Tim Brooks Oct 11, 2026
Harry's
The men's shaving category in 2013 was dominated by two brands, each spending heavily to tell men their razor needed more blades, more strips, more engineering. The price of a pack of replacement cartridges had crept up and Harry's looked saw this as an opportunity.
Founded in New York by Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider, Harry's launched in 2013 with a direct-to-consumer subscription model, a clean minimal aesthetic and a simple proposition: a well-made razor at a fair price, delivered to your door. Before taking a single order, they ran a pre-launch referral campaign that generated 100,000 email sign-ups in a week, built on the principle that the more friends you referred, the better the reward.
Fast-forward to 2025, when Harry's unveiled its first major rebrand since launching, updating its logo, packaging, website, and visual identity - as it matured from a disruptive DTC startup into a mainstream grooming brand stocked in major UK retailers.
"Follow the economics" - Someone clever must have coined that phrase once. A pithy statement of the bleedin’ obvious that can keep our wildest flights of fancy in check.
In the end it is an uncontroversial truth that brand growth requires more penetration and more consumption. Doh! It is hard to do this and stay a ‘small’ and feisty. The problem is maintaining the challenger attributes that made you unique and special whilst scaling and broadening the brand appeal.Harry’s is an impressive example of #whatbrandsdo because it made this transition. It adapted whilst keeping the brand fundamentals in place.
Harry’s was born on a wave of disruption – the shaving subscription model – that initially built them (and Dollar Shave). The hype was that technology and changing behaviour would usher in a new way of doing things. FMCG subscription models have largely failed - the cost of acquisition, dropout rates leading to an underwhelming lifetime value, the consumers’ cynicism about it and their desire to try new things all contribute to this.
Harry’s is still with us because it made sure it was more than its route to market. It became a ‘big’ brand because it focused on quality not just price; it built a meaningful brand personality; it worried about consumer needs not digital business models; most importantly it pivoted quickly to be a digital plus retail brand.
@Mark Ritson has always nailed it on the transition from small to big brand success story. Three things he often references: the DTC growth ceiling, DTC is great at first but can limit full scale up; the essential need for meaningful physical availability (as @byron sharp puts it); the need for marketing bothism – traditional and digital marketing; equity and activation etc. approaches. All this is essential, not least to access the light, competitor and non-buyers that are essential to being a big brand.
Strategically or intuitively, Harry’s got this and they got it quickly. They underpinned this with a relentless focus on innovation, quality and brand building. Outcome: Harry’s is a big brand now.
