YouSaid · the spoken record

Andy Katz-Mayfield

lines on the record: 129
first: 2023-06-12
most recent: 2023-06-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And it's totally free. This episode was produced by Liz Metzger with music composed by Rumtin Era Bluey. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Catherine Cypher. Our production staff also includes JC Howard, Casey Herman, Carrie Thompson, Sam Paulson, Alex Chung, Elaine Coates, John Isabella, Chris Massini, and Carla Estavez. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to how I built this.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, totally. You know, we had at Harry's, we made these razors in our very early days that were kids razors. So they had like kind of toy TEDs and you could just like jave with them, not actually have blades in them. And we used to sort of stand there next to the mirror and shave together him with his, you know, little razor and me with a regular Harry's razor. And it was great.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Andy Katz Mayfield and Jeff Rader, co founders of Harry's. So, Jeff, are you excited to teach your 11 year old to shave one day?”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think Jeff's being modest because I would find he'd be a really lucky guy to have started two multibillion dollar brands and just gotten lucky. So there's probably 15 or 20 people on the planet who can say that they've successfully started two multibillion dollar companies. I would ascribe the lucky part to be like situation and circumstance. Like I was lucky having access to amazing education and the network where fundraising was easier than it might be for somebody who was born into a different environment. You know, I think the adversity along the way and kind of determination to sort of push through that adversity is not luck at all. It's just hard work. It's me and Jeff that have to sort of steer the ship there. So I don't think that part is luck. A lot of that's hard work.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that there's certainly been a lot of serendipity and luck in my life. Like, you know, having. Sitting with Neil after class one day when Dave walked up with the idea for Warby Parker, Andy, having gotten to know Andy at Bane, like, gosh, I could have made a hundred different decisions in life that I wouldn't have, where I wouldn't have gotten to know him. And I think in making the ideas come to life, I think we've worked really hard to go do that. And I think made a lot of conscious decisions over time. Some days I'm like, oh, gosh, I just wish we could get a break. And then we get a great break. And it's awesome. And we learn something new. But I think that's probably a function of the fact that we have a team that's continuing to iterate and innovate. And so I guess, you know, in that way, like we do kind of manufacture on luck or success.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Both in your 40s, right? How much of where you are today do you attribute to the work and the strategy, and how much do you think has to do with luck? First to you, Jeff?”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So when you think about where you are today, right now What are we about 11 years in to the company ten years into the company?”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business momentum then helped us to start to convince the team that hey like this is going to be awesome we have a great sort of standalone business and exciting future vision Let's all kind of do this together.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In some ways, COVID was a good thing for us, and in some ways it was a hard thing. On the good side, all the people who are like, oh my gosh, Harry is like, this business is in crisis, this deal got blocked, what are you going to do? Now everyone was in crisis. And so we're like, welcome to our world. It's like, that was a good thing. Also, our business did really well during COVID. you know people stopped buying razor blades in stores so much but they started buying lots of stuff online and you know flamingo which is a brand we mentioned has an amazing wax at home wax product and people stop going to you know sort of salons to get wax and so that product totally took off and then our online business you know dtc also started to grow in a significant way because people weren't going to stores and so i think we actually we also turned the business to profitability we were eBit dot positive and so and i think that business underlying”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Started, I think, with Andy and I apologizing. So, as Andy mentioned, we had to do this Mia Coppa, which was important for us to say both to each other and to the team, like, hey, you've trusted us on this journey. We're really sorry that this happened the way that it happened. We didn't think it was going to happen this way. And we know that it's caused you all a lot of work. We still believe that we have a really compelling and exciting vision for the future. This whole thing about next-gen CPG, in some ways, it's going to be easier and better for us to build these ransom scratch ourselves or buy them. And actually, Andy and I were talking about this the other day. I remember a couple of folks coming up to us, like people had been to Harry's for a long time being like, just so you guys know, we're in. Whatever you need, we're in, we got you. Like, we're going to make this thing awesome. And for us, that was like so uplifting and inspiring. And investors, too, just calling us and be like, we got your back.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we, the actual moment was not a surprise because as things continued to progress, it got clearer and clearer that we were fighting an uphill battle. And so, you know, while it wasn't a surprise, it was certainly still a bit of a gut punch. And we felt like we had sort of let our team down this path and on this journey and kind of had to then Maya Culpa and pick ourselves up and get everybody remotivated around a standalone vision and path.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you're really investing a lot of time and energy into this because obviously you wanted it to go well. But ultimately, the merger got blocked, not by you or Edgewell, but by the Federal Trade Commission They basically said it was that if you guys were one company. It would stifle competition. It would be an antitrust thing. So, do you remember the moment when you heard about that?”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And yeah, it was the same level of skepticism of like, hey, do these guys, you know, Jeff and Andy, do they value what we bring to the table? They've got their young, fancy New York startup workforce, and we're out here in suburban Connecticut, you know, doing things more traditionally. And so there was a lot of trust building. And, you know, the same as Jeff mentioned, we were going to need our team to stick around to make this work. But we were also going to need their team to stick around and make this work and figure out a way to bring these cultures together.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was certainly a benefit of doing the deal, but it wasn't. A little bit more serendipitous than that in that Edgewell, as you mentioned, owns chick and shick historically had been the number two to Gillette. And Gillette is the 300-pound gorilla. And we thought it was potentially compelling to combine with Schick and have a more formidable competitor vis- ⁇-vis Gillette. And we were actually, you know, Jeff and I were talking about like, hey, could we buy these guys? I actually talked to a couple private equity firms about because Edgewell was a public company, but a reasonably small public company about trying to buy them, take them private and fold it into our business. That was actually how it started. And we could never get the math to work to take them private, but it's a small industry. And so we got to know them a little bit through that process.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So while you sort of launch the lab and begin to incubate ideas, I think the first one was flamingo, which is a woman's razor of skincare brand. You are approached by Edgewell, which is a company that think that owns Schick and tons of other banana boat and Hawaiian tropic, a bunch of different brands. Essentially, they decide they offer to acquire you. In May 2019, it's announced that they would buy Harry's for close to $1.4 billion in stock and in cash. I'm assuming that now you're Roughly six years in, your investors may want to return. And was that the thinking behind the acquisition, agreeing to it?”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, the vision really evolved from, hey, we're going to build a next generation Gillette or a next generation old spice, you know, from a Harry's brand standpoint to, hey, we're going to build a next generation Procter& Gamble. Like we want a family of brands. We had an idea for a woman's brand in the space. So that was kind of a logical place for us to start.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that was part of it. You know, Harry's was doing great, but we were kind of looking at this saying, okay, how big could Harry's really, really be overtime, even if we got to, you know, huge market shares everywhere, like there's going to be some cap on our growth and shave. And so if we thought about it, we thought, hey, like, you know, if we could increase our addressable market, not just to kind of men's grooming and personal care, but to all of CPG, that's a pretty significant sort of shift in the opportunity set that we have. And then we're starting to build good relationships with some of these great retailers like Walmart and Target and, you know, later Kroger and grocery and Meyer and Costco and CVS and Walgreens and all these places. And they're excited about this. They're excited about us building brands online that are kind of modern brands that have interest and awareness around them and then coming to retail eventually.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that I'm curious about, something that you did around 2018, is you establish an incubator called Harry's Labs. And I know it's changed somewhat, a little bit from what it originally was designed to do, but essentially it's an accelerator, right? You've developed products in-house and then you've purchased kind of small brands and made them bigger. Before we talk about the details, what was the idea here About diversification because at some point, right, there was going to be more competition in this space, and your market share might have stalled out. So was that the idea behind creating an internal incubator?”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I honestly feel like that was one of the greatest victories that we've had since we started Harry's. Like we got one of the biggest companies in the industry to drop their prices to be more consumer-centric, to try to sort of engage with us. And on the marketing side, I think the place where we went public the most was they created a campaign. It was to the song Welcome Back. And it said that most of the customers who try Harry's leave Harry's. And that just wasn't true. Like we had all the data of our direct-to-consumer business. And so we sent them back a letter with literally all the data. We're like, every cohort of customers since the beginning of Harry's, the majority of customers who try Harry's stay with Harry's. They didn't really respond. And so we eventually just took that letter and made it public. It was written by our lawyers, but it was kind of funny, tongue-in-cheek. I think that's the point when our customer base really came to our defense and said, okay.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it blew all of our blew targets expectations away. It blew our own personal expectations away. It certainly sent us into a bit of crisis mode as it related to supply chain and manufacturing razor blades. I think it was that moment probably that some of the traditional CPG players got religion that like, hey, these aren't like e-commerce startups. These are serious consumer brands that are threatening our core franchises. And yeah, that's when you start to see much more aggressive responses in terms of price action”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, when we launched in Target, we took over 50% market share of the category at Target overnight. Wow. And so whoever was sitting in Cincinnati at Procter& Gamble when that report came through probably fell out of their chair. Yeah.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so when you started to sell in Target, you started, this is when you started to see Gillette. Change, you respond. And what did you see”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Launched a target. We met Target in 2014. We spoke at their design month, and we liked them. I mean, I think that what struck me when we first met them was that they talked about their customer as a guest. Like, we feel like if, I don't know, we're not sure about Harry's, but if the guest tells us they want Harry's, then we should be serious about giving the guests some Harry's. And with Target, and then we launched at Walmart in 2018, and then we had to kind of work with Target to try to bring Harry's to life in their stores in a way that would be unique and sort of exciting and compelling to us in an aisle that, you know, was a source of frustration for lots of guys. It was one of the reasons why we started the company. And so we didn't just want to kind of do the same thing as everybody else.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, as you mentioned earlier, getting people to try something once is one thing, but then getting them to try it again and again is another thing. And part of that was obviously the quality of the product and the design and the price point. But did you also see Gillette lowering its price to start to match what you guys and some of the other? Competitive companies were offering at lower rates.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A fair bit of capital, I would say at least half of that capital, those kind of early rounds of capital, went to Germany to sort of build out the factory in the plant. I remember sitting there, gosh, this was probably 2016, 2015, with a reporter who's asking us the same question. And I was like, look around. There were like cranes building new buildings and dropping in heavy equipment.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So one of the things that happened at Harry's really started beginning in late 2013, so call it six months after we launched, and then through 2014, was that we started to really learn how to market to people online and get them to come to our website and started to grow in ways that we had not anticipated. And so, you know, in 2014, I think our plan was to do like $10 million of revenue or something and by like June we'd already done $10 million of revenue and we were going to, on the way to do 20 or more. And then at the same time, we were recognizing we were running out of factory capacity. And the industry was starting to change. Like, as you mentioned, Dollar Shave Club had launched. Gillette was out there changing. It was just a dynamic picture. And so we're like, okay, we think this is an important time for us to actually continue to grow to really establish ourselves as a strong brand in this space. And as a result, we ended up raising.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was doing Tell me how you, I mean, so essentially you got this, you've got your production facility, and I think you guys really went maybe aggressively is the right word, but you really went for it in terms of raising capital for the next couple years. There's debate about this right now. A lot of people, lots of people who are saying, well, you know, the last 10 years, this idea of growth, growth, growth, growth, maybe not the best approach. Other people say, well, but that is the best approach. You've got to raise a lot of money and grow because of otherwise you won't be able to establish a foothold. Talk to me a little bit about the strategy of raising money and raising more capital. I'm assuming it was to fuel faster growth.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was an interesting dynamic because Gillette globally had 70% market share, like truly insane. And some people looked at that and said. My gosh, you know, that's crazy to take those guys on. And they're owned by Procter& Gamble, the biggest, baddest CPG company on the planet. And I think for us, it was always helpful to sort of have this, there was like a David and Goliath narrative that I think played into our brand and that played into customers getting behind us. And I think we paid a lot less attention to Dollar Shave Club, or other upstarts, like what everybody else was doing was sort of immaterial at the end of the day relative to what Gillette was doing.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wonder with respect to your competitors, I mean, sometimes people on the shelf say, well, I don't pay attention to my competitors. I don't. But I'm not sure that's necessarily a good thing. I mean, I think that sometimes it's important to look at what your competitors are doing and to have a competitive sensibility, to feel like you really want to beat them. And did you guys have any of that?”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And I think that did differentiate us from others. I think we sort of at one point said we were kind of the only truly vertically integrated company in the shave industry in that we literally grind steel and make razor blades and deliver them to your door vis-a-vis our own kind of e-commerce platform and having that whole loop from the customer back to the factory was like an area of advantage for us, I think, at the time. And as Andy mentioned, we had all these ideas from customers and how we wanted to improve the product. And now we actually had the capability to go back to the very source and do that directly.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now that you owned this factory, I mean, there were competitors out there, and there were some competitors who started even before you, like Dollar Shave Club. And, you know, obviously the big ones like Gillette and Shick. Now that you owned your own production facility, presumably it puts you in a, I mean, you're in a slightly different position than, say, like a dollar shave club, which I don't think owned its own factory.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know the Germans are Pilata planning before doing, and the American perception of the German team was they're not doing anything why they're not working, they're moving slowly. And of course in a manufacturing environment, like you need to be more planful. You can't just test and learn things on the fly on a website. You can do that stuff. So it was challenging.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We might need three hours for my German-American cultural adventures. Probably the biggest difference that we had to work through is that we were a fast-moving entrepreneurial culture like Tess Learn, iterate, like two steps forward, one step back. And the Germans perceived that as just these guys have no idea what they're doing. It's complete chaos. It's unorganized, disorganized”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think in retrospect, we were slow to really, yeah, say, hey, this is Harry's. You know, we've got a certain set of values. We've got a certain way of doing things. Because, you know, they were bigger than us and we didn't want to upset the Apple cart and we didn't know we're not manufacturing experts. We're trusting them to run the factory. We did need to integrate in some way, shape, or form.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we went from a, you know, a sort of technology enabled startup that was doing, I don't know what we were doing at the time, Jeff, you know, five or ten million dollars of revenue on an annualized basis to like a fully vertically integrated global consumer package goods company overnight, which was both exciting and daunting. I distinctly remember they put us up effectively on like milk crates on the factory floor and gathered all the workers to announce this and to introduce ourselves and we're looking out there at 300 or 400 German factory workers and it was definitely like an oh crap moment of you know like it was exciting but at the other time it was like what did we get ourselves into here”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so now, I mean, once this is done, I mean, you now own a razor blade company. I want to ask you about so many things about it, but just, I mean, essentially this makes you, what, you know, it's a term we hear a lot on the show and elsewhere, it's vertically integrated. Now you own, you're not dependent on a supplier to make your product. You make it yourself.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Funniest thing about the negotiating process was that we didn't have a conference room in our office. And so Andy was sitting in with a makeshift table in the stairwell next to our office doing all of this. You know, on the phone with Germany with papers are everywhere, like for months on end.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we were able to get commitments for $65 million of equity. We then went to Germany to raise $35 million of debt, which was a whole different challenge to convince these like very conservative German bank lenders to lend us the money to go buy this federal.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had a bunch of other great existing investors. And so I think with Lee's excitement and support that helped us to start to build like what a syndicate essentially of investors who would want to do this with us.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How did we do that? Well, we called Lee, who, as I mentioned, had invested personally in our seed round. And he was at a hedge fund Tiger Global and called him and said, hey, Lee, remember about that factory thing we chatted about back in December? Well, we launched, like the business is doing well. And there might be an opportunity to actually go by that. And he said, well, okay, cool. Come up next week and talk to me and my partner about it. So we went up to Midtown to meet with him and his partner and pitched them on this idea.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was very worried that we would have our legs cut out from underneath us, and particularly, you know, the risk of Gillette or somebody like that buying this thing and basically putting us out of business. And so we did not want, if we could avoid it like a full-blown competitive sales process. So time was of the essence to try to preempt that. Yeah, so we started talking to them and outlining what a deal could look like and then had to go figure out how to find $100 million to finance it.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we come back in just a moment, how Jeff and Andy deal with the inevitable angst of marrying an old school German company with an upstart American one. Stay with us. I'm Guy Ros and you're listening to how I built this. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. So it's around 2012, 2013, very early in the business, and Jeff and Andy are already looking to acquire a German company that makes their razors. And one of the reasons they want to move quickly, they're worried about competition.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was a little bit crazy. And, you know, I actually remember one of our investors who invested personally in our seed round. His name's Lee. We were talking about the idea of vertical integration with him in the seed round. And he was like, well, how much money would it cost to buy the factory? And I was like, I don't know, probably like $100 million. And he was like, well, you should probably launch the brand first and see if it works. But if it does, come talk to me. So I think Jeff and I sort of like took that to heart. Yeah, we said, well, you know, probably didn't intend to try to go find $100 million to buy a factory two months into our company's existence, but the time is now, so let's go see if we can make it happen.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wow. I mean, this is like two months into your business where you're having this conversation, I think, something like that.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, in some ways that would have been the logical place to start. So we did have that conversation with them. And what wound up happening is the conversation moved from, well, we could, you know, try to have some sort of joint production line, or we could buy this thing outright.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was clear to you that one solution could be to build a product line in their factory that would be dedicated just to Harry's, and that was a potential solution. Did you propose this idea to anyone?”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Moreover, while the product when we launched we thought was really good, we immediately and we sort of knew this already, but one of the beauty of having direct relationships with customers is that we immediately started getting all sorts of feedback, which was like, oh, I like this, but could you add that trimmer blade thing on the back? Could you make the thing more flexible? It would be really difficult to meaningfully inflect product improvement without actually owning the manufacturing process. From even before we launch, we're like, we're going to have to own this thing at some point. Maybe not the whole factory, but we need to own our own production line. Like we have to be vertically integrated.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now this manufacturer fine technique, were they able to, I mean, given the demand, right, and you had ordered a million blades from them. But each kit was coming with three to five blades, I guess. I mean, were you confident that they could ramp up production for you”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we had more coming, but for a little while we were sold out. And we started this thing internally that we weren't going to shave until our customers were shaving. So we were like walking around three weeks after launching this stuff with 10-day beards with people being like, what's wrong with you? And we're like, well. We're trying to get in stock, you know, and once we do, we'll shave ourselves.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think what within like a couple of weeks or maybe a month you sold out of everything that you had bought that you ordered.”
2023-06-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Harry’s Razors: Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT