#1 dollar shave video series#

Of all those merchants, Dollar Beard Club is the biggest. The warehouse is home to 1,000 different merchants and 20,000 different SKUs, or unique products. Its northern side is 1409 South Lilac Avenue its southern side is 1489. Stoikos and his team of bearded brothers have indeed turned parody into a multimillion-dollar business.ĭollar Beard Club ships out of the Ingram Micro Commerce and Fulfillment Solutions facility in Bloomington, California, a building so vast that a single address cannot contain it. But a look into the Dollar Beard Club’s books and a visit to its warehouse revealed something perhaps more interesting: that simple model appears to be repeatable. In an era when many businesses still operate on a tried and tested formula of investing in research and development and then paying for advertising blitzes to introduce new products, the Dollar Shave Club challenged the model by building a business with only a basic product and a knack for online video. And a visit to the warehouse? Yeah, that could be arranged too. And when I asked him to prove it, he agreed to open Dollar Beard Club’s books and share most everything - active subscriptions, subscriber churn, revenue - a rare move for startup founders who typically guard their books like state secrets.

#1 dollar shave video series#

But could Dollar Beard Club transform that initial momentum into a viable business? In a series of texts sent to BuzzFeed News over the following months, Stoikos claimed he was doing just that. Two days after dropping the video, Stoikos told BuzzFeed News his company turned its parody into more than $30,000 in recurring monthly subscription revenue. While Dollar Shave Club catered to clean-shaven men, shipping them razors for $1 per month, Stoikos rallied their bristly counterparts, promising a monthly supply of beard oil for the same dollar via a new company called the Dollar Beard Club.Īnd yes, Dollar Beard Club was real - very real. Frame by frame, he parodied the famous introductory video that vaulted Dollar Shave Club into the public consciousness in 2012, and later to a $1 billion sale. Slightly less than a year earlier, Stoikos starred in a video inspired by a viral hit. Its presence meant one thing: The boss was in to visit. They, along and millions of others, knew Stoikos’s beard from YouTube, but spotting it in the wild on a hot May day still caused a stir. The beard - 7 inches long and flush with interlocking blond and brown hairs - inspired nearby workers to stop in their tracks and stare. Amid a sea of packing supplies, ready-to-ship products, and beeping forklifts. The glorious beard growing from Chris Stoikos’s face stood out in the 160,000-square-foot warehouse about an hour’s drive east of LA.