Dollar Shave Club

Dollar Shave Club is a Venice, California-based company that delivers razors and other personal grooming products to customers by mail. It delivers razor blades on a monthly basis and offers additional grooming products for home delivery.
Dollar Shave Club was founded by Mark Levine and Michael Dubin. The pair met at a party and spoke of their frustrations with the cost of razor blades. With their own money and investments from start-up incubator Science Inc., they began operations in January 2011 and launched their website in April 2011. 
Dollar Shave Club was backed by a variety of venture capitalists. In March 2012, seed investors provided $1 million in funding from groups that included Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Andreessen Horowitz, Shasta Ventures, and others. The same group, joined by Venrock, provided $9.8 million in series A funding in October 2012. A year later, a $12 million series B round was raised led by Venrock, Comcast Ventures, New World Investors and Battery Ventures. Amidst the fundraising announcement, Dollar Shave Club announced it would be expanding its product line to include a dozen other men’s products in 2014. In June 2015, the company secured $75 million in series D funding. On July 19, 2016, Dollar Shave Club was acquired by Unilever for a reported $1 billion in cash.
Dollar Shave Club offers three membership plans, which can be upgraded or downgraded at any time. The membership service first launched March 6, 2012, via a YouTube video that went viral.
The YouTube video attracted an unanticipated amount of traffic, that crashed the company’s server in the first hour. Once Dubin got the server working, he enlisted a team of friends and contractors to help fulfill the 12,000 orders that arrived in the first 48 hours of launching the video.
Since the membership launch, the company has acquired 3.2 million subscribers. Although the company primarily markets its products to men, approximately 20% of its customers are women.