Our Blades Are F***ing Great
Michael Dubin walked through a warehouse for 90 seconds, told you the razors were great, and made fun of Gillette. The video reportedly cost $4,500 and ended in a $1B Unilever acquisition five years later.
The story
On March 6, 2012, an unknown direct-to-consumer razor startup uploaded a 90-second YouTube video of its founder, Michael Dubin, walking through a warehouse, deadpanning jokes about Gillette's bloated product line, and pitching $1 razors delivered to your door. Production cost: around $4,500. By the end of day one, the site had 12,000 orders and the servers had crashed. The video has now passed 28 million views. Five years later, Unilever bought Dollar Shave Club for $1 billion in cash. The script — and Dubin's delivery — is studied in every D2C playbook as the moment a category was reframed: razors weren't a precision-engineering arms race anymore, they were a subscription nuisance with a markup problem. Gillette has been losing share ever since.
Why it worked
It named the customer's actual frustration (razor prices) in the customer's actual voice (irreverent, profane, blunt) and offered the obvious fix.
Takeaway for marketers
If your product is a reaction to a category's BS, lead the ad with the BS, not the product.