Shaving the Layers off the Dollar Shave Club

The Dollar Shave Club (see www.dollarshaveclub.com) claims to be a cost-effective alternative to retail and/or other etail options for buying razor blades and shaving cream.  

The company has generated a fair amount of social media buzz and traffic over the past couple years, thanks to its aggressive approach to establishing an offbeat online identity.

We’re here to dissect the hype…  To crystallize our misgivings, we’ve generated the “Top 5 Reasons to think about before jumping on to the Dollar Shave Club wagon.”

5.  Smug, smarmy and smirky tone of the site’s writing.  If we want to read annoying, consciously styled casual hipness, we’ll find a 20-something wannabe screenwriter in some coffee shop somewhere.  And we won’t buy razor blades from him.

4.  Smugger, smarmier and smirkier tone of the site’s video.  If we want to see some obnoxious, self-satisfied entrepreneur doing a bad imitation of a failed comic doing dialogue from a Jud Apatow flick, we’ll ... um, well, we’ll watch that video on the home page again.  But we won’t buy razor blades from that guy either.

3.  It’s a BS gimmick?  Read through the site carefully, and you’ll find that it’s really just selling subscriptions to an average e-commerce experience.  Some examples of needing to go to the small print to get the whole story: (a) The dollar-a-month teaser relies either on too few shaves per month or too many shaves per cartridge; (b) The headliner low prices only let you shave with the cheap, inferior blade.  We could go on, but won’t – suffice it to say that those of you old enough to remember the Columbia Record and Tape Club should feel your Spidey Sense tingle.

2.  Insult to injury.  Not only is this a snow job disguised as shaving cream, but the company has the nerve to design and post its “Chairman’s BS-Free Seal” on the site.  Adding BS to BS gets you knee-deep in, that’s right, BS – real fast.

1.  The real story.  As you dig into the Dollar Shave Club site, you get a creeping feeling that the real goal – and the real profit driver – is to gather, use and sell all the subscribers’ personal information.  To confirm this suspicion, and simultaneously scare the crap out of yourself, try eyeballing www.dollarshaveclub.com/privacy-policy.  If that doesn’t send you running for the sink to wash your hands like you just shook with Anthony Weiner, we don’t know what will….

Shave honest, ManPossible denizens!

by ManPossible