Sam Parr interviews Paul Tran, CEO and founder of Manscaped, about how he built a nine-figure men’s below-the-waist grooming brand from scratch without institutional capital. They cover the evolution of Manscaped’s marketing strategy — from serious hygiene messaging that flopped to the cheeky humor that defined the brand — and dig into channel diversification, influencer strategy, operations failures, and Paul’s long-term vision for a multi-generational CPG brand.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host, founder of Native), Paul Tran (CEO and founder of Manscaped)
Introduction: Meet Paul Tran and Manscaped [00:00:00]
Sam: 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 help men groom their groins. Is that right?
Paul: That’s the whitespace.
Sam: 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, and a foot odor product as well. What’s the foot odor product called?
Paul: It’s called the Foot Duster.
Sam: The Foot Duster. Okay. And you guys have a really cheeky sense of humor. When people go into Manscaped or look at Manscaped’s past, the taglines are fantastic. One I remember — it’s called good sense — “When you trim the hedges, the tree stands taller.” Who came up with that?
Paul: I mean, that’s true, right? That’s absolutely true.
Sam: Who came up with that tagline?
Paul: You know, we have a really talented marketing team. It evolved — I can’t remember exactly where that tagline came from — but we just have a really talented marketing team that comes up with these really catchy sayings all the time.
Sam: Yeah, that’s certainly really catchy. 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 survey your customers about that kind of thing?
Paul: We do survey our customers, and it’s actually turned out to be much more frequent than we thought. There’s a bell curve, and the highest frequency is around once a week to once every fourteen days. So between seven and fourteen days is when somebody maintains their bush.
Sam: And what’s the other end of the bell curve? Is the other end once every five years?
Paul: The other end also follows the age gap, right? When you’re much older, less incentivized to do it. So it’s like never. That’s the other side of the bell curve.
Sam: Gotcha. And who’s buying these products? 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 partner looking like this, so he needs to trim”?
Paul: We actually have a pretty eclectic mix between men and women. During the holidays, we market much more to women, so we have more women customers then. But really, the truth is that if you haven’t groomed down there, you don’t know what it feels like. After you’ve done it, it’s refreshing. Men actually start to enjoy it, you know? It’s like when your hair is really long and then you finally cut it — it feels really relaxing. Men are starting to enjoy that. It feels fresher, not as damp. You start getting used to that feeling, and it becomes just a normal thing.
Sam: Yeah, you’re right about a lot of that. When I shave, or at least get a barber to cut my beard, afterwards I just feel like a new human being. I don’t know what it is about that — what psychological impact makes me feel like I’m a newly reborn person.
Paul: That’s what we strive for. At the end of the day, we just want you to feel better. Life is pretty rough already — there’s so much to do, so many responsibilities. We just want to make your life a little more enjoyable. That’s truly our mission.
The Product Line and the White Space [00:05:00]
Sam: So there’s a subscription element to the business as well, aside from the hero product. The Lawn Mower — that’s the trimmer — is that right?
Paul: Absolutely. Think about it this way: when you look at the female body, you realize there’s a product and a brand for every single female care need you can think of. When you switch to the male body, you start at the top with your hair — Gillette, Head & Shoulders, whatever — you go down to the torso with Old Spice and Native. When you get down to the groin, there’s nobody playing in the groin. That is total empty white space.
We got lucky when we recognized that a few years ago and were able to capitalize on it. We obtained an amazing name — Manscaped — and right now we define the category of male grooming in that space. We totally own this category.
What’s really important for us is to create the best products. Our mandate is we don’t optimize for price. We’re not the cheapest products. We are the best products. There are a lot of products out there from the low end to the high end, but we want to focus on creating the absolute best.
Sam: So talking about the Lawn Mower — which is a trimmer for your pubes, and it’s a fantastic name — you’re on the Lawn Mower 3.0 now. What went from 2.0 to 3.0? And what are you going to put in the 4.0? Is there customer feedback involved?
Paul: Absolutely. We have a Facebook group — the Ballers group. It’s a VIP group, invite-only. You have to ask to join. It’s for our closest, most engaged customers. And when I say best, it’s not a monetary value based on how much you buy — it’s just people that like the brand and want to interact with myself and our executive and product development team. We have about 2,000 to 3,000 people in there who are really interactive, love to test products.
One of the biggest things we do is our blade has what we call Skin Safe technology. It makes it really difficult to nick yourself down there, because if you’ve ever done that, it is the most horrible feeling. That’s what everyone is afraid of before they start manscaping. Our blades are the only blade out there specifically engineered to trim your groin. This is not your face — your face is pretty taut and easy to trim. The groin is loose skin. It’s a completely different experience.
Sam: Yeah, it’s not the same as trimming your beard.
Paul: Exactly. So going back to your question: how do we determine the difference between 2.0 and 3.0? It’s just innovating in the product pipeline. It might take a year, eighteen months to engineer a great product, so we have multiple products lined up. We’re designing the 4.0 at the same time we’re designing the 5.0 and planning the 6.0.
We’re a hardware company in addition to soft goods, so we have our own R&D lab with in-house industrial designers, material experts, and engineers. When we developed the 2.0, that was really our first mass product with Skin Safe. The 3.0 was an evolution — it had a light in it, because even if your bathroom is really lit, there are shadows. At first we thought, “Is a light a gimmick?” But then we put a light on a prototype and it was actually really useful, because you need to see down there. So the light made it into the 3.0. As for the 4.0 — I don’t want to talk about all the different features, but yeah, we’re really innovating on this experience.
R&D in-House: The Case for Going Deep [00:13:00]
Sam: Going back to this Facebook group — are you reaching out to those people to say, “Hey, we have the 4.0, does anyone want to try samples and give us feedback before we finalize production”? Is that how it works?
Paul: That cycle is actually more frequent with our soft goods — things like ball deodorant and products we’re testing in the pipeline. Those get tested internally, employees use it, then we expand to the VIP Ballers group.
Sam: Talk to me a little bit about R&D. It’s really amazing that you have that in-house as an independent company. We never had that at Native — even once we joined Procter & Gamble, most of our R&D was with third-party manufacturers. How big is this R&D group? I haven’t heard of a startup thinking about R&D within the first five years like you guys are doing.
Paul: That goes back to a firm belief of mine. I’ve always thought it was really important not only to go wide but also to go deep. There’s a saying: “a jack-of-all-trades, master of none.” I don’t think an entrepreneur can be like that. To be really successful, you not only have to go wide, you have to go deep and be a master of a lot of things.
With that belief, we’ve always made sure everything is done in-house. We’ve never hired an agency and we don’t use agencies for anything. All video production is done in-house. All media buying is done in-house. R&D is done in-house.
Sam: Oh my god. There are no agencies? So when you launch a TV commercial, you have your own in-house production team make it, your own in-house creative team decide what it is, and your own in-house editors cut it up as well?
Paul: Yes, that’s it.
Sam: How big is the entire team then?
Paul: Right now we’re at about 72 employees.
Sam: That is not that big, and pretty amazing based on the amount of content I see coming out of Manscaped. When did you hire your first R&D employee?
Paul: Like many other startups in the CPG space, we used contract manufacturers at first — third-party labs to create our first products. But about fourteen months ago we started really building out our own R&D lab. We hired our first research chemist, and we knew we had to retain this knowledge and really understand it from top down.
Having it in-house lets us iterate very quickly. What would take weeks working with an outside lab — you send them a brief, they send you samples, you send them back — those cycles are just way too long. Having a team we can work with hand-in-hand has really accelerated everything.
The Early Days: From Serious to Cheeky [00:19:00]
Sam: Okay, let’s start talking a little more about the early days of Manscaped. Before this R&D team exists, before you’re developing 4.0, you guys were working on the original products. Did you call the first product the Lawn Mower 1.0?
Paul: We called it the Lawn Mower, yeah.
Sam: Gotcha. How did your marketing strategy develop? I think everyone’s familiar with the Dollar Shave Club video that really launched that brand. How did you guys get started?
Paul: We first started by messaging around hygiene and cleanliness. Like, “Dudes, you guys should do this because it’s good for you, you’ll feel better.” And none of that was resonating.
Sam: How long did you try that type of marketing? That more serious, less cheeky approach?
Paul: Probably for three months.
Sam: And how much money did you spend in those three months to realize it wasn’t working? Ballpark — was it $10,000 or $100,000?
Paul: I think we spent about $50,000 on marketing. And then we realized that didn’t work.
Sam: So tell me about the evolution. What happened?
Paul: So we just changed gears. We knew there was a market for this, there was white space. We had to crack how to communicate with men. In my past I’ve had startups focused on women — skincare, perfumes and colognes, and other things. But we needed to understand how to get to that tipping point with men.
And we realized that dudes aren’t talking about this stuff. They don’t stand around the water cooler and say, “Hey, you look so great today, what volumizer are you using?” Dudes don’t talk about skincare, don’t talk about hygiene products — but they’ll talk about funny things, things that were hilarious and entertaining.
So we started creating videos. The first one I remember was towards the end of the year. Ryan Fiore, our VP of Marketing, actually dressed up as Santa. He’s got his Santa pants down around his ankles and the camera is just panning — and it looks like snow falling down, right? Because as you pan Santa’s legs, there’s a buzzing sound and it’s kind of snowing indoors. There was another person sprinkling fake white hairs onto the ground as we pulled the camera back and you could see Santa’s legs. That was the first video we shot.
Sam: That was the first move you made toward cheeky humor — away from “hey, this is good for you, it’ll make you feel better”?
Paul: Yeah, that was the first one.
Sam: Okay, let me talk a little more about that $50,000. Where did you end up spending it? You have a product people want, you’re testing to see if this concept has legs, but the messaging is what’s failing.
Paul: This is probably going to be the default answer across many startups: we spent it on Facebook and Google. That’s just the reality.
But what I do want to say: don’t get a false sense of confidence that your CAC is so low on Facebook that this will scale infinitely. There is a Facebook ceiling and a Google ceiling, and you’re going to hit it. A lot of entrepreneurs need to realize that early on. Facebook and Google are really good at targeting — they’re data powerhouses — but if your total addressable market is only this big, you’re going to hit that ceiling pretty quickly.
You have to think about how to broaden your product appeal and make sure you’re addressing a very large total addressable market. Eventually you’re going to have to market to men or women or both. If you’re still doing fine-tuned targeting, you can extract all the value you can — but you’re going to hit a ceiling.
Sam: I absolutely agree. At Native we saw a $2 CAC in 2015, a $4 CAC in 2016, a $6.50 CAC in 2017. Even just looking at that $2 CAC, it more than tripled over two years. And there were multiple ceilings. There was a ceiling at $200,000, a ceiling at $500,000, a much denser ceiling at $1,000,000. And trying to push against those ceilings took a lot of time and effort and the right messaging.
You’re absolutely right from an audience targeting perspective, too. Look-alike audiences crushed it for us for a really long period — until we hit one of those ceilings. We’d use a 1% look-alike, then expand to 2% and 3%, and then all of a sudden look-alikes don’t work anymore. At some point you’re like, “I’m targeting all women,” and then you’re like, “I’m targeting all humans that exist on earth.” Not everyone is going to buy something when they see a Facebook ad.
Paul: Absolutely. You gotta get off of platforms. Online should always be part of your marketing mix, but it should never be 100%. As soon as you can, you’ve got to diversify. It’s just never going to scale forever.
We diversified from Facebook and Google probably last year. One of our big channels is still YouTube, because a lot of people spend their time there. We’re one of the biggest spenders on Hulu, we have a massive TV budget, UFC sponsorship — we sponsor the UFC. And we haven’t really announced it yet, but we’re going to be one of the exclusive sponsors of the San Francisco 49ers.
Sam: What does “exclusive sponsor” for the 49ers mean?
Paul: I think next year when you go to Levi’s Stadium and go into any of the bathrooms, you’re going to see all our signage on top of all the urinals.
Sam: That is great. How many companies out there can actually buy that ad unit? Gillette isn’t going to buy that urinal ad unit. But it fits so well for Manscaped — and it fits the cheeky tone.
Paul: Right. When you see the signage with the finger pointing down and it says “Got bush?” — you’re standing right there and you can evaluate and think about that.
Sam: I want to talk much more about this, but before we get off the topic — the San Francisco 49ers sponsorship, ballpark the cost for me. Is it six figures? Seven figures? At Native, for reference, we were going to spend a million dollars on subway ads in New York City in 2020 — station takeovers were a low six figures, photos on subway trains were about $40,000.
Paul: It’s in the six figures, not to the seven figures. Definitely in the six figures.
Sam: Does it include tickets? Am I going to see you at 49ers games?
Paul: The 49ers management team is just phenomenal. We got to go to the Super Bowl with them — to the NFC playoffs in their box.
The Santa Video and Finding the Right Message [00:32:00]
Sam: Okay, let’s rewind. So you’ve spent $50,000, the seriousness wasn’t working, you’ve sort of pivoted, you’re running this Santa Claus video. It’s cheeky and funny — but nobody’s ever heard of Santa Claus trimming his pubes. What did you do with that video, and when did you realize cheeky humor was the right direction?
Paul: I’d answer that in two parts. First: you run it on Facebook and you run it on YouTube. And what you’re tracking at that time is how much am I paying per CPM and per click? How much is it costing me to deliver traffic to the website? Then when they get to the website, you have to be really observant and do a lot of conversion rate optimization. You’ve got to make sure that lead closes when they get to the site — presenting them with the right offer.
So we’re running that video, tracking CPM and CPA, driving to the website. Early days, what you’re looking for are signals. And what I mean by signals is: I identified three pillars of what was important to our male audience.
“When you trim the bush, the tree stands taller” — that was an important motivation factor.
“Use the right tools for the job” — if you’re going to do this, don’t hurt yourself. That was a really important marketing message.
We distilled down this big concept — “hey guys, don’t cut yourself, because that’s too crude to say directly” — into just “use the right tools for the job.”
And then “when you trim the hedges, the tree stands taller” tells you there’s a benefit beyond just feeling good. We always wanted to be a brand that encompasses masculinity and empowerment for men. We didn’t want to just be a grooming company — that was never our intention. But to get there, we had to figure out what men were receptive to.
So “if you trim the bushes the tree stands taller” — men got that right away. They felt this power, this feeling of empowerment. And “use the right tools for the job” because don’t cut yourself. That big learning probably cost about $200,000 to $250,000 to really learn.
It’s kind of philosophical when you’re talking about marketing this way — to spend that much money just to learn these two key things. And a lot of entrepreneurs aren’t really in tune with their audience. They might just pass them by. But we tested a lot of marketing messages and realized those two things combined together really resonated and really got men to understand the need — and why they should use dedicated tools specifically created to solve this problem.
Any startup trying to build a brand — not just a fast-pass platform where you’re just selling utility — if you want to build a brand in a highly competitive CPG space, you have to distill your marketing message to be so fine-tuned that it really resonates with a broad audience.
Sam: Can you give me examples of messages you thought might work and ended up not working?
Paul: There were so many. We had a bunch that made the shortlist. Like “feel fresher” or something like that. “Make sure you’re clean and ready all the time.” A bunch along that vein. It just didn’t resonate. It didn’t click with dudes. As a marketer, that’s what you’re searching for — how to sell your product in one simple statement where your audience understands it and sees the need instantly.
The Facebook Wall and Going Off Platforms [00:39:00]
Sam: So you spent $200,000 to $250,000 on Facebook and Google testing that messaging. I really liked what you said earlier about the landing page. Too often people are focused only on CPA and what their ad looks like, and they don’t look at how good their landing page is — whether they’re convincing people to buy once they get there, that it’s a good value, and that they should buy now. Those are two sides of the same coin and both dramatically impact CPA.
Paul: That’s where I go back to the agency question. It’s difficult to hire an agency unless you’ve got a lot of money — you’re venture funded. We weren’t at that time. Unless you have a lot of money, you wouldn’t be able to buy enough time from an agency to actually come up with these things.
So if you’re an entrepreneur with a really phenomenal product you’ve spent years building, I would say: take that leap and do the marketing yourself. Don’t be shy. At the core of my career I was a technologist — I didn’t do CPG, I wasn’t a brand guy, I wasn’t a marketer. I built SaaS and software. But you’re the only one who really understands the value of your product. Trying to communicate that through an agency is really hit or miss unless you’ve got a lot of money and you’re paying for a lot of their time.
Sam: Couldn’t agree more. 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 eight months ago, because I was like: this is the backbone of the business, this is how we’re growing, and I don’t want to outsource that to somebody else who by definition will have agency costs and won’t care about the business as much, won’t be looking at metrics as frequently, won’t be iterating on different test messages.
If this is a skill that’s important to the company, I should get good at it or at least understand it.
You mentioned you need a lot of money to hire agencies. Going back to what you guys did — you spent $50,000 on the serious messaging that didn’t work, then about $250,000 on testing until you found what did work. How were you able to afford this? Because early on you were bootstrapped.
Paul: We were bootstrapped and grew organically for a very long time. How we funded it was through prior successes — you gotta gamble and reinvest. That’s the best way to think about it.
Fundraising and spending investor dollars has a price. There’s a cost to that, and I think very often that gets overshadowed by the glitz and glamour of closing a round. That’s where I’d advise entrepreneurs: closing a round is just the beginning. You don’t know how much pressure that’s going to be on your ass all the time — how to spend that money. Then you get into a point where you’re starting to spend frivolously. I guarantee if we had a million dollars in the bank early on, we would have spent half a million testing things we didn’t need to test.
It’s a psychological trap to raise money way too early because that’s when you lose the most amount of your company — the most dilution. And it makes you less strict with yourself and your budget.
Sam: Absolutely. At Native we raised $50,000 at a $5,000,000 valuation, probably four months into the business. Then another $250,000 within the first year. The reason I did that early on was: the business was working, I wanted external validation, and honestly, I was in San Francisco and this is what everyone here does. There’s this great tweet — someone said “raise 10 million dollars and you get invited to every party in San Francisco, sell your business and make 10 million dollars, crickets.” People somehow celebrate fundraising more than they do actual successful exits, which doesn’t make any sense.
What scale were you at when you raised your first checks?
Paul: Well — and I want to make sure there’s some disclosure here, you were one of those early checks — we were beyond eight figures.
Sam: Wait, you were north of $10,000,000 in revenue but not north of $100,000,000?
Paul: Correct. And those few checks — we called it a sweetheart round — the impetus was to bring on amazing talent. There were no VCs in that note. It was pretty much hand-selected from a group of friends. People like yourself, Nick from Thrive — amazing individuals that could really contribute to the business and had the experience to call.
Sam: Has that been helpful? At Native, maybe half the investors were really helpful — people I could call and be like, “Hey, this is a problem I’m having, have you had it before?” We had Nick who helped me with trademark stuff early on, an executive at Facebook who helped us get access to the right people there, and Paul Ferris from Azure who was a calming voice when I was panicking. Has it been the same experience for you?
Paul: Absolutely. And you nailed it — about 50%. Even when you hand-select these guys, everyone’s got their own lives and their own jobs. Imagine if you don’t hand-select them — the value would be dramatically lower. With 50%, I can call anytime. And you gotta manage expectations — them investing in your company doesn’t mean they have ten hours a week for you. For key decisions, you can put out a broad email: “Hey, can anybody help me connect with this manufacturer?” — and you get really rapid responses. That’s what you can reliably get.
Diversifying Beyond Facebook and Google [00:51:00]
Sam: Okay. You’ve raised this sweethearts round, you’ve spent about $250,000 on Facebook and Google with the Santa Claus video and learned what messaging works. At what point did you start getting off Facebook and Google?
One of the most impressive things I found about Manscaped is the diversity of channel acquisition. YouTube is a really hard channel for people to scale. Hulu — we tried Hulu at Native and it wasn’t nearly as successful as you guys. How do you test new channels, and what are your largest channels of customer acquisition?
Paul: It depends. Between Facebook, Instagram, and Google — that’s still a very large channel. You can’t forget Instagram. It’s getting to be a huge channel. And then YouTube drives a tremendous amount of views. Not necessarily traffic to the site, but views. There’s so much inventory on YouTube it’s just hard to crack.
Sam: If all of these channels were going to be regulated by the FTC and all were going to be shut down except one, which one would you want to continue to exist?
Paul: Today I would say Google.
Sam: Interesting. And on YouTube — are you doing pre-roll ads, influencer-based ads, user-generated content?
Paul: We’re doing all of it. We’re doing hero ads, influencer ads, user-generated content. We have a team of five in our influencer department and all they do is work with influencers.
There’s a tipping point where everything starts to gel — all these channels lift each other. You can’t just be on Facebook and be successful. You’ve got to be on Facebook, Google, Hulu, everywhere else to actually scale massively. We realized that very early on. This year is a big push for us to be everywhere — including 20 billboards, you know, you’re in ads — we were on the Conor McGregor fight, a car in NASCAR.
Sam: Tell me how you structure your team to handle all that. Is one person working on YouTube also working on Instagram, or do you have someone dedicated to YouTube, someone dedicated to UFC and NASCAR?
Paul: There’s an out-of-home director, Joey Kovac — he’s phenomenal. But to answer the first part of your question: you gotta find the best people. The best people will bring in the best people, who will bring in the best people. As an entrepreneur, one of your primary jobs is to build the team — lead the vision and build the team.
So Ryan Fiore, our VP of Marketing, and I have been working together for almost a decade. Ryan brought in Joey Kovac, who did a lot of marketing for MVMT before they exited. Joey brought in Nate Singer to handle Google and YouTube. We brought in Nathalie Hopin to handle radio — she got us on Howard Stern and all these amazing podcasts. Then Lauren came on to handle influencers.
Sam: So you have directors for each channel, structured under a VP of Marketing?
Paul: Correct. But for a startup — don’t think you need that to start. You’ve got to do everything wrong first, right? In the beginning, Ryan and I were on YouTube every single day, clicking through and refreshing a thousand times a day to see metrics. That’s how you start. Then when you reach critical mass, you bring in someone to handle that channel and you pioneer the next one.
Sam: That’s a great thing to mention. A lot of people want to be in seven different marketing channels when they launch. I’ve rarely met people who are good at both Facebook and Google Ads, and people are like “I’m going to try Facebook, Google, Snap, Pinterest, and TikTok when I launch.” You’re not going to be able to measure anything. By the time you’re looking at TikTok, your fifth channel, you’ll have forgotten what your Facebook ads looked like.
I’m a big fan of going deep on one or two channels, becoming a master of those, and then hiring people once you’ve built critical mass and you understand the trajectory of that channel.
Paul: Absolutely. And once you understand the next three to four months of trajectory of that channel, you gotta master it, then you move on.
Budget Structure and the “Going Balls Out” Mentality [01:00:00]
Sam: How do you think about budgets when you’re doing this? Is there a quarterly meeting where you’re like, “Influencer team, you get 12% of the budget, radio team gets 10%”? Or are you saying, “We’ll spend up to a $30 CAC, and spend as much as you can until you hit that”?
Paul: Now we are more systematic, more organized. But the first two years, let’s be honest — nobody’s getting fixed budgets in the first two years. You’re still learning so much, still growing so much, it’s still so fluid. We just launched this channel with this video, the CPA is doing so well — go balls out. That’s the only thing that matters. Now I want to make sure the entrepreneurs out there don’t think you need formal budgets in place in the early days. You just gotta make it work.
Sam: In the early days it’s always audibles. Every day is a new fire. On the rare days where you can focus on marketing channels, you’ve got to go with what’s working — not dogma. You can’t be like “YouTube worked for Paul at Manscaped so I’m going to spend money on YouTube.” People come up to me like, “Facebook worked for you guys, how do I make Facebook work for me?” And I’m like, we had a specific use case, we were there at a different time, we were spending a lot of resources there. And with Manscaped — the content and the cheeky humor are much more amenable to video than to a quick mobile photo. People can’t get caught up in the dogma of others. You have to call audibles when you get to the line, see what’s working, and spend your time and resources there.
Failures in Operations and Inventory [01:05:00]
Sam: What did you guys fail at? It sounds like the non-cheeky marketing was one — but what about operationally? Supply chain issues? These hardware products can’t be made in a day or two.
Paul: In an all-encompassing way: if you’re in software and SaaS, you don’t have to worry about making stuff, right? But for hard, physical products and operations and supply chain, it’s a lot of work.
Sam: Can you give me an example of a disaster in operations?
Paul: So we had projected inventory for all of Q1. We bought it, we had it in stock. It was November and we’re like, “We’re good until April. That’s how much inventory we have.” And by December 16th — we were sold out. Everyone and their families were in the warehouse packing new inventory to send out. We shipped late to our customers, which means they weren’t happy. That’s a failure for us. We want to delight our customers all the time.
And that doesn’t go away, by the way. That happens all the time when you’re scaling. You can never predict how things will just pop — Howard Stern does a read, an influencer launches a video, things just explode. It’s really difficult to manage all the channels now because we’re not just DTC. We’ve got Amazon, international, retail. And with retail you’re planning months and months — sometimes a year — in advance. It’s a completely different beast.
Sam: I didn’t understand how hard that would be until Native got into retail. We scaled from making 500 units of deodorant a week in 2015 to 21,000 units a day in 2017, and we were still selling out. Once you sell to Target and Walmart, their first order could be 300,000 units — and all of a sudden the just-in-time inventory you’d always relied on is no longer sustainable.
Paul: Absolutely. And it gets really difficult as your SKU count starts to expand too.
Retail, Seasonality, and the Business Mix [01:12:00]
Sam: So what retailers are you in today?
Paul: Target and Best Buy. We’re focused on those two right now because that’s where our audience lives. We have a lot of great retail partners, but for 2020 we’re really focusing on Target and Best Buy.
Sam: Does your online site make up the majority of your sales, or do Target and Best Buy?
Paul: DTC ecommerce makes up the majority of our sales.
Sam: Is there cyclicality to the business? By December 16th you’d sold out — I imagine people are buying this product for Christmas. Is there another bump for Valentine’s Day, Father’s Day, other gift-giving holidays?
Paul: Valentine’s Day and Father’s Day — any gift-giving holiday, we see a bump. That’s when women buy gifts for men. Q4 is definitely huge, same as any ecommerce business.
Sam: For Native, Q4 was actually one of the worse quarters partly because people wear more deodorant in the summer. Deodorant as a gift is kind of a mediocre present. But if I gave you a package of Manscaped — it’s a higher price point, much nicer gift. I wonder if men ever accuse their female partners of this being a gift for themselves, like “I’m buying you lingerie but really it’s for me”?
Paul: We haven’t polled our customers on that, but we have a lot of unboxing reactions on Instagram and TikTok that have been pretty great.
Influencer Strategy: Start Big Enough to Get Data [01:18:00]
Sam: Did you work your way up from micro-influencers to A-list celebrities, or did you go big right out of the gate?
Paul: We haven’t gone with celebrities and we haven’t kept an interest in that. We went with amazing influencers. The first influencer we brought on was Jose Zuniga of Teaching Men’s Fashion. He’s phenomenal — he really knows men’s hygiene and grooming. We still work very closely with him today.
Sam: Did you put a significant budget toward testing influencers from the start, or were you testing with smaller accounts first?
Paul: I think testing with micro-influencers will give you really bad data, because there’s not enough reach. You need to test with enough reach to have a statistically significant sample. The more data you have, the better you can conclude from it. At that time, Jose had like four million followers on YouTube — that was the right amount for a good test.
Sam: So you’re looking for people who are already fairly large on YouTube. Is that still the case, or are you willing to go down to people with 10,000 subscribers now?
Paul: Now our influencer team evaluates each potential partner primarily for authenticity. If you’ve got 30,000 followers and all you’re doing is pushing products, you’re not the right influencer for us. We want you to actually test our product, really use it, be a fan of it. That authenticity comes through — as a brand, we really value authentic voice.
Sam: How do female influencers project that authenticity — by talking about their partners?
Paul: It depends on the platform. On Instagram, it might be taking a photo with a partner. On YouTube, it’s mostly couples — if it’s a female Instagram or YouTuber, they’d pair up with their partner and talk about the product. There are so many ways to talk about this: how it doesn’t hurt, the right tools for the job, how much better it makes them feel — women can say, “You give this to your man and it makes them so much better, you like it more.” We leave it up to them to put their own spin on it.
The Long Game: Building a Multi-Generational Brand [01:25:00]
Sam: We’re almost out of time. I want to ask a couple more questions. The business has changed dramatically — from you and Ryan refreshing YouTube a thousand times a day to today, sponsoring NFL teams and NASCAR teams. What is your goal with the business? Do you want to work here for 20 years? Is there an exit strategy within five years?
Manscaped is right in the wheelhouse of a lot of CPG companies — there’s a lot of competition for Gillette from Harry’s and Dollar Shave Club, and you’re in the same industry but going after a very different category or niche, uniquely positioned.
Paul: The way we think about it is: we never build a business with the sole purpose of exiting. If you create a successful business that transcends fads, that can be multi-generational, then potential acquirers just come naturally.
So we look at the last 40 to 50 years — there aren’t many brands able to be multi-generational. Head & Shoulders, Gillette, Pantene — most of them are Procter & Gamble brands. There aren’t that many brands that actually have the unit economics to transcend.
What I mean is: it costs a lot of money to build a brand. If you’re trying to sell shampoo at retail with 20-30% margins, there’s not enough margin to actually build a brand. You want to be able to spend $50,000,000 on marketing, then grow that to $100,000,000 on marketing for five or six years, and really have a global brand. Then you start harvesting. You have to pay your dues upfront — build the brand, really understand your audience, create amazing products within those five to seven years, and then after that you can smoothly start harvesting.
With our unit economics — we recoup the cost on the first unit sale. We can recycle that cash very, very quickly. That’s how we’ve been able to scale so quickly without any institutional funding. There are virtually no companies able to do that at $50,000,000 in revenue. That’s why the Aways and Allbirds of the world have raised capital.
We’re very fortunate to have gotten beyond nine figures in revenue without institutional capital, and those unit economics allow us to pursue a multi-generational strategy. We’re launching internationally — early in Australia, Canada, UK, all of Europe — and within the next three to five years we’ll be a truly global brand.
Sam: What’s really interesting is that you’re clearly incremental revenue. There’s no portfolio company in the grooming care space playing where you play. It’s the last frontier in male grooming.
Paul: Agreed. We’re not competing with Gillette, we’re not cannibalizing their sales. If a P&G were to acquire Manscaped, we’d sit within their grooming category but be completely incremental to the top line.
Sam: Not only is men’s below-the-waist grooming growing — you’re the reason it’s growing. When Native launched into Target, we grew their deodorant category something like 8% to 10% in the first year, and Target hadn’t seen that in a really long time. The men’s below-the-waist grooming category wasn’t growing quickly — you’re riding those coattails. You’re the reason it’s growing quickly.
Paul: We’re seeing really similar data with Target too. Great partner, great to be working with them. This category hasn’t been innovated in forever — it’s a brand new category. And we got lucky with the name Manscaped, which defines the category.
Final Question: The Boba Tea Tally [01:33:00]
Sam: Okay, one last question. I put on Twitter that I was interviewing you for a podcast and asked what should I ask you, and someone from your own team asked me to ask this: “Have the host guess how many gallons of boba tea the Manscaped team has consumed in total.”
Paul: The reason behind this is my wife loves boba — she’s addicted to it. She got the entire company addicted to boba. So I would say many many many hundreds of gallons.
Sam: I’m going to guess 120 gallons.
Paul: It’s definitely more than 120. We order it almost every day. With 70 people on the team, probably 40 of them are getting boba — I’ve gotta say it’s a great line item to have in a budget when you’re showing it to your board.
Sam: Paul, this was fantastic. Really love what you’ve built. Aside from having this incredible vision for the company and understanding where Manscaped fits within the CPG space, you also have these humble origins and you still remember the perspective you had when you launched the business and were struggling to get the right messaging out. Very few people at your stage maintain that perspective.
When I asked about budgets and you said, “Look, the first two years we called audibles at the line every time” — that was really great. It makes me realize that sometimes I’ve forgotten what it was like to be in the trenches. And it kind of makes me miss those days. So appreciate you bringing that up.
Paul: Thank you, I really appreciate that. Deep down at heart I’m an entrepreneur and I’ll always be an entrepreneur. It’s a special breed, and I celebrate all entrepreneurs out there because it takes guts to go out there and sacrifice every single day to follow your dreams. It’s not easy.
Sam: Couldn’t agree more. You’ve got to stand up to your family and friends — at my age, people are lawyers, making a lot of money, starting 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 entrepreneurs, and a ton of respect for you and what you’ve built at Manscaped.
And full disclosure: this also makes me realize how excited I am as an investor in Manscaped. After hearing all this, I’m like, “Oh, fantastic — this is doing really well.” So thanks again for your time and for taking my money.
Paul: Thank you. I’m excited to see what your next project is going to be.
Sam: Me too. I don’t know what it’ll be — hopefully once this COVID stuff dies down I’ll think of something. Really appreciate it.