Exit Strategy S1:E5 // Paul Tran - How Manscaped Created a Nine-Figure Business

Welcome to episode 5 of The Exit Strategy Podcast. I'm here with Paul Tran. Paul, you're the CEO and founder of Manscaped. Manscaped, you know, Native started in 2015. Manscaped started around then. Manscaped sells products that helps men groom their groins. Is that right?

That's, that's perfectly right. There was white space.

And some of the products that you sell, just so people have clarity, are the Lawn Mower, which helps men trim their pubes, deodorant for your balls, you know, like a foot and a foot odor product as well. What's the foot odor product called?

It's called the Foot Duster.

It's called the Foot Duster. Okay. And you guys have a really cheeky sense of humor. You know, when people go on to Manscaped or look at Manscaped's past, You know, I've read some of your taglines. They're fantastic. One is— I remember one because I was reading it. It's called— it says, when you trim the hedges, the tree stands taller. Who came up with that?

I mean, I mean, that's true, right?

That's absolutely true. Who came up with that tagline?

You know, we have a— we have a really talented marketing team, you know, where we're just You know, it evolved as, um, I can't remember where exactly where that tagline came from, but, um, you know, we just have a really talented marketing team that, that comes up with these, um, these really catchy sayings all the time.

Uh, yeah, that's certainly really catchy. Um, you know, one of the questions I was thinking about when I was doing some research about Manscaped is how often are men trimming their hedges? Do you guys have any idea? Do you guys like survey your customers about that kind of information, or what's—

we do survey our customers, and, um, it's, it's actually, it's— we, we— it turned out to be much more frequent than we thought. Um, a lot of men, or, you know, of course in anything there's a bell curve, right? Um, sure. Where the bell curve, the highest frequency is around once a week to, to once every 14, 14 days. So it's be— it's between You know, 7 and 14 days is when somebody maintenance their bush.

And what's the other end of the bell curve? Is the other end once every like 5 years?

The other end, of course, is, you know, it follows— also follows the age gap, right? When you're much older, less incentivized to do it, so it's like never, right? So that's the other side of the bell curve.

Gotcha. Yeah. And that, look, I guess who are the, who's buying, who are buying these products? Is it, is it men who are like, hey, I want to make myself look better and my tree to stand taller? Or is it women who are like, I'm tired of looking at my husband or boyfriend or partners looking like this. And so he needs to trim.

Well, we actually have a pretty eclectic mix between men and women. During the holidays, we open marketing much more to women, so we have more women customers than the rest of the year. But really, the truth is that if you haven't groomed down there, you don't know what it feels like. After you've groomed down there, you feel it's refreshing. So we've seen that men, that actually start, like, really enjoy it. You know, it's like, um, it's like, you know, we think we got— when your hair is really long, you know, and then, and then you finally cut your hair, it feels really like— it feels really relaxing, really cool. Um, and that— and I think men start— they're starting to enjoy that. Um, you know, it's— it feels fresher, it's not as damp. Um, so I, I think you start getting used to that feeling and it becomes just a normal thing.

Yeah. Yeah, you're right about a lot of that. I know, like, when I shave sometimes, or at least get a barber to cut my beard afterwards, I just feel like I'm a new human being and feel great. I don't know what it is about that. Like, I still don't understand what, like, what psychological impact that is where I'm like, okay, this guy has just cut my beard. It looks good. But now I feel like I'm a new— I'm a newly reborn person.

Yeah, it's just, and that's what we strive for. I mean, as the essence of the company, at the end of the day, we just want you to feel better. Like the way that we think about it is life is pretty rough already. There's so much to do. There's so many responsibilities. We just want to make your life just a little more enjoyable. And that's truly, at the end of the day, that's our mission. Yeah.

And so there's a subscription element to the business as well. Aside from like, I imagine like the hero product that you guys have is the lawn mower, like what trims hedges. Is that right?

Absolutely. So, I mean, if you think about it, the way I like to explain it is that when you look at the female body, you realize you start from head to toe, you're analyzing, right? You realize that there's a product and a brand for every single female care and need you can think of. When you go to the male body, you switch your attention to the male body, you start with your head. You got Gillette, Dollar Shave Club, your Harry's. You go down to the torso, you got Native, you got Old Spice. When you get down to the groin, there's nobody playing in the groin. That is total empty white space. We got lucky and fortunate and we recognized that 3 years ago. And we were able to capitalize on that. We were able to attain an amazing name. So Manscaped, you know, right now, I mean, we define the category of manscaping, right? So that Manscaped defines that category. And we just, we totally own this category. And, you know, we, and what's really important for us is to create the best products. Like where the way that we think about our mission and our mandate is that we, we don't optimize for anything other than quality. So we're not optimizing for price. We're not the cheapest products, we are the best products. Um, so that, that's, that's kind of how— because there's a lot of products out there, right? I mean, from everything from the low end to high end, but we, what we want to focus on is creating the absolute best products. Um, and that starts with our lawnmower.

So talking about the Lawn Mower, which is like a trimmer for your pubes, really, and a fantastic name, you know, would love to delve more into the name of Manscaped and Lawn Mower in a minute. But like, you know, you're on the Lawn Mower 3.0. What did— like, how did you guys decide what went from Lawn Mower 2.0 to 3.0? And what, what, like, what, what are you going to put in Lawn Mower 4.0? Like, is that a, is that a, you know, is there customer feedback involved in that? Is there like, what's going on for you guys to make those types of decisions?

Absolutely. So we have a Facebook group, and I want to plug it here. It's the Facebook Ballers group, um, and it's a VIP group and it's invite only. You have to, you know, ask to join. Um, but the— this group is for our closest, um, best customers that are interactive with us. And when I say best, it's not on a monetary value, like how much you buy. It's just, you know, it's just people that like the brand that want to interact with myself and our executive team and our product development team. And so we have, I think, about close to 2,000 or 3,000 people in there that are really interactive, that they love to test products. So we have a great group of core, you know, Manscaped fans that we can test new products. But one of the biggest things that we do is, you know, our blade has what we call SkinSafe technology, and SkinSafe makes it really difficult for you to, excuse my French, nick your balls, right? Um, because if, if you've ever nicked yourself down there, it is the most horrible feeling. You know that area?

I think that's what everyone is afraid of before they start manscaping, is like, what happens if I mess this up?

That is the number one fear, and I can tell you it bleeds a lot. You know, it expands, it retracts, it hurts, it hurts all day. You know, so it's a real pain point. So our blades, we— it's the only blade out there specifically engineered to trim your groin because it's not like any other area of your face, right? Like if you talk about your beard, it's pretty taut. Your face is really taut. It's really easy to trim, right? This is loose skin with hair on it. So it's not the same experience as trimming your beard. It's much more difficult. So Going back to your, to your, to your question. Now, how do we determine the difference between the 2.0 and the 3.0? It's just innovating, you know, in the product pipeline, you're, it might take like a year to 18 months to engineer a great product. So we have multiple products lined up, like we're designing the 4.0 at the same time we're designing the 5.0 and we're putting thought into the 6.0 because we're, we're a hardware company in addition to soft goods, right? So we have our own R&D lab that we built out that does all the soft goods, like all the formulations, you know, the ball deodorant and everything else that we're gonna get into. But on a hardware side, we have our own in-house industrial designers, material experts, and engineers that design these and design and think through the problems that you have. So, you know, when we developed the 2.0, that was really our first mass product. With SkinSafe. And then the 3.0 was an evolution of the 2.0. You know, it had a light in there because we realized like, even if your bathroom is really lit, you know, there are shadows, you know? So like the light, it seems like, oh, we thought about it. Is it a gimmick? You know, if we put a light on there, would it be deemed as a gimmick? And then we actually put a light on a prototype. Like, oh, this is actually really useful because like you can, because you need to see down there. You know, like, it's not the same experience because you, you know, you got to see down there. So putting a light on there made it into the 3.0. The 4.0, I don't want to talk about all the different features, but we're really innovating on this experience. And we don't think that there's many companies that really looked at groin trimming and how to innovate in that area while making it safe easy and enjoyable.

And so going back to this Facebook group, are you going to like reach out to the Facebook group and say, hey guys, we have the 4.0, does anyone want to try a couple samples and give us your feedback before we finalize this production? Is that how it works?

Or like, you know, before that works all the time? Um, so that, that is, that cycle is much more frequent, um, with, with our soft goods products. So, um, you know, all of our, um, you know ball deodorant and all the products that we're testing in the pipeline now. That is, that goes out, that gets tested internally, you know, goes all through all the stability testing. And all of the employees use it. And then we expand it out to our VIP ballers group.

And then talk to me a little bit about R&D. It's really amazing that you sort of have that R&D in-house as an independent company. We never had that as Native as an independent company. And even once we joined Procter Gamble, like, We did some R&D internally, but most of the R&D we did like with third-party manufacturers. How big is this R&D group? I haven't heard of like a startup sort of thinking about R&D as like, you know, early on or within the first 5 years of their existence like you guys are doing. How big is that R&D group?

So that goes back to a firm belief of mine. You know, I've always kind of thought I always, I have I always thought it was really important not only to go wide, but to also go deep. And what that means is you gotta know a lot of different things, but you just can't be a— what was there? There's a saying, what was the saying? You know, a jack of all trades, but master of none. I don't think an entrepreneur can be like that. I think to be really successful, you not only have to go wide, but you also have to go deep. You gotta be a master of a lot of things. So with that belief, you know, we always, we made sure that everything was done in-house. Like we never hired an agency and we don't use any agencies for anything. All video production is done in-house. All media buying is done in-house. R&D is done in-house. Product development. Oh my God.

So no agencies. How, so look, the technology that you guys build out, you guys have your own developers. So when you guys launch a TV commercial, you have your own in-house production agency make it, you have your own in-house creative agency decide what it is, and then your own in-house like agency or your own in-house employees, um, cut it up as well and edit.

That's insane.

How big is the entire team then?

Um, right now we're seeing about 72 employees. So we're not that big.

Okay. Yeah, that is not that big. Uh, and pretty amazing based on like the amount of content that I see coming out of landscape. So you guys are certainly productive at creating content. And when did you guys hire your first R&D employee then?

Well, I mean, just like, like many other startups in the CPG space, you know, we use contract manufacturers. So, you know, we use a third-party lab to create our first products. But I think in about, about a year, probably 14 months ago, when we started really building out our own R&D lab. Wow. And hired our first R&D research chemist. And, you know, it was— we knew that we had to retain this knowledge and really understand it, you know, from top down. So having in-house, we got to iterate very quickly. We didn't like this, let's change it. And so we're like, what would take, you know, what would take weeks from working with a lab, 'Cause you know, we worked with labs before. You gotta send them, you know, send them a brief, they send you samples. Sure. And then you send them back and forth. It just, the cycles are just way too long, right? Yeah. So for us having a team that we can work with hand in hand is, it was just really accelerated that.

Gotcha. Okay, let's start talking a little bit more about like the early days of Manscaped. So before this R&D team exists, before you guys are sort of developing Lawn Mower 4.0, You know, you guys are working on the original products. Manscaped gets on Shark Tank at some point and at some point, like, you know, you're on Shark Tank, you're working on the original marketing for the, for the, for the company. Is— do you guys call the first— do you guys call the first product you released a Lawn Mower 1.0?

It was called the Lawn Mower.

Yeah, it was called Lawn Mower. Okay. Gotcha.

Yeah.

And like, how do you guys— yeah. Tell me a little bit more about how this marketing strategy developed, because certainly like You know, I think everyone is familiar with the Dollar Shave Club, like, like commercial or video, initial video that really launched that brand and how spectacularly successful it was. You know how Michael Dubin saying you don't need Roger Federer to endorse your razor blade. Why are you paying Roger Federer to shave? How did you guys get started in terms of your marketing strategy?

So, you know, we first started to be we knew that this is something that was good for men, right? It helped with being, you know, it's hygienic and it's cleanliness, right?

Yeah.

So we started off with messaging in that way. Like, dudes, you guys should do this because it's good for you. You know, you'll feel better. And none of that, none of that resonated, right?

How long did you try that type of marketing for that was like more serious and less cheeky?

Probably for 3 months.

And how much money did you have to spend in those 3 months to be like, this isn't working out? If you had to ballpark it, what is it, $10,000 or $100,000?

No, I think we spent probably $50,000 on marketing to realize that that didn't work.

And then, yeah. So then tell me about the evolution. Then what happened?

Yeah. So then, you know, Being scientific, no, it just didn't gravitate to anyone, you know. So then we said, we just, we basically changed gears and said, you know, we knew that there was a market for this and there was white space. We knew that we had to crack it and figure out how to communicate with men because communicating, like, in my past, I've had startups that focus primarily on women in skincare, right? And and perfumes and colognes and, you know, even in SaaS and other things, right? But we needed to understand that we had to get to that tipping point of understanding how to communicate with men in this way. And we realized that, you know, dudes aren't talking about this. Like, they don't stand around the water cooler and be like, hey, your hair looks so great today. What'd you use? Was it a volumizer? Like, what kind of conditioner are you using? Dudes don't do that. right?

Yeah.

Um, they don't talk about skincare, they don't talk about deodorants or hygiene, right? Um, but they'll talk about funny things, right? Things that were hilarious, that, um, that, um, entertains them. So then we started creating our first video. I remember, um, was a video because it was towards the end of the year and we had produced this video of, uh, of Santa Claus trimming. So, um, it was in— it was, it was in an apartment, and, uh, Ryan Fiore, our, our VP of marketing, was the one that actually dressed up as Santa. And he's got his Santa pants down on his ankles, and the camera is just panning, and it looks like snow falling down, right? And then as you pan out, you see Santa's legs, and that's— as it's snowing, you hear this like buzzing sound I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that— so you're like, oh, it's kind of snowing indoors because it was like in inside, in inside on a house. So as you're, you know, and then we had another person was like, um, uh, Catherine was, was sprinkling, um, you know, the— these fake white hairs that are on onto the ground. And we were, we were pulling back the camera that was panning back and panning out. You can see Santa's legs. So that was the— that was kind of the first video that we, that we shot.

That was the first time you moved from like— was that the first like move you had towards the cheeky sense of humor from being serious about like, hey, this is good for you, it's going to make you feel better?

Yeah, that was, that was the first one.

Okay. Let me talk a little bit more about the $50,000 you spent where that didn't work well. Where did you end up spending that $50,000 over those like 3 months to be like, let's test to see if this, you know, if this concept has any legs? Because, you know, you have a product that, you know, consumers want. You're trying to find the right marketing channels and the right marketing, you know, messaging to go out with that. That marketing messaging is what's failing. Where did you spend that $50,000?

Look, I think, I think this answer is going to be kind of a de facto answer across many, many startups, especially in the early days. You spend it on Facebook, you spend it on Google. And that is just the reality. Yeah. But what I do want to say about that is like all you entrepreneurs out there, don't get a false sense of confidence that you are, your cap is so low, that you're doing so well on Facebook, that this is going to scale infinitely. You know, because you start running those numbers, right? You're like on Facebook, like, oh man, my cap is $20. Oh man, if I dump $200 million into marketing, I would make this much.

Yes. It doesn't work that way.

It doesn't work that way. There is a Facebook and a Google wall, and I'll use a different, Facebook ceiling. You're going to hit that ceiling and it's going to hurt. And a lot of entrepreneurs need to realize that early on. We were really fortunate that we realized that early on. 'Cause you gotta think about it, Facebook is really, really good at targeting. I mean, Facebook and Google, these guys are data powerhouses. They know how to target and find the right buyers for you. But there's, if your market, if your total addressable market is this big, right? You're gonna hit that ceiling pretty quickly. You know, so you have to really think about how to broaden your product appeal and to make sure that you are addressing a very large total addressable market. Like your addressable market, like eventually you're going to have to market to men or women or both. Like if you're still doing like fine-tuned targeting, you know, lookalikes, and you're trying to extract every value, that's, you can't scale it.

I think that, look, what you said definitely has a ton of, is absolutely correct. Like at Native, you know, we saw a $2 CAC in 2015. A $4 CAC in 2016, a $6.50 CAC in 2017. So one, even looking at that $2 CAC, it basically more than tripled over the course of 2 years. But— and we saw those like there were multiple ceilings we got to. There was a ceiling at $200,000. There was a ceiling at $500,000. There was a much denser ceiling at $1 million. And trying to push against those ceilings took a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of like right messaging. And you're absolutely right from an audience targeting perspective as well, like lookalike audiences. Absolutely crushed it for us for a really long period of time until we hit one of those ceilings. Like, you know, we used to look like audience of 1%, which looked like, you know, 2 million people. And then, you know, you start expanding that to 2% and 3%, and then all of a sudden lookalikes don't work anymore. And then at some point you're just like, I'm targeting all women. And then you're like, I'm targeting all humans that exist on Earth now. Because in reality, like, not everyone is going to buy something when they see a Facebook ad, right? Like, you know, Facebook does a great job of segmenting their audiences. They're like, you know, they have— let's say there's— they have 300 million people in the United States. Something like 80% of the people that are on Facebook generally won't click ads and make a purchase from it. And so everybody is competing for those 20% of people who do buy things online. And so you're— even if your total addressable market is this big, in reality online it's this big because, you know, there's just fewer people buying things that are online.

Absolutely. Absolutely. You got to get to— if you want to build a truly scalable business, you got to eventually figure out how to get off of platforms. You got to be able to get off of online. I mean, online should— is always a part of your marketing mix, your marketing strategy, right? But it should never be 100%. Like, as soon as you can, you know, you gotta, you gotta go through withdrawal symptoms of getting off platforms, but you gotta start diversifying your, your, your, your, your marketing, or it's just never going to scale. Like, I mean, for us, we're everywhere now. We have figured out how to, and this is where we're very fortunate, we have a really talented marketing team, you know, but we got off of Facebook and Google probably last year. And when I say off, I mean, we really diversified from it. One of our big channels is still YouTube, right? Because a lot of people spend their time there. We're one of the biggest spenders on Hulu, right? We have a massive TV budget. Um, UFC sponsorship. I mean, we sponsor the UFC, um, where we haven't really announced it yet, but we're going to be the one of the exclusive sponsors of the San Francisco 49ers.

Um, you know, so what does that mean, uh, if you're an exclusive sponsor for the 49ers? What does that mean?

That means that I think that next year when you go to Levi's Stadium and you go into any of the bathrooms, you're going to see our signage on top of all the urinals. Wow. That's going to be, I mean, the crazy thing is that's what we, that's, those are some things we cracked, right? It's like, yeah. How many, how many companies out there can actually buy that ad unit? Right? Like, like who's going to buy that ad unit? Like Apple's not going to buy ad unit on top of urinal, right? But it fits so well for us and it fits our cheeky tone that it, that it works for us. Right? So like, what are you doing right there? You're like, you're thinking about it, right? So, you know, when we have— when you see an ad that says, has a finger point down with the Trevor and says, "Got Bush," you're like, hmm, you know, you're standing right there. You can kind of evaluate and think about that.

Okay, I want to talk much more about this. I want to talk a little bit about the past as well. But before we get off this topic, how much— ballpark the cost to me for San Francisco 49ers sponsorship? Is it 6 figures or 7 figures or 5 figures?

Oh, it's definitely not 5 figures.

Yeah, I know.

It's—

I can't imagine it's 5 figures. So give me a ballpark because, you know, like, let me give you a couple of examples. You know, we interviewed Kara from Hintwater like a couple of weeks ago, and she told— she told me how she bought a Super Bowl commercial for under $1 million. We interviewed Andrew, who's the CEO of this company called Hims, which is like a, you know, men's sexual wellness company. And he bought urinals over the, you know, over Giants Stadium. Give me an idea of what, like, just ballpark the cost for me. You don't need to give me the exact number. Is it high six figures, low six figures, mid-six figures? Is it seven figures? Give me some. You know, at Native, we were running, you know, a very lean budget. But by the end, by the time we were, you know, doing over $100 million, we had a pretty sizable marketing budget. We were spending money on TV ads. On billboards in New York City. We spent— we're going to spend $1 million in 2020, or we were going to before COVID really hit on billboard— I'm sorry, on subway ads in New York City in 2020. And, you know, that included like station takeovers, which cost like a low, very low six figures. And that included some, you know, photos in subway trains, which cost like about $40,000. What does a 49ers exclusive sponsorship get you? Are you going to go— are you going to— do you have a booth? Are you going to go to games? Give me the price, or give me a ballpark of the price.

I would say it's, you know, it's in the six figures. Not to the seven figures yet, but definitely in the six figures.

Okay, and does it include a bunch of tickets, or am I going to see you at a bunch of 49ers games?

Yeah, I mean, the 49ers are just a phenomenal team. Management-wise, they're so awesome. We got to go to the Super Bowl with them. We were at the NFC playoffs in their box. It was amazing. Yeah, that would be fantastic.

Okay, let's go. Let's rewind a little bit and go back to the Santa Claus commercial. So you guys have, you know, it's been 3 months. The seriousness, it wasn't working. You were spending on Facebook and Google, burned $50,000, didn't love what happened. You've sort of pivoted now. You're running this Santa Claus commercial or like you've got the Santa Claus video. What do you do with it? You're like, you know, it's really funny. It's cheeky. It's super interesting, but it's time relevant because it's winter. Nobody's ever heard of Santa Claus. Trimming his pubes, but that's really funny. Uh, what hap— what do you do with that commercial? And when do you realize that cheeky sense of humor makes sense?

So I would, I would answer that in, in two parts. So the, the first, the first part is, um, once again, you run it on Facebook and Google, right? That's, that's the first thing. So you, so you, you run it on, you, you run it on, on Facebook, you run on YouTube, And what you're tracking for at that time is, how much am I paying per CPM and per click? Right? What is it costing me to deliver traffic to the website?

Yeah.

Right? And then when they get to the website, then now you have to make sure that you're really observant and performing a lot of conversion rate optimization, right? You gotta make sure that that lead closes when they get to the site. Where you present them with the right offer. So the first part of me answering your question is, yeah, we got that video, we're testing, we're running it on Facebook, we're running it on YouTube, and we're tracking how much it's costing us. And remember, at that time we weren't broad yet. We're still like, okay, we're gonna advertise to men that's 18 to 25. It's gonna run this video with this call to action. And then there's, We're running 35 to 40 with this video or this different call to action, and then it's all gonna drive to the website. So then, you know, then of course you're calculating, oh wait, what are my CPMs? What are my CPAs? And more important, my CPCs. And then when they get to the site, that's when you really start doing a lot of work, like offer testing. Like what do I need to offer? What do I need to say? Because early days, really, really early days, what you're looking for is— what you're looking for are signals, right? And you have to be really in tune with your entire marketing strategy to understand these signals, right? And what I mean by signals is early on I set up 3 pillars of what is important to our male audience. And this is very early on, right? It was, you know, when you trim the bush, the tree stands taller. That was an important motivation factor for them. Use the right tools for the job. So if you're going to do this, don't hurt yourself. That was a really important marketing message that really got them, that really got you to understand it. So we distilled down this really big concept of, "Hey guys, don't cut yourself," because that's crude to say. So it really just became, you know, use the right tools for the job, right? So when you trim the hedges, the tree stands taller, it tells you, okay, well then that works, right? You kind of equate and you kind of understand that there's a benefit, right? Outside of you just feeling good. Because for us, we knew that ultimately we wanted to be a much bigger brand that encompasses, you know, masculinity and empowerment for men. We didn't want to just be a growing business. That was never our intention. We wanted to empower men, but to get there, we had to figure out what men were receptive to. So that's where that, you know, if you trim the bushes, the tree stands taller. Men got that right away. They got why they should do that and how they would receive this power. It's not this power, but receive this feeling of empowerment, right? And then after that, it was all about use the right tools for the job, because don't cut yourself, don't hurt yourself. But that was the big learning that cost probably $200,000, quarter of a million, to really learn. And it's really kind of philosophical when you talk about marketing in this way, But to spend that much money just to learn these two key things, and most people, a lot of people that are not marketers, they're not really in tune with their audience, that might just pass them. They'll think, "Oh, I didn't really get that." But we tested a lot of marketing message and realized that those two things combined together really resonated, really got men to understand why you should do this, the need, and why you should use dedicated tools that we created to solve this problem. So I think any startup trying to build a brand and not just like a SaaS platform where you're just selling utility, right? Your SaaS platform, you're selling utility. This, you know, we solve your problem like this, right? But to really build a brand in the CPG, a highly competitive CPG space, you have to distill your marketing message to be so so fine-tuned that it really resonates with a broad audience.

So you tested, can you give me the examples of, so the two that worked were, you know, tree stands taller, use the right tools for the job. What were some of the marketing messages you thought might work and ended up not working? Do you remember any of those?

I can't remember, there were so many. We had like, we had a bunch that there was, I think it was like 10 on that made it to the shortlist. Of, you know, it was like, you know, feel fresher or something like that, right? Was one of them. You know, make sure you're clean and ready all the time. And it was a bunch of different along that vein, but it just didn't resonate. You know, it was just like, it just didn't click with dudes. And that's what you're searching for as marketers. Trying to market any product, that's what you're searching for. You're searching for the— with this, how to sell your product in one simple statement to under— for your audience understands it and sees the need instantly.

Yeah. So you spent $200,000 sort of testing that messaging on Facebook and Google, you know? Yeah. I really liked what you said earlier, which was, uh, once you get people to your website, you have to like optimize offers as well. I feel like too often people are like, great, what is my CPA? And my CPA is what is— how is my— how good is my Facebook ad? And what they don't look at is how good is my landing page? Am I convincing people once they get to my landing page that they should buy this product, that it's a good value, and that they should buy it now and not 2 weeks from now? And I feel like, you know, those are two sides of the same coin and both are going to dramatically impact CPA, right? Like you can say, hey, Tree Stands Taller, on your Facebook ad and like, you know, the flip side of that coin, the landing page can be use the right tools for the job. But if the landing page is like buy this trimmer because, you know, your balls aren't the same as your face, it could be a very different type of CPA.

Yeah, I think a lot of entrepreneurs and it's that— see, that's, that's where I go back to, you know, it's, it's difficult to it's difficult to hire an agency unless you got a lot of money, right? Unless you're venture funded, and that, you know, we weren't at that time. And so it wasn't, unless you had a lot of money, you wouldn't be able to buy enough time of an agency to actually come up with these things. You know, to, so if you're an entrepreneur and you think you have a really phenomenal product, You spent years building this product. I would say, take that leap. Like, don't be shy because in my core, like half of my career, I was a technologist. Like I didn't do CPG. You know, I wasn't a branding guy. I wasn't a marketer. I was a technologist. I built SaaS platforms and software. So I would say that, don't be shy, take that risk and do the marketing yourself because you're the only one that really understands the value of your product. Like to try to communicate that with an agency. And it's, it's going to, it's going to, it's really, really hit or miss unless you've got a lot of money and you're paying for a lot of their time. It just, it just, I have seen it not work out very well.

I couldn't agree more. When we were, when Native was growing the entire time we were an independent company, I ran all paid ads. After we sold the business, I still ran paid ads until probably like 6 months ago. Or something to that effect, or like, you know, maybe 8 months ago at this point, because I was just like, this is the backbone of the business. This is how we're growing. This is one of the reasons we're growing very quickly. And I don't want to outsource that to somebody else who, you know, by necessity, like, you know, is an agency by definition. And there will be agency costs as a result of that. They won't care as much. They don't care about the business. They won't be looking at the metrics as quickly as I am or as frequently as I am, and they won't be iterating on different tests on messages. Like if this is a skill that I have, if this is a skill that's important to the company, I should get good at this skill, or I should at least understand this skill. Um, and so like, you know, one of the things that you mentioned was you need a lot of money in order to hire these agencies in order to like, you know, to get them to do good work. Uh, going back to what you guys did, you guys spent $50,000 and it didn't really work out with the serious messaging, $200,000 and you realized what messaging did work. How were you able to afford this stuff? Because early on you were bootstrapped.

Yeah, I mean, we were bootstrapped for, and we grew organically for a very, very long time. And how we were, you know, through prior successes, you know, you gotta gamble and reinvest. You know, I would think that's the best way to, to talk about. And, you know, fundraising and, and, and spending investor dollars, it has its, it has its price. There's, there is a, there is a cost to that, right? Um, and I think, I think very often that, um, gets overshadowed by the glitz and glamour of fundraising and closing around. Um, and that's where I would, I would advise entrepreneurs that, you know, closing, because right now when you read the news, right, like every close is around and everyone's cheering. There's a lot of PR around it. It's like, dude, that's just the beginning. Like, you don't know how much those investors are going to be on your ass all the time. Um, you know how to spend that money. And then you get into a point where, um, you're starting to spend frivolously. You know, it's like, I guarantee you, if we had $1 million in the bank, we wouldn't have spent $200,000. We would've spent half a million testing.

Yeah.

Right. You, so I think it's, it's a cyclical trap to raise money way too early. Um, because number one, that's when you lose the most amount of the most of your company, right. It's early on.

Most dilution.

Yeah. The most amount of dilution. You look back and you're like, oh my God, that was crazy. Right. But then, but then like it makes you, it makes you not as strict with yourself and with your budget.

Absolutely. I couldn't agree more with all of that. You know, we raised like $50,000 and it was a great sign that we were onto a successful business. We raised that at Native. We raised $50,000 at like a $5 million valuation, probably 4 months into the business, and then another $250K maybe within the first year. And those were, you know, the reason that I did that early on, the business was working. I wasn't like, in reality, we didn't even need that $250K. I was just like, I want to make sure that there's external validation that what I'm doing here is right. I think that was the primary reason. And the secondary reason was that I was like, I'm in San Francisco and this is what everyone here does. Everyone raises money as a sign of success. There's this great tweet I saw. I don't remember who tweeted it. Someone's like, raise $10 million and you get invited to every party in San Francisco. Sell your business and make $10 million. Crickets. Like, people somehow celebrate the fundraising more than they do actually the successful exits, which doesn't make any sense. What scale were you at when you did raise your first few checks? And, you know, I want to make sure there's some disclosure here. I was one of those checks at some point. What scale were you at when you raised those first few checks?

Well, those first few checks, we— I mean, we were We were beyond the 8 figures, right? By the time we raised those, those first few checks and they were—

When you say you were beyond 8 figures, you mean you were like north of $10 million, not north of $100 million?

Correct.

Okay.

Correct. Yeah. Um, and those, and those few checks, the, you know, the impetus behind those was to bring on talent like yourself, right? I mean, we, we, we called it a, a Sweetheart round, or sweetheart note, because we wanted to bring on amazing talent. So there weren't any VCs in that note. It was, it was everyone that was pretty much hand-selected from a group of friends, you know, so like, like yourself, like Nick from Thrive, and like from this amazing individuals that could really contribute to, to the business that can have the experience. And that we wanted to actually call and talk to you, you know, like, we'll call, I'll call you when you're in China and we'll talk about things, you know? So, you know, so that was the reason why we raised and it wasn't because of need.

And has that been helpful? You know, we raised money, we raised $500,000 at Native, about half the investors I would say were really helpful people that I could call and be like, "Hey, this is a problem I'm having. Have you had it before?" You know, we— like, Nick was the first episode of this podcast. He actually helped me with a bunch of trademark stuff, or he at least made me think about trademark stuff early on. There were— there was a— one of our investors was an executive at Facebook who was really helpful at, like, helping us just get access to the right people at Facebook that we needed. Another was just, like, a calming voice who, you know, was a VC and had sort of seen a bunch of things happen in San Francisco, and so was like, like when I called him up, he's like, his name's Paul Ferris from Azure. And he's like, hey, Moise, this is how to think about things. You're panicking too much. Have the investors that you sort of let in, those sweethearts, have those sweethearts been helpful?

I was, yeah, absolutely. And I think you nailed it on the head with about 50%. It's like about even, even when you hand-select these guys, this group of investors, everyone's got their own lives, right? Everyone has their own focus. So of everyone you hand select, only 50% will be really valuable. So imagine if you don't hand select them and it's just like a group of a bunch of different people, like the value out of that will be dramatically lower. Right. So, um, yeah, 50% I can call anytime. And, and I, I want to say this, you know, you got to manage expectations, right? Everyone's got their own lives. Everyone's got their own jobs, right? Just because they invest in your company doesn't mean that you have, you know, 10 hours a week of their time, right? You gotta manage expectations, right? So it's really key decisions. Hey, I'm going through this. What do you think? You know, you don't need manufacturers in here, whatever. It's like, send out a broad email and, you know, hey, anybody can help me with connecting with this person, that person. That's where you can get really rapid responses and they can be really helpful.

Yeah. Okay, let's do a little bit of fast forwarding. You've raised this money from a bunch of sweethearts, including myself. You've spent $200,000 to $250,000 on Facebook and Google with the Santa Claus commercial and you're like, okay, I'm not going to talk about anything. I'm not going to be— I'm going to be less serious and be more cheeky with my humor because that's what's resonating with consumers. At what point do you start getting off Facebook and Google? Like, you know, I think the most— one of the most impressive things I found about Manscaped is the diversity of channel acquisition. Like YouTube is a really hard channel for people to scale. So like, you know, Hulu, we've tried on Hulu, like when Native has been on Hulu ads, wasn't nearly as successful as you guys. How do you guys test? How do you guys— well, first, first, help me understand your largest channels of customer acquisition. Is it YouTube? Is it still Facebook? Like, what is the largest channel still?

Well, it depends. I mean, Facebook and Google is still a very large channel. And between— I mean, between YouTube, if we do I'm sorry, not YouTube, Google and Facebook is a large channel, right? 'Cause Facebook encompasses both of their assets, it's Facebook and Instagram, is very large channel, 'cause you can't forget about Instagram. Everyone talks about Facebook, but Instagram is a huge channel. So that's where a lot of spend goes. The other spend is on Google, of course there's AdWords, right? There is GDN, there is so many different ad units that you guys have, like most startup, entrepreneurs haven't even considered, right? On the Google platform. And then there's YouTube, which drives a tremendous amount of traffic. And that's, I should say, tremendous amounts of views, not necessarily traffic, okay? Because there's so much inventory on YouTube. It's just, it's so hard to crack. Like YouTube is so hard to crack.

Okay, let me ask you in a different way. If you had to choose, if all of these channels were gonna be regulated by the FTC and all of them were going to be shut down except one, which one would you want to continue to exist?

It depends on when. It depends on when. Right now I would say Google.

Today. Yeah. You'd say what? You'd say which?

Today would be Google.

Okay. Uh, and then help me understand a little bit more about YouTube. Are you guys doing pre-roll ads or are you guys doing like influencer-based ads on YouTube?

We're doing pre-roll ads. We're doing influencer ads. We're doing, um, user-generated content. We're doing— I mean, we signed— we have a team of 5 in our influencer department, and all they do is work with influencers. So it gets to a point where you have to keep grinding, and there's a tipping point where you're like, everything starts to gel because all these channels lift everything. Right? Like you can't, you can't just be on Facebook and be successful. You gotta be on Facebook, on Google, on Hulu, on everything else to actually, to actually scale massively. Um, so we realized that on very, very early on. So this year is a big push for us to kind of be, be, be everywhere, including billboards. Um, and we got like, we got like 20 billboards out there now. Um, you know, urinal ads, like UFC fights. We were at the Conor McGregor fight. We had a car in NASCAR. So, wow. Yeah.

So tell me how you structure your team to handle all that then. Do you guys have like, is one person that's working on YouTube also working on Instagram, or is there somebody who's dedicated to YouTube, somebody who's dedicated to UFC fights, and somebody who's dedicated to NASCAR?

So there is, there's an out-of-home director, Joey Kovac. He's just phenomenal. And you really, I think the way that, to answer the first part of your question is how do you structure? You gotta find the best people. The best people will bring in the best people, will bring in the best people. You know, so it's so important as an entrepreneur to build a team, right? When you're the, one of your primary jobs as a CEO is to build the team, right? To lead the vision and build the team. So bringing in your, your, the right generals, the right key people in the leadership team will automatically start to bring in the right people on the next layer. Right? So, um, you know, Ryan and I have been working together. Ryan is our VP of marketing, has been working together for almost a decade now. He brought in Joey Kovac, which is phenomenal. Joey, you know, did a lot of the marketing for Movement before they exited, from the ground up. Then he brought in Nate Singer to handle Google and YouTube, and then we brought in Natalie Hoffman to handle radio. So, and then she was phenomenal. She got us on Howard Stern and all these, you know, all these amazing podcasts. And then they brought in Lauren on the marketing side and Lauren does all of the influencers, built out the influencer team.

So it sounds like you have directors for each channel though, as opposed, like, you know, you have a YouTube, somebody who manages YouTube, somebody who manages out-of-home, somebody who manages Instagram and Facebook. And that's sort of how you structured it under a VP of marketing.

Correct.

And then how would you structure—

For a startup though, but for a startup though, I don't want you to think that. That's how, that's what you need to start, right? You don't need that to start. You gotta do everything on your own. Right? Like in the beginning, like Ryan and I were on YouTube every single day, like clicking through, refreshing like 1,000 times a day to see metrics, right? That's how you start. And then when you, when you reach critical mass, that's when you bring in someone to handle where you go on and you pioneer the next channel.

Yeah. I think that's a great thing to mention. Like, I feel like a lot of people want to be like, want to be in 7 different marketing channels when they launch their business. And it's hard to be an expert. You know, I've rarely met people who are good at Facebook and Google ads and people are like, yeah, I'm going to try and run Facebook, Google, Snap, Pinterest, and TikTok ads when I launch my business. And I'm like, you're not going to be able to measure— like, you're going to forget everything that you've ever done by the time you're looking at TikTok ads, you know, which is your fifth channel today. You're going to forget what your Facebook ads look like. And so it's really hard to be a master of so many channels right out of the gate. You know, I'm a big fan of sort of going deep on 1 or 2 channels, or 3 if you are able to, um, and becoming a master of those and then hiring people once you're sort of able to, uh, once you understand the metrics behind those and you've built some sort of critical mass and know how to, like, you know, you understand the next 3 to 4 months of the trajectory of that channel.

Mm-hmm. You gotta master it. You gotta master it before you move on.

Yeah, absolutely. Um, and then how do you think about budgets when you're doing this? So is there like a quarterly meeting for budgets or an annual meeting for budgets where you're like, okay, influencer team, you get 12% of our budget, radio team, you get 10% of our budget? How do you guys think? Or are you like sort of like, you know what, influencers, we're willing to spend up to $30 CAC, spend as much as you can until you hit $30. You know, how do you think about that?

I mean, now we are. I mean, to be honest, now we are, right? Like we're, we're much more systematic now. We're much more organized. But the first 2 years, let's be honest, nobody gets set budgets in the first 2 years. You're still learning so much. You're still growing so much. And it's still so fluid that like, you know, dude, we just launched this channel with this video. The CPA is still, well, gotta go balls out, right? Yeah.

And that's the only thing that matters over the course of the next 8 weeks is this channel. Everyone else be quiet. This is the channel that's gonna make our business.

Snap. Yeah. Yeah.

That's true.

And so, and so, you know, I, I don't wanna, I wanna make sure that the listeners are, and, and the entrepreneurs out there don't get a, you know, don't think that you need to have budgets in place on that. You know, in, in the early days, you just gotta make it work. That's all you gotta do. You gotta make it work. That's all you gotta focus on.

Yeah. In the early days, it's always audibles, right? Like every day is a new fire that you have to put out. And the rare days where you don't have fires and can sort of focus on marketing channels, you've got to go with just what's working and not like, and not dogma. You can't be like, you know what, Facebook work or like, you know, YouTube worked for Paul at Manscaped. I'm going to spend money on, you know, people come up to me and they're like, hey, Facebook worked for you guys. How should I get Facebook to work for me? And I'm like, look, Facebook worked for us. It like, you know, what worked for us almost certainly will not work for you. We had a specific use case. You know, we were on there at a different time than Facebook is today. And like, you know, we were spending a lot of resources on Facebook. For you guys, the content that you have and the cheeky humor is much more amenable to video than it may be to like a quick mobile, uh, you know, photo. And so, um, it's just a different channel that works. And like, people cannot get caught up on the dogma of others. They have to call audibles when they get to the line, see what's working and spend their time and resources there.

Absolutely.

What did you guys like, um, fail at? So like, you know, certainly you, it sounds, you know, and maybe this is a bad, maybe fail is a bad word. Uh, you know, at Native we failed at a ton of stuff. Operations for a really long time until we hired a stellar operations person. Finance forever. What did you guys feel like? You know, certainly like not doing the cheeky marketing was tough. Did you guys have operational supply issues? Because these things can't be easy to— it's not like you're, you know, with deodorant, you want to make more. You probably can do it in like, you know, a week. Like you need a week of heads up, maybe 2 weeks. These are, you know, hardware components. That cannot be made in a day or 2 days. It's not mixing ingredients together. Well, I mean, some of your products are, but a lot of them aren't. You know, what were the things that you guys struggled with to make the business a success?

Absolutely right. So, I mean, I'll answer in a kind of an all-encompassing way. Like, if you, if you're in software and SaaS, then you don't have to worry about, you know, making stuff, right? You gotta, you gotta worry about having enough servers. But now there's Clouds, you know, we don't have to worry about that anymore either, right? So that's why software is so— can be so lucrative if you get the right win. Um, but, but for hard and physical products and operations, supply chain, you know, it, it's, it's a lot of work. So if you're gonna ask me, I'm exactly with you. Like, we failed at operations. Um, it— we failed multiple times at operations.

Meaning— what was one of the— give me an example of a disaster you guys had.

Disaster.

So, or like one of the things that you failed at in operation specifically.

Yeah, so we had— we were on a run rate, we had projected, uh, inventory for the entire Q1, right? We bought it, we have it in stock. It was November, we're like, well, we're good. And we bought so much inventory, or like, we're good for the next quarter. This is November and we're like, we're good until April. And that's how much inventory we had. By December 16th, it sold out, all inventory. And we're like, oh crap. It was crazy. Everyone and our families were in the warehouse packing new inventory to send out. So that was definitely a failure. So we shipped late to our customers, which means they weren't happy with us. That means that's a fail for us. We want to delight our customers all the time. And that really sucked. And that didn't go away, by the way. That happens all the time. All the time. When you're scaling, you can never predict. How Howard Stern would do a read, things would just pop. And influencers would launch their videos, things would just pop. And it's just really difficult to manage all the channels, because now we're omnichannel, right? So we're not just a subscription, we're not just a D2C company. We've got Amazon, we've got D2C, we've got international, and we've got retail. So now we're working with, you know, a lot of all our retail partners. You're, you're planning with them months and months. Retail's a different beast. It's not DTC. You're planning a year in advance at all times.

Yeah, I think I, I didn't understand how hard it would be until Native got into retail. Like, you know, we scaled, we had the same problems you did in terms of like running out of inventory. In 2015, we were making 500 units of deodorant a week. By 2017, we were making 21,000 units a day. And we were still like selling out, like, you know, if you bought your deodorant on a Thursday, it was either made the day before or the day after. It was like, it's not like we had a lot of inventory, but once you sell into Target and Walmart and like large brick-and-mortar stores, you know, their first order could be, you know, 300,000 units or 20,000, 50,000 units. And all of a sudden, the just-in-time inventory that you had always been reliant on is no longer sustainable.

Yeah, absolutely. It gets, it gets really difficult as, as your SKU starts to expand also.

Yeah. Yeah. So tell me about some of the retailers that you guys are in. You guys are in Target today. Any other retailers?

We're in Target, Best Buy, and we're really going to focus on Target and Best Buy because we feel that that's where our audience lives. You know, we have a lot of great retail partners, but we're going to For the time being, at least for 2020, we're really gonna focus on Target and Best Buy.

And is— does your online site make up the majority of your sales, or do Target and Best Buy make up the majority of your sales?

No, D2C web e-commerce makes up the majority of our sales.

And is there like cyclicality to the business? You know, it's really interesting that you said by December 16th you had sort of sold out. I would imagine that people are buying this product for Christmas. Is there another bump in sales, for instance, right before Valentine's Day?

Um, yeah, Valentine's Day, Father's Day, any gift-giving holiday, we see a bump because that's when women buy us gifts for men. And then of course holidays, right? That's when we women really buy as gifts for men. But then men are also spending on themselves. So, um, you know, Q4 is definitely huge, just any other e-commerce company, you know, Q4 is huge for everybody.

Yeah, well, I mean, Q4 is like— for Native, it was actually probably one of the worst quarters, in part because like, you tend to wear more deodorant in the summer when it's hotter out, uh, as opposed to the winter when it's cold out. And you know, some people give deodorants as gifts. In fact, a lot of people do, a lot more than I suspected. But like, you know, if I gave you a deodorant as a gift, I think you'd be like, well, this is nice, but like, okay, this is like a pretty mediocre gift. I mean, if I give you a package of Manscaped, it'd be very different.

Front.

Like, you know, it's obviously a higher price point and a great, like, um, a much nicer gift. I wonder if men ever accuse— like, men who get this as a gift from their female partners, I wonder if they ever accuse them of being like, this is a gift for yourself. Like, when I buy lingerie for you, it's a gift for me. This is a gift for yourself.

I wonder, you know, we haven't pulled our— we haven't pulled our customers, but yeah, that, that might be the case. Um, but we have a lot of, you know, unboxing experience that people unboxing reactions on Instagram and TikTok. So it's been pretty fun.

Yeah. Did you work your way up when it came to influencer advertising? Did you start at like micro influencers and work your way up to like, you know, A-list celebrities? Or were you like, you know what, let's go big right out of the gate and get the Kim Kardashians or Tom Bradys of the world to try this product?

You know, we still haven't gone with celebrities. We have not tapped any celebrities yet. So we're talking, but we went with amazing influencers. So our first influencer that we ever brought on was Jose Zuniga of Teaching Men's Fashion. He's phenomenal. The dude knows his stuff. He really knows men's hygiene and grooming. And so we tapped him as one of our first influencers, and we still work very closely with him to this day.

So, so I guess, like, was your budget right away going after— maybe the celebrity is a bad example— was your budget right away sort of saying, hey, let's put $10,000 or $50,000 or $100,000 to test among different influencers to see what works and what doesn't? Or were you like, I'm ready to go with an influencer that has 500,000 people that may not be an A-list celebrity, but it certainly a large Instagram celebrity.

Yes. So, you know, but I think if you're going to test influencer market, testing micro-influencers will give you really bad data because it just— there's just not enough reach, right?

Yeah.

You got to test with enough reach to have— it's like your sampling, right? The more data you have, the better results, the better data you're going to— the better you can conclude on your data, right? You know, I think, I think at that time Jose had like 4 million followers on YouTube. And that was, that was the, that was the right amount for us to really do a good test. Wow.

All right. So you're looking for guys who are already like rather large on YouTube before you spend money there. And is that still the case? Are you still sort of focusing on those people that have a million plus, or are you willing to go down now to people who have 10,000+ subscribers?

Now it's, now our influencer team evaluates each influencer, potential influencer partner. And the re— what we evaluate for primarily is authenticity. And like, if you're, if you've got 30,000 followers or 30,000 fans or whatever that is, you know, on each of these, on these different platforms and in your Instagram, all you're doing is pushing product, that you're not the right influencer for us.

Yeah.

You know, we want you to actually test our product, you know, really use it and be a fan of it. Because that authenticity comes out because we as a brand really value our authenticity. We want to have a really authentic voice. And that's, that's really important to our brand.

And so how do female influencers sort of project that authenticity? Is it sort of talking about, you know, their partners? Or how do female, you know, users project that authenticity? Authenticity?

Well, it, it depends. Usually it's, um, the way that they, the way that they do is it depends on which platform, right? So on, on Instagram, they're just taking pictures of it as, as endorsing it. Um, and many times they're taking pictures with a partner as like, you know, you guys, because Instagram is a very photo-based, um, you know, platform. Whereas on YouTube, um, it's mostly couples, right? It's, it's the— if it's, if it's a, a woman Instagram or a female Instagram, they would be, they would pair up with their partner, right? And, and, and talk about the product. Um, because there's so many ways you can talk about this product, right? Men can talk about how great it is, how it doesn't hurt you, how it's the right tool for the job, right? And how, how, how much, how much better it makes them feel. Um, when it's women talk about it as, hey, you know, you give this to your men, um, and it makes them feel much better. It makes you like it more. And, you know, so yeah, sure, we leave it up to them to kind of put their own spin on it.

Gotcha. Um, okay, you know, uh, we're almost out of time, so I just want to ask a couple more questions. You know, the business has changed dramatically since you went from that serious advertising, and it was you and Ryan sort of refreshing YouTube, to today. Um, you know, you're sponsoring for, uh, the NFL teams and NASCAR teams, and that's pretty amazing. Where is it like, what is your goal with the business? I think that like, you know, do you want to work here for 20 years? Is there an exit strategy in the net? Like, you know, within 5 years? Like, what is like, where do you want to go with the business? You know, this is like the business that you've created is right in the wheelhouse of a lot of CPG companies, right? It's almost like, like there's a lot of competition for the Gillette of the world from the Harry's and Dollar Shave Clubs of the world. This is going up, this is like in the same industry, but going after a very different type of category or niche. And you're uniquely positioned and sort of one of the few companies in that space. What do you wanna do?

Yeah, the way that we think about that is, we never, I personally never create or build a business for the sole purpose of exiting with that in mind. I just feel like if you create a successful business that transcends, you know, fads or, you know, that can be multi-generational, that's a potential to be multi-generational, then, you know, the potential acquirers just come. It's natural. So that's kind of how we think about it. Let's build a really successful business. And so when you look back at the last 40, 50 years, there aren't many brands that are able to be multi-generational, right? I mean, you look at like Head Shoulders. They've—

Sure.

Generations upon generations, right? Gillette, generations upon generations. Pantene. There aren't that many brands that are able to actually do that.

You've mentioned all Procter Gamble brands. They're going to love that.

No, I mean, there's a whole bunch, right? There's a lot of Unilever brands also, right? But there's not that many that actually have the unit economics to be able to transcend. What I mean by that is it costs a lot of money. It costs a lot of money to build a brand. It is really expensive to build a brand. And if you're trying to sell a shampoo in which, you know, at retail, and you're trying to build a business that way, there's no way you have enough margin to actually build a brand, right? Because you don't want to take 20, 35, 20, 30 years to build a brand, right?

Sure.

You want to be able to spend $50 million on marketing, right? Or, and then grow that to $100 million on marketing for 5 years, 6 years, right? And really have a global brand. And then, and then you, then you start harvesting. I mean, that's, that's, that's kind of how we see it, right? You have to spend the money up front. You have to, you have to pay your dues, right? And, and build that brand, really understand your audience, build, create amazing products within those 5 to 6, 7 years. And then after that, you can really start harvesting. So that's kind of how we see building a brand. We believe that with our unit economics, because I mean, this, we recoup the cap on the first-time sale. So beyond anything else, many—

you're profitable on first unit sale, the profit on first unit sale.

So we're able to recycle that cash very, very quickly. So that's how we've been able to scale so quickly without any institutional funding. Right. So I think there's not that many companies that are able to do that.

And there's virtually no companies that are able to do that, especially that like, you know, there's companies that are able to do that to get to $4 or $5 million in revenue. Virtually no companies are able to do that at the— at $50 million. In revenue. That's why the Away and Allbirds of the world have raised capital.

Yeah, yeah, we're, we're very fortunate that we, you know, we're able to get, you know, beyond 9 figures in, in revenue without institutional capital and, and, you know, to have that kind of unit economics. So that allows us to— we believe that that really helps us, um, you know, be multi-generational. We're going to grow this thing We're launching internationally, so we're already in Australia, Canada, UK, will be all of Europe, you know, and within the next 3 to 5 years be a truly global brand. And then it's, you know, it's all for harvesting. But what's really interesting beyond that is the way we think about it is we're purely incremental, Moïse. You know, there's no portfolio company in groin care. Like we're probably the last frontier in male grooming.

Agreed. Yeah, it's, it's really amazing when like, um, it's not like you're competing with Gillette, you're in the same category. And were a P&G an acquirer of Manscaped, you would sit within their grooming category likely. But like, uh, it's not like you're cannibalizing Gillette sales.

Exactly. You know, we, if anything, we can, we can help it, right? We're, we're truly incremental to the top line revenue. Right. And if you look at men's, men's hygiene in general, it's definitely growing, but it's not growing as fast as our category.

Yeah. Yeah. And not only is it growing like, I mean, your category is primarily growing because of you. I think that like, you know, people rarely realize that, like when Native launched into Target, we grew their deodorant category something like 8% or 10% the first year. And rarely do like, you know, Target hadn't seen that in a really long time. The men's, you know, below the waist grooming category isn't growing quickly and you're riding those coattails. You're the reason that it's growing quickly.

You know, we're seeing very similar data with Target also. Great partner, great to be working with them. They're phenomenal.

Love Target.

Yeah, love Target. They're just phenomenal partners. But we're seeing very similar things with them. This category hasn't been innovated and it's a brand new category, you know, and we got lucky with the name Manscaped that we defined the category.

Yeah, yeah, fantastic name. Uh, okay, one last question because I, I put on Twitter, I said, you know, I was interviewing you, uh, for a podcast, what should I ask you? And someone from your own team actually asked me to ask you this, and they said, uh, have Paul guess how many gallons of boba tea, uh, the Manscaped team has consumed in total. Do you want to make a guess?

So the reason behind this is my wife loves boba. She's addicted to boba. So she got the entire company addicted to boba. So I would say many, many, many hundreds of gallons of boba.

Okay, if you had to give me a number, 'cause I'm gonna tweet at this guy and be like, hey, is this right or wrong?

I would say, Oh man, because we order boba almost every day. I don't know, I gotta be like 120 gallons.

Okay, no, you're— it's definitely more than 120 gallons. If you order boba every day, that's probably like 18 ounces. There's 70 people on the team, probably 40 of them are getting boba. No, it's gonna be—

yeah, our boba budget is ridiculous. That is—

that's a great, uh, that's a great like line item to have in a budget when you're like doing a P&L and sort of showing it to your board. You're like, this is how much we're going to spend on Boba this quarter. Paul, this was fantastic. Really love, you know, that I really love what you— this conversation. I think you've, you know, aside from one of the things that I've realized about you is that aside from having this incredible vision for the company and sort of understanding where you fit within the CBG space, you also have these humble origins and you have like the perspective you you still remember the perspective you had when you launched the business and were struggling trying to get the right messaging out, trying to understand, you know, how to get production up and like understand what entrepreneurs are going through when they're still much smaller businesses. I feel like very few people have that perspective and it's so refreshing to hear because I think that a lot of people who are building $2, $3 million, $4 million, or who are at a $2, $3, $4 million run rate, you know, don't necessarily want to talk about stuff that I brought up, which was like, how do you think about budget? You go back and you're like, look, budget is what we think about today. The first 2 years we called audibles at the line every time we went up there. And that was really great. I love how you mentioned that because it makes me realize that sometimes I've forgotten what it was like to be in the trenches and makes me miss those days. So appreciate you sort of bringing that up and having that like, you know, in the trenches type of mentality. That was fantastic.

Oh, thank you. I really appreciate that. I think deep down at heart, I'm an entrepreneur and I'll always be an entrepreneur. You know, I think it's a special breed and I celebrate all entrepreneurs out there because it takes guts, you know, to go out there and to sacrifice every single day to follow your dreams. It's not easy.

Couldn't agree more with that. Takes a ton of guts. You know, you gotta stand up to your family and your friends who are, you know, certainly at my age are like, you know, lawyers and are making a lot of money and have families. And you're like, you know what, I'm going to put everything on the line. So I have a ton of respect for those entrepreneurs and have a ton of respect for the business and you too.

Oh, thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks so much, Paul.

This was fantastic. Really appreciate your time. Congratulations on all the success. Super excited. You know, after all of this, it also makes me realize how excited I am as an investor in Manscaped. I feel like, uh, when you said all this, I'm like, oh, fantastic, my investment's doing really well. So thanks again for all the time and for taking my money. Really appreciate that.

Thank you. I'm excited to see what your, your next project's going to be.

So me too. Uh, I don't know what it'll be. Hopefully once this COVID stuff dies down, I'll, I'll think of something.

Thanks, Paul.

Really appreciate it.