Dollar Shave Club - kicking in the rotten door of the dumbest oligopoly

The double-edge safety razor seemed like a humorous devolution to me. Purchasing the first pack of replacement razors for your Gillette or Schick shaving product is a coming-of-age event for any young man, when he realizes life is going to be expensive. I actually took part in this system of obvious rent-seeking for a few years before I applied my interest in economics and realized that if there was competition in shaving, prices would fall. Competition in the cartridge razor market is stymied by proprietary cartridge connections, but for my luck the safety blade market is humming at something dramatically closer to a competitive equilibrium. So I returned to the shaving technology of fifty years ago and felt, in net, quite advanced for the change.

It never once occurred to me, though, that there is a massive pile of money to be made in taking down the oligopoly that exists in shaving.

Your handsome-ass grandfather had one blade. And polio.

It seems obvious now. For how much I do like my safety razor, it's not exactly user-friendly. As my dad discovered when I got him one for Father's Day, you can cut pretty sizable gashes in your face with these things. There's sort of a trick to using one effectively. Also, you have to replace the actual razor itself - which involves taking an unbelievably sharp sliver of steel out of a little paper wrapper and dropping it into place. I haven't cut myself yet doing it, but I imagine when I do it's going to be the World Series of cursing.

However, there is absolutely nothing special about cartridge razors that would stop a competitor from jumping in. The biggest cost to switching is the original razor handle, and if a startup were to, say, sell a subscription service to help subsidize that, they could easily break in. So what is needed is a competitor to bring Schumpeter-esque destruction upon the big razor companies. They'll need to sell an effectively designed cartridge razor, be low in cost, effectively market to young men, and preferably operate outside of the normal channels of distribution.

I bring you Dollar Shave Club. I'm not sure if I'll sign up - I'm torn, as I do sort of miss cartridge shaving, but I still have a ton (tonnnn) of safety razors left. But I do like what these guys are doing. So go watch their video, it's pretty funny.