death?" They'll be like, "Oh, this is stupid. Oh, this is dumb." And then it's not going to make it through because it's not actually allowing the market to really test it. So I think we would have a long road ahead of us in terms of massive, massive success before Coca Cola would probably ever take the leap. And at that point it's one of those things where we'd have to make the tough decision of do you have someone like this that helps basically spread it to more people? But with a brand like Liquid Death, it's pretty much all brand. So if they didn't truly get what made the brand special and didn't give creative control or power to kind of keep the brand what it is and they try to like "water it down", that could be the end of the brand like that. And it's happened before. It happened to Snapple. Do you remember the old Snapple ads? The original ones with the lady from Long Island? Yeah, it was shot with not great cameras, but it felt really authentic, like it was a real Long Island type person. And it became the fastest growing beverage brand ever, got bought by think Quaker for like three or four billion dollars. And then soon as it went to Quaker, they put that kind of great little brand through the corporate kind of system and they said, "Okay, this woman, she's not aspirational enough. Now that we're going to be a big brand, we need to get someone a little more aspirational because your small things aren't going to work anymore on the big scale. And you know what? We've got to shoot it with better cameras because your stuff, it just doesn't feel very professional. And they changed it all. They lost over $1 billion or $2 billion in market share in less than two years. So it's like that stuff happens and you just have to, you have to be aware of what you're getting into. F Geyrhalter: Yeah, no, totally. And I think what will most probably happen, and that's going to be a really great thing for you to see is when suddenly at a bar, there's another water in a beer can, right? That's what's going to happen. It's going to be that Coca-Cola's moving in and saying, "Well that makes sense. Kids want to drink beer in bars. And so now there's this guy doing these waters, so let's just do the same thing and have a cool brand for kids." And they have huge distribution, they've got huge power, but like you said, building that authentic brand that's near impossible for them. And I see them fail over and over and over again. And that's why what you're doing is so extremely genius because you realize that you can actually come in really, really strong and be unreasonably bold and altogether unreasonable, because you can, you have to, right? And a question for me is, how did you know that your audience... So here's the punk rockers going to the show and they're going to see that tallboy can of water. How did he know that they would not call BS on heavy metal-looking beer cans that sell us $2 water? I mean, since this easily could have gone two ways, right? And in your own words, you call marketing and branding BS on your site. How was that fine line of humor, sarcasm, and then yet the deep connection created? I mean, you must've been at least a little bit nervous at some point. M Cessario: To be honest, I never really was nervous about it because I think at the heart of... At least my understanding and the reason that I gravitated towards punk rock and metal and that world was the ability to kind of, for lack of a better word, fuck with people and kind of infiltrate something where it's not supposed to be. Punk rock wasn't punk rock really when the only people who sold it were 20 people in a room. It was like when Iggy Pop got on a mass stage and you're seeing this psycho losing his mind on stage and doing things that nobody's ever seen before and was selling it to the suburbs. Then there's this big outrage of like, "What is this music? This is the devil's music. This is bad." And that kind of tension of disrupting kind of like longstanding norms that tend to be very restricted. I think that is at the heart of what I think punk rock and counter culture really is. And I think I knew that Liquid Death, making it into an actual product, which is not easy, you know? F Geyrhalter: Oh yeah. M Cessario: There's not many... I feel like if you have a disruptive or unacceptable idea, what you're supposed to do is just make a band and then your product is selling albums. That's how you get your disruptive idea into the world. It's like, "Oh, you want to be crazy? Okay, make a band, make an album, sell that." Because anybody can really do that. You can find a recording studio fairly easily. You can record stuff. There's home recording equipment, you can put your idea out there. But if you want to make a disruptive idea in that same tone of voice into a consumer packaged good and you've got to figure out how are you going to get people to give you all the money it takes to make it, how are you going to actually figure out production in Austria to make this thing, then how are you going to actually sell it? Deal with the Amazon backend system of shipping people product and taxes. That requires a kind of thinking and resource that a lot of people with these disruptive punk-rock, fuck-you ideas don't always have access to. I think that that's sort of what I was trying to do, is like how do we get a brand through this gauntlet of bringing a packaged good brand to life that totally feels like it does not belong in this world? And I just knew that people would relate to that. It was like wow! Regardless of like... I think the other important thing was making it very clear that the sarcasm was very heavy, that we were not taking ourselves seriously. We weren't actually trying to brand water as heavy, what we're more trying to do is make fun of all the extreme youth marketing of energy drinks. At the end of the day, an energy drink is what, 95% water, some bubbles and like a little bit of sugar and caffeine. It's like all the same stuff that's in my grandma's breakfast tea. But you can call it Monster and put it in a can with a claw mark on it. And then they market it to kids and like, "Hey, it's all about action sports and extreme." They're not being sarcastic about it. They're being very serious of like, "This is going to appeal to the kids because it's extreme and that's what kids love." And we're kind of making fun of that. It's like, "Okay, we're going to beat you at your own game." If all marketing is essentially kind of like storytelling theatrics really around a product, we're going to take ours to the next level and be very clear that this is theatrics, it's professional wrestling. It's entertainment and people respect entertainment. Like you said, we always look at, we want to give value to people. If we're putting something in your Facebook feed, we want it to make you laugh. We want it to do something besides just say, "Hey, buy this." And I think entertainment is the easiest way to kind of paint the picture of what that is. It's like, okay, like we should be making people laugh to make this the funniest thing that they've seen all day every time we put something out there. F Geyrhalter: And on that note, on your site, you say, and I excuse the language, I'm just a messenger here. You say most products in the health and wellness space are all marketed with aspirational fitness models and airbrushed celebrities. Fuck that. Why should unhealthy products be the only brands with a permission to be loud, fun and weird? Besides our marketing and branding is bullshit. So we're going to take ours less seriously and have more fun with it. So yet, as we already discussed, branding is everything to Liquid Death. And that's where the sarcasm kind of fits in. It is the lifeline of the death brand. It's really the foundation of the entire brand. What does, after everything that you already shared with us, what does branding mean to you? Because branding has a horrible, horrible kind of like taste in your mouth, right? It feels fabricated, it feels big, it feels unreal, it doesn't feel authentic, yet in my eyes, branding today is a totally different word. It should actually be rebranded, that word because it's just so different now. I think it is about a lot of the things that you talk about, which you can apply your thinking quite frankly, to any brand. From a tech brand to a retail brand, to a health care brand, because the foundational elements of authenticity, of transparency, of understanding your niche audience and diving full in and creating a tribe, all of these things that can be applied to anything. So what does branding mean to you today? M Cessario: I think you make a really good point that branding needs to be rebranded, especially now because what brand meant when the practice was coined in like the 50s and 60s. Branding was more about when there was what? Three television channels and a couple billboards here and there. You had to have a consistency and brand just so that people would remember you. Because maybe they saw your commercial once on channel two and then they didn't come in contact with your brand again for another week maybe because there was one billboard they passed by. And you had to have the brand link the two things together so people knew, "Oh it's this brand. Oh it's this brand." But that's not the case anymore. With social media, I don't even know what the number is, like how many advertising messages we're exposed to a day. Like thousands and thousands…Branding is something totally different, and I always go back to using examples from the entertainment industry, like using television shows and movies. If you had to say, "What is Steven Spielberg's brand?" It becomes a lot more complicated. You don't want to reduce him to just a brand. It's like it's a vision. It's a type of story. It's a place in the world. It's a point of view of a human being that's behind something. The days of trying to just bullshit people in terms of like, okay, I want my brand to be something that is not at all what I am is I think harder and harder to pull off now. Your brand has to be the people who are behind it, and I think you know as much as like Steven Spielberg, you know he makes Steven Spielberg movies. If Steven Spielberg just tried to make, I don't know, like a soap opera TV show, it's like he can probably do it but it's not going to have the world-wide acclaim that him being him actually has. So I think for me branding is just about making it very clear who the people are behind the brand that you're giving your money to. And I think that's really what it is for us. It's like at the end of the day there might be four other can waters on the shelf next to us and one is Aquafina can water, which they already announced they're going to try to test next year. Super boring looking can, right? Aquafina. There might be a couple of other ones. At the end of the day, what we're hoping is that all the content we put out there, the messaging we put out there, what we do for people, how we talk, how we sound, what we communicate about ourselves, ultimately when there's four brands there, someone is like, "This is all water. I don't really believe that any of these waters are significantly better from a taste perspective than any of the others. So I kind of see it as a level playing field. I want to give my $1.85 to Liquid Death because I want to give my money to those guys more than I want to give it to this faceless kind of water over here or this one that's kind of trying something that I don't really get right here." M Cessario: I think that's ultimately we want to do, is we want to connect with people where they're like, "I want to support this company and these people. And it goes well beyond just the functional benefits of what the actual product is." Because in almost every product category, the differences between brands are basically trivial. If you had to have people blind taste test Monster versus RockStar versus Red Bull, most people probably couldn't even pick out the difference. At the end of the day, people would rather give their money to Red bull based on the things they do, versus some people they want to give their money to Monster or whatever. F Geyrhalter: Yeah. My wife and I in a spare moment of uninspiration we did a blind water taste test. And I think we had maybe like 12 waters from Evian to, the Trader Joes brand, to every single water. And in the end the one that won was like one of those in-store, private label, super cheap water brands, right? So, well let's talk a little bit more about the people behind the brand. Obviously, with you it's yourself, but there's also a lot of investment that came in. I think you gained investments totaling 2.3 million, if I'm correct, maybe it's more by now. But that alone is pretty astonishing, but it's even more remarkable when I look at the names of who actually invested in Liquid Death, from Michael Dubin of Dollar Shave Club fame to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone to Gary Vee, who I, as a side note, refrained to talk to over the course of a 10 and a half hour flight to London despite him sitting, well mainly sleeping right next to me. And I'm very proud that I was able to not talk to him. But these are some serious heavyweights and they understand the power of story and virality. What made them invest in you? What was the reason that Gary Vee said, "Hey Mike, I get it. I'll invest in a water company called Liquid Death with heads being chopped off people and blood everywhere in its commercial. That makes a lot of sense to me. It'll be a hit"? And I know you worked for his company, but what was the decision of some of these people where they said, "No, this is exactly why I believe in it." M Cessario: I mean, part of it is me, which the fact that I worked for Gary and he knew me. He just was like, "I'm a fan of you, Mike, and I believe in this." But I think Gary for instance, he is one that has no emotion about what success means. I think he preaches that all the time. It's like don't let emotion get in the way of like, "Oh well this maybe offends me or this doesn't seem right because there is a really good chance that this would be a really, really good business." And I think Gary is also hyper aware that social media is the internet now. I think he even has a poster on the wall in the agency that says social media is just a slang term for the current state of the internet. F Geyrhalter: That's great. Yeah. M Cessario: Yeah. That's where people get all their news now. It's where they get their entertainment. It's where they learn about what's going on, and he just knows what it takes to succeed in this environment of internet culture. I mean, nothing is censored anymore, right? Kids now, they don't care about normal movie-star celebrities, it's about YouTube celebrities. These YouTubers, they're not censored, they can kind of do whatever they want. They don't have to fit certain formats or things like that. So the culture of entertainment and what's on social media is in a place now where it's going to take a certain level of entertainment to actually succeed in that world and compete against these new forms of media and entertainment. I think that's what he totally gets. Like he knew instantly that, oh, this is a brand that will absolutely be a hit on social media, which is at the crux of almost everything that we do as a culture now. So he just instantly got that. And then of course the fact that, and I think this goes along with most people, they've never seen weird, irreverent, crazy being used to actually do something really positive, which is getting more people to drink more water more often. And I think the pairing of those two things, I mean, that's really what our brand DNA is that if we were just Liquid Death and crazy and heads flying, and we were an energy drink, it would almost be expected. It'd be like, "Oh yeah, that makes sense." But the fact that it's all that and it's water, and it's promoting an alternative to single use plastic because cans are infinitely recyclable, and basically one of the most sustainable beverage containers by almost every measure. Plastic is a huge problem right now that everybody... it's becoming like the new tobacco really. So it's kind of like sustainability and health paired with just irreverence and weird and contemporary art and internet culture. That's I think what people respond to. They can kind of justify that, "Yes, I know this is crazy and it's viral, but what it's doing is actually really positive and we haven't really seen that before." F Geyrhalter: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think that's a kernel of truth in your brand that is super, super important. Once you actually start seeing the bigger picture and how it actually is a very positive thing that you're doing, it's fantastic. And let's talk about this for a second because I'm from Austria as I mentioned, your water is also from Austria. Let's talk about how that fits into the story. Because how should we as consumers feel about water being shipped from Fiji and Iceland or Austria, because as you mentioned, you're actually a rather environmentally conscious brand, right? Like you're counting on many vegans in your target audience and you use the cans instead of plastic, which as you mentioned with plastic pollution, that's a huge issue. How do you feel about shipping water from across the pond? M Cessario: The reason that we're bottling and sourcing in Austria is because when I first... it's starting to change a little bit now, but when I first was looking to produce the brand, there is not a single co-packer or bottler in North America who can put non-carbonated springwater in cans. It doesn't exist. F Geyrhalter: Oh wow. M Cessario: Crazy. Because basically the kind of equipment you need for canning when the product doesn't have carbonation and doesn't have a preservative in it is very different than 99.9% of canned products which either have carbonation or preservative. So most of these canning facilities, they weren't equipped to do this, and if you want to use spring water and not just use factory tap water, which most people don't realize, Smartwater, Aquafina, Dasani, Essentia, Lifewater, they're all just purified municipal water from the factory. F Geyrhalter: Right. It's mind blowing, right? Yeah. M Cessario: Yeah. So we kind of knew that as a premium brand, because cans are more expensive than plastic because it's metal, that's also the reason that cans are actually profitable to recycle because the recycled aluminum actually has good value to it that the recycling company can sell and make a profit on based on what it costs to recycle it. Plastic is not. Because recycled plastic is such low quality, they can't really sell it or make a profit on what it cost them to do. They used to sell it to China, but then now China are saying, "We don't want to buy your recycled garbage anymore." So what happens a lot of the time is plastic comes in to a recycling facility and rather than spending the money to grind it down and recycle it, they just have to send it to the landfill because they're not going to go out of business recycling something that's not profitable. So aluminum actually because of the high material value actually helps subsidize the recycling of cheap materials like plastic and glass, where the final recycled product almost has no value to resell. So that's become a long winded way of saying that the way that we got to Austria was we just kind of realized that if we wanted to do spring water and put it in cans, a, any source, if you bottle at the source, that's pretty much what you want to do because the expense of trying to truck tanker trucks of water from a source far away to some canner doesn't really make sense. So most springwater brands are bottled at the source. Any springwater source in the US, they definitely didn't have any canning capabilities. So we found this place in Austria, outside Salzburg and we flew out there, we met them. They own four of their own private mineral waters springs. They had all the canning capabilities. I've been to Apple's offices in Culver City and these bottlers' offices in Austria were nicer than Apple's offices. F Geyrhalter: So you had to say something nice about Austria. I was fishing for compliments. I'm like, well, because Austria has the best damn spring water in the world, but you're like, "Nope, they're the only ones who could pull it off." M Cessario: Yeah, I mean Austria is the most beautiful place I've ever been to. F Geyrhalter: All right. There we go. All right. You're allowed back on the podcast. M Cessario: So yeah, I mean it was kind of just a random... I just kept making phone calls to bottlers and they kept saying, "Oh yeah, no, we don't do that. Oh yeah, no, we don't do that. It can't be done." Had professionals from the industry doing research for us out there too. "Hey, no one can do it." So finally I found this place in Austria. I flew out there and met them. They could do it. We really liked them. Yeah, Austria is kind of cool too because it's like most people haven't had an Austrian water necessarily, and it's kind of a fun kind of interesting thing that could work with the brand. So yeah, let's do that. But we're actually going to be moving all of our water canning and production starting next month to British Columbia in Canada. So we don't have to ship water overseas. It's a much shorter journey. F Geyrhalter: That's awesome. Congrats. That's a big move and I love to hear that. I think it works really, really well what you're trying to do. But back to those curve balls, I mean, you would have never thought that bottling water in a freaking can would be one of those big curve balls in your entrepreneurial journey where you're like, "What? That can't happen. I have to go to Austria." I mean, those are the things that people don't think about when they start a business. It's like, "Well that seems like it makes a lot of sense. Let's do that." We have to slowly wrap up, but a big question that I'd like to ask everyone on my show is if you could describe your brand in one word, and I call it your brand DNA, what could that word be? I know it's not death. Don't tell me it's death. It's not death. M Cessario: No, it's murder. F Geyrhalter: There you go. Exactly. M Cessario: It's funny. We've been working with some friends of ours, like we're actually kind of partnering because now that the business is growing and I can't run the business and actually execute and do all the marketing at the same time, we're now working with a creative agency partner run by a friend of mine named Matt Heath. They're called Party Land, and we've kind of been working with them on that same exact thing where they're like, "Hey, if we had to distill the brand down to one word, what would it be?" We had a little talk about it, and right now where we're landing with it is mischief. That I think is really the DNA of the brand, is pushing the buttons and getting into things you're not supposed to get into but all rooted in kind of this fun, and doing stuff that's subversive. Trying to always avoid doing the traditional approach to something. Rather than, okay, if we want to be at this music festival, the music festival wants to charge you a sponsorship fee of $80,000. You pay them that money and now you have the right to sell them water that they're going to sell at the festival. Right? That's how every other brand has to do it. We're going to look at, okay, how do we like crow bar open the back door to get in there and have a presence? Do we actually go to the headlining band who we think would be into the product and they're really stoked on it and we get it to them and then they request that it's like in the green room and then all the other artists have access to. That's more mischief. How do you subvert? How do you go around just like the pay to play or the traditional way that most brands like Coca-Cola or these other brands have to do because they just don't have the fandom of a brand like ours that would actually have people go out of their way for you or let you in the back door or whatever. F Geyrhalter: Well, mischief is such a great ownable word too, right? And you can totally live up to it. In a way, it's a watered down version of punk rock, which I think works really well. All right, I have so many more questions, but we got to wrap it up. Listeners who fell in love with Liquid Death just now, is Amazon the place to go to, to get their taste of Liquid Death or should they sign up to your newsletter? Which by the way is one of my favorite pieces of your brand because for my listeners, the newsletter sign-up fine print, you know, that little thing that is underneath the big button saying sign me up. Instead of the GDPR blurb, which everyone freaked out about. "Oh my God, we have to be compliant." It actually says by selecting start selling my soul, which is the button to click to sign up. I agree I want to receive important info and offers from Liquid Death since they will own my soul for eternity. So I guess you can do that. You can start selling my soul on the website, hit that button. Or where else can they find your product right now? M Cessario: Yeah. So you can buy it on Amazon or you can buy it direct from our website at liquiddeath.com. In terms of selling your soul, I think that's an interesting... It's been one of our most popular things now, it's basically on our website. You can legally sell us your soul. There's an actual legal document that we had a real lawyer draft up. It'll automatically populate your name and everything in there, you click to sign it like a DocuSign digital thing. And that is the only way that you can join the Liquid Death Country Club, is by selling your soul. And then once you're a Country Club member on our website, you'll get a free VIP case added to your first order, if you're a country club member. F Geyrhalter: And since this is a legal document, do you also outline what you will be doing with the soul of your tribe members? M Cessario: No, it basically says we can do whatever we want with it. F Geyrhalter: That's pretty good. There's got to be a whole new podcast about what you have done with the soul once the deceased start appearing in your office. Well, Mike, this was a blast. I really appreciate taking the time out of a busy schedule at a time when your young brand is really taking off. So thank you so much for having been on the show. M Cessario: Yeah. I know. Thanks for having me. It was fun. F Geyrhalter: Absolutely. And thanks to you for listening, for subscribing, for rating, and for reviewing this podcast. This podcast is brought to you by FINIEN, a brand consultancy creating strategic, verbal and visual brand clarity. You can learn more about FINIEN and download free white papers to support your own brand launch or rebranding efforts at finien.com. The Hitting The Mark theme music was written and produced by Happiness Won. I will see you next time when we once again will be hitting the mark.

A viral video put Dollar Shave Club on the map, but it took a team to get it where it is today. CEO Michael Dubin talks about DSC’s growth, acquisition, and expanding product line. It was the commercial seen round the internet. On March 6, 2012, Dollar Shave Club uploaded its first YouTube video, featuring one-and-a-half minutes of offbeat humor, during which founder Michael Dubin rides in a kid’s wagon, wields a machete, and encounters, among many other things, a person in a bear suit. “Do you think your razor needs a vibrating handle, a flashlight, a back scratcher, and 10 blades?” Dubin deadpans while riding a forklift. “Your handsome-ass grandfather had one blade—and polio.” It was a totally unique way to explain a simple concept: For an affordable fee, Dollar Shave Club subscribers would get quality razor blades delivered to their doorsteps on a regular basis, thus skipping the trips to the store for overpriced, gimmicky alternatives. And people loved it—the resulting traffic from the video’s launch crashed their site. Since then, that commercial has been viewed over 26 million times on YouTube. It cost only $4,500 to produce, yet it launched the company on a trajectory that would later lead to a $1 billion acquisition by Unilever. “It put us on the map, no doubt,” Dubin says. “We wouldn't be where we are without it.” But this isn’t a story about Michael Dubin and his famous viral video. It’s not even a story about razor blades. As Dubin is quick to point out, getting DSC to where it is today required a team effort. And with its ever-expanding product line, today, the company is about so much more than a good shave. Timing Is Everything—In Comedy and Business They say the most important thing in comedy is timing; the difference between roaring laughter and painful silence can be a fraction of a second. Maybe this was something Dubin learned during the eight years he spent training at New York City’s Upright Citizens Brigade, an improv theatre with notable alumni such as Saturday Night Live’s Horatio Sanz and Amy Poehler. While taking improv classes, Dubin worked various media jobs, starting as a page at NBC, then moving into production and news writing at MSNBC, and eventually, getting into digital marketing at SportsIllustrated.com. But it wasn’t just Dubin’s punchline delivery that set DSC up for success out of the gate. Even the timing of its launch was strategic. As Dubin told NPR’s Guy Raz in a “How I Built This” interview, he chose that specific date—March 6—because, with his media background, he knew that news outlets would be hungry for a tech story leading up to the annual South by Southwest conference that takes place in Austin in mid-March. The launch date also coincided with Dollar Shave Club’s announcement of its $1 million seed round. It Takes a Team A viral video can be a major boost for any company, but it’s far from the secret to a successful business. For that, you need great people, and assembling them is easier said than done. “Big business is a team sport,” Dubin says, “and it requires talent from all corners of the universe that will help you build what you're looking to build.” Knowing where to find your future teammates can be a challenge. “Finding great talent is always going to be the hardest thing that any entrepreneur does,” Dubin says. “Because, ultimately, there's somebody out there in the marketplace that can help you do your job really well and help you build your company the best way possible. But you've got to go out and find them in the great wide world.” That’s why Dubin is a fan of recruiters, “because recruiters are paid to have knowledge of the network that you're looking in.” When building his team early on, Dubin had just moved from New York to Los Angeles and lacked a network in his new city, so he relied on his early investors to make introductions. “That's a great reason to take investment—besides, obviously, needing to take it to drive growth and invest where you need to.” To attract the right talent, Dubin recommends founders do two things. First, focus on your company’s mission. What are you trying to achieve? What gaps in the market are you trying to fill? Why do you come to work every day? “Really talented people want to work for companies that have purpose,” he says. “And that's defined in the mission of the company.” Second, consider granting employees equity. “People want to feel like they're participants in the success—if you ultimately do have the success—and that's super meaningful.” And if your mission changes, that’s okay. It’s natural for it to evolve as your company grows; that’s certainly true for Dollar Shave Club. “It started out more as a shave-only proposition,” Dubin says. “And then it grew out into becoming…more of a men's health, more of a men's grooming platform.” What’s their mission today? “Help guys take care of their minds and bodies so they can be their best selves.” Growth, Acquisition, and Expansion Taking on the shaving industry was a gutsy move. To put that into perspective, it was around the year 1900 that King C. Gillette invented the world’s first disposable razor, according to Gillette’s website. So when Dubin decided to disrupt the shaving market, he was going up against a company that had already been in it for over 100 years. Eight months after the launch of its first commercial, Dollar Shave Club secured a Series A round of $9.8 million. And two years after that, the subscription razor blade company hit 1 million members. In July 2016, Unilever acquired Dollar Shave Club for a reported $1 billion. At the time, DSC had 3.2 million members and was expected to exceed $200 million in turnover (which is sometimes defined as net sales and sometimes defined as revenue) that year. Dubin stayed on as CEO and continues to serve in that capacity today. “Unilever's been very good to let us run the company our way,” he says, “and that was part of the design.” Today, Dollar Shave Club boasts over 300 employees and continues to expand its product line and global footprint. Beyond razors, DSC now sells cologne, body wash, shampoo—even flushable toilet wipes (they’re called One Wipe Charlies). It also has sites live in Australia, Canada, and the UK, with plans to expand further in the next couple of years. Knowing When It’s Time to Add a New Product For a long time, razor blade subscriptions were Dollar Shave Club’s bread and butter, and it gained a loyal following with its single product line. But growth almost always means product expansion, so how can a founder know when it’s the right time to add new products? “You have to stay true to your core,” Dubin says. “You have to develop credibility in your core categories before you can expand outward. There is such a thing as doing that too fast.” Timing matters. Move too fast, and you could confuse your customers and dilute your brand. Too slow, and you may miss your opportunity to take the market. As for figuring out what your next product should be: ”You should definitely do your research. It's always a blend of gut and research.” Time Well Spent These days, Dubin doesn’t star in any viral videos, but he told Foundr about a recent, albeit lesser-known, YouTube video of his commencement address to the 2018 graduating class of his alma mater, Emory University. In it, he sums up the lessons he’s learned over the years, including one about “little choices.” “They're the ones you make more frequently, maybe even every day,” he says to the graduates, “the ripple effects of which, I believe, actually have a bigger impact over the course of your life. They’re choices about where to invest your time.” Given Dollar Shave Club’s meteoric success, it’s safe to say that Dubin and his team’s time has been well spent. 5 Entrepreneurial Lessons from Michael Dubin Dollar Shave Club is a massively popular company that attracted a billion-dollar acquisition. What are some parting lessons we can take from this interview with CEO Michael Dubin? Video isn’t a magic bullet.“What worked for us is not necessarily going to work for everybody,” Dubin says. “Unfortunately, there's no easy answer here. The best advice that I can give to somebody is to find what makes you special, understand what unique talents you have or your team has, and leverage those to try and cut through the noise. It's not easy. It's not easy, and video is not the surefire way to do it.” Culture is more than company perks.“Culture's a tricky word. A lot of people mistake culture for meaning like a coffee bar and a beanbag chair for everybody or stand-up desks, and that's not what culture is. Culture is a much more complex, complicated animal than that. And to me, culture means…people are into their jobs, they feel like they're contributing to the mission, they feel like they're being valued for their contributions and recognized for their contributions, and that they have a career path at that company—that's culture. All the other stuff is sort of superfluous icing on the cake.” Only use a subscription model if it enhances the customer experience.“A lot of people get addicted to this notion of a subscription business because they love the idea of monthly recurring revenue, but you should only be launching a subscription business if it's going to be an enhancement to…the customer's experience. The customer's experience is the most important thing. If delivering them a subscription is going to make their life better or happier, you should offer a subscription. And if not, you shouldn't.” Expect hard times. “You're going to go through hard times. You're going to go through lonely periods. That's to be expected. There's really nothing that anybody can tell you that's going to help make that feel better. … You just kind of have to go through it, truly.” Take breaks. “My advice to entrepreneurs who are starting companies is you have to be relentless, but you also have to step away and take breaks. You can't work yourself to death because it's a marathon, not a sprint.”   Key Takeaways His media background and the social network for travelers he tried to start before launching Dollar Shave Club The importance of building a great team to help your business grow How to attract and retain high-quality talent How Dollar Shave Club defined its mission and how it has evolved over time What the early DSC team looked like The famous first Dollar Shave Club video Life after Unilever’s acquisition of DSC Challenges the DSC team faces as they grow the brand How to know when to launch another product Dubin’s thoughts on the physical product subscription model How to build a healthy company culture

Many companies break when they scale too quickly with poor infrastructure, and when Michael Dubin's Dollar Shave Club hit momentum through a viral video, he had to figure out quickly how to scale effectively. Hear his story behind the hit viral video from 2012, the importance of worrying and the golden ratio to tracking success.

Many companies break when they scale too quickly with poor infrastructure, and when Michael Dubin’s Dollar Shave Club hit momentum through a viral video, he had to figure out quickly how to scale effectively... The post How To Build A Billion Dollar Brand w/ Michael Dubin #BrandBuilderPodcast appeared first on Freedom Fast Lane.

Many companies break when they scale too quickly with poor infrastructure, and when Michael Dubin's Dollar Shave Club hit momentum through a viral video, he had to figure out quickly how to scale effectively. Hear his story behind the hit viral video from 2012, the importance of worrying and the golden ratio to tracking success.

Since its 2016 acquisition by Unilever, Dollar Shave Club has overhauled its business model from a subscription razor service to include a variety of male-care products like fragrance, toothpaste, hair gel, and body wash. Founder and CEO Michael Dubin opens up about taking on competitors in the industry and how his background in improv and marketing is key to the company's success. Produced by Haley Draznin, CNN.

Michael Dubin is the founder and CEO of Dollar Shave Club, which sells men's razors and accessories on a monthly basis. Dollar Shave Club has over 4 million members worldwide and was acquired by Unilever in 2016 for 1 Billion Dollars. 15-year-old entrepreneur Campbell Baron talks to Michael about his journey to success. Get 2 Months of Skillshare For Free (Paid Promotion) ⇨ https://www.skillshare.com/succeed Youtube ⇨ http://tinyurl.com/y8nl7sjn Podcast ⇨ https://anchor.fm/the-ones-who-succeed/ See you next Tuesday!

At the end of 2010, Michael Dubin was working in marketing when he met a guy named Mark Levine at a holiday party. Mark was looking for ideas to get rid of a massive pile of razors he had sitting in a California warehouse. Michael's spontaneous idea for an internet razor subscription service grew into Dollar Shave Club, and his background in improv helped him make a viral video to generate buzz for the new brand. Just five years after launch, Unilever acquired Dollar Shave Club for a reported $1 billion. Recorded live in Los Angeles.

Dollar Shave Club is a membership club for men’s grooming products. The company started delivering razors in 2011 for less than $10 per month. DSC now offers a range of bathroom products from hair gel to body cleanser. Michael speaks with Jessica Harris about how he started DSC, from scratch. Listen to the interview

For more on the podcast: Right-click here and save as to download this episode to your computer You can find the shownotes to this episode on: http://behindthestory.be/podcast/episode011/ Subscribe on iTunes/Apple Podcasts Subscribe on Android If you would like to be part of my storytelling community, please join my Facebook group here Links and Resources: Sarah's company and Social Media Links: http://saraharcher.co.uk http://www.lemon-squeeze.co.uk LinkedIn Facebook Twitter Lemon Squeeze Twitter Sarah Archer Sarah can be contacted through: Social Media Her website (request and registration forms) Email: sarah@lemon-squeeze.co.uk Listen to her podcast around public speaking: The Speaking Club Podcast - a weekly speaking, humour, pitching and mindset podcast. I especially would like to recommend podcast episode 019, Humour 101 for Public Speaking: on how to integrate humour in your speeches. Dollar Shave Club. Dollar Shave Club was founded by Michael Dubin 5 years ago, in business in online razors. They got so succesful, because of the humor and storytelling in the video's used for their branding. The engaging and entertaining content over the next 4 years resulted in Unilever buying the company for 1 Billion dollars! Squatty Potty used video with storytelling humor. Resulted in 400% in retail sales and 600% in online sales. Russell Brunson's epiphany bridge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKML2GyjuRQ Neuro Linguistic Programming Sarah recommends these books to aspiring entrepreneurs that she currently reads: Will it Fly by Pat Flynn. Sarah and I share the same podcast mentor: Pat Flynn. Sarah will launch an online course this year, and she wants to get it right! It should meet the needs of her clients! This Pat Flynn book is great for anyone who wants to make a business idea come to life! The Amours of Lillie Langtry, play written by Joan Greening and produced by Lemon Squeeze Productions, this summer 2018 in Edinbrugh, The Fringe. Sarah plays Lillie Langtry, who she describes as the Victorian version of Kim Kardashian, Oprah Winfrey and Madonna, all in one. The Days I knew, by Lillie Langtry - Her memoirs Never split the difference, by Chris Voss. Chris, a former FBI hostage negotiator, talks all about negotiations and influence. The interview: Sarah is the founder of Lemon Squeeze Productions, in the UK, and all-round in her speaking business: comedian, actress, play writer, copy writer, author, keynote speaker, speaking coach and employee engagement specialist. She helps leaders and professionals on their quest to becoming high impact communicators, especially during change and transformation, combining her business and coaching background with her comedy experience. Sarah is a qualified Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) practitioner, integrating a specific communication approach with personal development and psychotherapy. She hosts the podcast: The Speaking Club Podcast, in which she brings hacks, tips and inspiring interviews and stories on public speaking. I recommend it as a great source, and it is very entertaining. Sarah has been performing stand up comedy since 2003 all over the UK and in 2015 she took her first play 'Dearly Beloved' on tour. In 2016, her performance and business background led to writing her first book Cracking Speech Mate! - 'How to use humour to make you an amazing speaker'. Followed by her book Straight to the Top - 'How to create and deliver a killer elevator pitch'. This year, 2018, she plans to come out with an online course. She loves being in front of a large audience and being in control of their attention. She's actually more comfortable in front of a large crowd than doing networking. But whatever the audience size and difference in energy, she treats her speeches like a conversation. She has always been interested in entertaining people, since a little child. There was a reward for her in making people smile. People give you their attention. Even in job interviews she tried to be cheeky. Not overstepping the line, knowing how far to go. Using humour, as well as self deprecation! Making fun of yourself. Nelson Mandela was a master at that, she says, and made people feel at ease. She wanted to go to drama school, but didn’t get in at the time. She then took a job in the corporate world in IT, starting off in the UK and then Germany. In Germany, she started to see the power of speaking, when she got elected at the age of 22 as a Works Council chair. Could she do the job at her age? She was asked to give a speech at the annual company event in front of the whole company. One of the things that worked was humour and stories. It was a powerful tool. Her speech removed any doubt whether she was fit for the job or not. When she moved back to UK, she switched to HR and Consulting in the corporate world. But she also started stand up comedy and writing. Recently, she channeled her expericiences into writing plays for theatre. Sarah left the corporate world in 2010 for the first time, as she wanted to make a career out of teaching people on how to use humor and do standup comedy. But she didn’t treat it as a business, and ended up going back to corporate. Then about a year ago, she decided she really wanted to make a success out of speaking. The calling was too strong; her love and passion to challenge, entertain and teach people, make them surprise themselves. Her business was still there, but now she would treat it as such, and it made all the difference! For her very first speeches, she used stories from an after-dinner speaking book. She integrated them in her talks and it worked! People resonated with the stories. It's a technique anyone can learn. That and bringing in your personality to stand out! There are different types of speakers: Keynote speaker – Paid speaker, doing a 45 minute talk at a conference, inspire and give action tips Platform speaker – Unpaid speaker, who's intention is to sell a product or service. If done right, it shouldn’t feel like a sales talk. MC (Master of Ceremonie) – Their job is to make the other speakers look good and to keep the event running smoothly. But speaking is also part of any job and role that needs to sell change, needs to engage or make an impact. If you want to grow (a business), you need to be a good storyteller. Her key clients are therefore corporate leaders and entrepreneurs. Humor and storytelling are important to communication and are the secret to business success. And with the advent of Ted Talks, you see how important stories have become in business. There are very good examples of gifted speakers out there now, which has raised the bar. You can't rely on your PowerPoint slides as protective armor, as all it does is undermine you, Sarah says. These days you cannot get to the top of a company and not be a good speaker. She gives an 2 examples of brands that grew enormously, because of storytelling and humour. Dollar Shave Club, started 5 years ago, sold to Unilever 1 billion dollars Squatty Potty grew 400% in retail sales and 600% in online sales. In general, the main steps to approach a talk are: Before looking at the content, the humour or storytelling of your speech, figure out what the goals of the talk are. Confirm your purpose and recognize what your presentation is going to ask your audience to do, say, think. When the problem you are solving and the solution you are offering is clear, try and 'summarize' your talk into one sentence. Brainstorm around that one sentence. What stories can you use to bring that one sentence accross? Look at the gaps are that would hinder the message, think about the uncomfortable parts of your presentation. For the end talk, try and focus on the 3 most important points and link a story around each of those. Use stories like an epiphany bridge and create hooks so that your audience can relate (think of the hero's journey with struggles and wins). Try to include humour for more engagement and entertainment. Include take-away's, as people want to have things to do after. Stand up comedy can be a huge help to become a better speaker, as well. She teaches those techniques to many business people. And at the end of her course her students have to perform 5 minute standup comedy that is self written. She also teaches to no be afraid to have an attitude and a clear opinion, because it can transform a speech. You might not connect to everyone. You don't want that either. But, you have to connect to your 'tribe'. When it comes to failure, something she learned from Neuro Linguistic Programming, is that there is no such thing as failure, only feedback. And everyone in the world is worried about what other people think of them. Very few people are born without worry. She therefore tries to focus on her goals and not give up when things get tough. What makes someone successful in business and life are your will and drive, having a strong mindset. As a female speaker, she says that having worked in HR for so long, she’s seen women not applying for jobs if they are not ticking all the box. The same thing goes for speaking. In general, men are quicker to promote themselves. Women could be encouraged more, for sure. However, woman themselves should become less worried, be more light. Bring in humour to counteract. ENJOY THE INTERVIEW!

As the Founder and CEO of Dollar Shave Club, Michael Dubin has build a billion-dollar grooming empire in under five years. And on top of that, he is one of the funniest CEOs of our time.  Little over a year after starting his company, Mike uploaded a hilarious 90-second video to YouTube. The video went viral, prompting 12,000 orders in a two-day span after it was released, and garnering nearly 24 million views as of the recording of this podcast. Harnessing the reach of their marketing campaign, Michael grew his start-up into an enormously successful grooming empire that recently sold to Unilever for a reported $1 billion. In an intimate fireside discussion, Michael shared his key lessons and reflections with IVY's co-founder Beri Meric. When asked what makes for a viral marketing campaign, Michael responded: “Resonant ideas, based on our shared experience of humanity. Please enjoy our conversation with Mike Dubin. And remember to visit IVY.com to enjoy access to a lifetime of learning, growth, and impact through in-person collaborations with world-class leaders, thinkers, and institutions.

Host Jessica Harris talks with Greg Lambrecht, founder of Coravin. Harris also talks to Michael Dubin, co-founder of Dollar Shave Club.

Michael Dubin & I discussed reunion shows & homosexuality. Because who is more qualified to discuss homosexuality than two old heterosexuals? BLURB. Episode 50, by the way. Blurb.

Venrock partner and early Dollar Shave Club investor David Pakman speaks with CEO Michael Dubin about the acquisition by Unilever and the company's journey to this point. 

If you haven’t heard this interview with Michael before, or even if you have, then you are in for a real treat. While I first aired this interview over two years ago, the incredible knowledge and lessons that Michael shared with me is still something I know all of us can learn from and use in our businesses today. Enjoy! You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: http://bit.ly/1Z9c3Zu

In Traffic with Neil Rubenstein interviews Michael Dubin of Fadeaway Records

In observance of Movember, our beauty and personal care research team is focusing on men's grooming this month and had the opportunity to interview executives at three influential brands in the industry: David Hildrew of Bluebeard's Revenge, Michael Dubin of The Dollar Shave Club and Will King of King of Shaves.  This podcast outlines the major trends that emerged from these interviews.  

New post from eCommerceFuel:Michael Dubin has built a business to over 200,000 customers utilizing, among other things, a viral video on YouTube. Now, after generating ten million dollars in funding, Dollar Shave Club has continued to grow and expand. Michael is on the show to discuss how he was able to come up with the idea behind the […]

Kevin Heupel Debt Relief Expert and Attorney who has been featured in USA Today's Legal Elite and has helped thousands of good people get out of debt.  In March 2013, Kevin recently became a best-selling author on Amazon with his book: Get off the Financial Roller Coaster.”   Sharon Vinderine founder and CEO of Parent Tested Parent Approved.  She has taken a once unknown seal of approval and made it into something that families can turn to when making purchasing decisions for their families.  The PTPA Seal of Approval is one of the most highly recognized family seals in North America and has over 60,000 families as part of its testing community.  Keith Berkshire certified specialist in Family Law at the Berkshire Law Office.  Keith currently serves on the Family Law Practice and Procedure Committee of the State Bar of Arizona, Civil Rules Committee, as well as on the Case Law Update Committee of the State Bar of Arizona. He is practicing in all areas of family law, including complex litigation, and appellate practice   Michael Dubin Founder and CEO of DollarShaveClub.com; a great shave for a few bucks a month.  Michael has spent over 10 years in Media and Digital Marketing. He began his career as an NBC page, moving on to write and produce news at MSNBC.  He left to begin a career in Digital Marketing; first working for a small client services firm in NYC, then moving on to develop custom content for brand advertisers including Gatorade, EA and Reebok on behalf of Time Inc. properties LIFE.com and SI.com.         

Michael Dubin

In our third show of the season, host Mike O'Toole talks to Michael Dubin, CEO, Dollar Shave Club. From a baby shaving a man's head to a machete-wielding CEO dancing with a leaf blower, Michael Dubin's Dollar Shave Club video has reached over 7.3 million views on YouTube. His no-nonsense, tell it like it is, "Our Blades Are F**king Great" approach helped this company go from an unknown startup to an overnight brand success story people can't get enough of.