667: He Built a $300M Men's Grooming Brand in JUST Three Years | MANSCAPED

0:01Hey founder fam, before we jump in, I want to take a quick moment to talk about our sponsor OmniSend, the email marketing and SMS platform built specifically for e-commerce founders. We've been recommending OmniSend to founder students and members of our platform for a while now because it just works. So whether you're launching your first store or you're scaling it to seven figures, it really helps you automate your marketing and get results. And did you know, on average, OmniSend customers make$79 for every$1 they spend, which is an insanely good return on investment. And if you're already on another platform, here's the thing.

0:35In just five days, you could actually be paying 35 % less without doing an absolute thing. OmniSend will move every flow across, list, and template. You just show up when it's done. And finally, because you're part of the founder community, you get 50 % off your first three months with the code FOUNDER50. Just head to OmniSend.com forward slash founder and that's founder without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump in the show. From zero to$300 million in 36 months shaving your stinky man bits. That's today's guest. Paul Tran, who's the founder of Manscaped, the brand that single-handedly created the men's below the belt grooming category.

1:15What started as a bloody mess with the wrong trimmer became a global D2C powerhouse, outgrowing a century-old industry and even walking away from a billion-dollar merger along the way. This is an incredible conversation where Paul's going to break down the exact playbook behind one of the most remarkable D2C scale-ups in recent history.

1:36Hear the stories, learn the proven methods, and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan.

1:50From zero to 300 million in 36 months, what was the exact moment where you saw a massive, unaddressed white space in men's grooming and you're like, we're going to launch Manscaped? Well, Nate, thanks for having me on this podcast. It's going to be really cool to talk to you guys today. The catalyst. So way back, eight years now, gosh, it's a long time. I had started three companies that same year. Manscaped was one of them. And Manscaped really was spawned out of a need. And it was really just, gosh, I'm going to be blunt, a bloody mess, getting nicked. And at that time, there was no brand that represented male groin care.

2:44There was no brand. Now when you think about male groin care, you can't help but think about Manscaped because we just define that category now. We absolutely own the mindshare of men for that area of the body. And so not to be too graphic for the guys listening, for the ladies, this is a real pain point for men. You know, there were beard trimmers, there were hair clippers, but there was nothing designed specifically for the groin. So we set out and after that bloody mess, I was just thinking, you know, there's got to be a better way. I hate to say that, but I guess all entrepreneurs have that epiphany.

3:38And it was a hypothesis. Are guys doing this and not talking about it? And these big conglomerates were just ignoring this category? Or was there no market at all? Nobody cared. Nobody was doing it. So we set off and we wanted to create a really good groin trimmer for men that was, number one, very safe. So, you know, our skin safe technology that we wrapped around our ceramic blade technology was the quarterstone of our technology and our trimmers. So started with a kind of a whimsical play on words. We called it the Lawnmower. I started with the Lawnmower 1.0. And from the very beginning, we knew that we didn't want to just be a hardware business.

4:34We wanted to be a men's lifestyle business. So from day one, we really didn't have any sales. We have this long-term vision of being a men's lifestyle business and taking care of men, like a brand that defines masculinity for men. So when we launched our first product, it wasn't just a trimmer. It was an entire kit to take care of your groin. And this included really funny and witty things. We thought through the entire process. We had a mat. We called it the magic mat. And it was a newspaper that we wrote with really whimsical and witty articles that you could actually sit down and read and be entertained by it.

5:24It had graphics on how for you to mow a landing strip. It was just really funny. But it had a utility, too. It allowed you to groom, cover everything up, and throw it out. So from day one, we knew that we wanted to package everything and make it really easy for men. So that's kind of how we started. and it was from an entrepreneur side, from a perspective, we're talking about strictly the business and not just the product. You know, we brought in, I think it was 10 ,000 units and we're experimenting. You know, this is back in the early days. This is back, you know, when we were starting to bring in units It was probably eight years ago.

6:22And it was all platforms. It was, at that time, Facebook hadn't changed its name to Meta yet. So it was platforms, scaling platforms, Facebook, Google, YouTube. In that heyday, in that time frame, ads were still really reasonable. Ad rates are just incredibly expensive now. and we brought in the 10 ,000 units and we kind of struck a chord. So the three businesses that I started that year, Manscaped had the lowest revenue, but we felt it had the highest potential. And it just scaled massively from there. Yeah, so I'd like to explore that. So the three businesses, you said that it had the lowest revenue, but the highest potential.

7:14What did that look like? and can you give us some comparisons or any specifics there? Yeah, yeah. Great question. So the two other businesses had higher revenue, but there was a sense that there was something special with Manscaped. And here were the indicators for us. When I would read the comments on our Facebook ads, and people were really excited just reading the comments. So that was a big indicator. The second one was we would shoot up in revenue and then be dark for two or three months as we get a new inventory. So we bring in 10 ,000 units and it would sell out two weeks and then we're dark.

8:00And then we would have to wait for the next set of inventory. Then we'd sell out and we'd go dark again. So the volume of products that we were able to sell was another really important indicator that this was striking a chord. And then kind of the last one was just the everyone that was working on Manscaped was just so excited about it. So with those insights, it gave me the confidence that we have to lean into Manscaped. Interesting. And so to do your first run, 10 ,000 units, how did you find the manufacturer? Did you have to raise any money to fund that first MOQ? Talk us through that piece of the puzzle because you launched a kit.

8:57Many founders now, they launch with perhaps one hero product. You launch with a kit, great for AOVs, early days, great for unit economics with Facebook ads. But that's the stuff that people are starting to work out and go really hard on now, right? But back then, you could launch a product and you could have a$40 AOV and still be profitable. Now, that's very difficult, right? Very difficult. Yeah. So talk us through that. Yeah. Yeah. So back then, ad testing was king. You couldn't iterate through ads as quickly as you can now. Because with AI, back then you still had smartphones, but you didn't really shoot real content on smartphone.

9:51We still shot, if you want to shoot high quality content, we're still on DSLRs and you're still editing. It's so easy to edit videos and content now. And there wasn't as much noise in the market. But, you know, it's just there wasn't as many brands trying to capture the consumer's attention. So when we launched, it was all about how do we achieve the lowest CAC, right? And at one time, our CAC was like$23 for an$89 AOE product. And that was once again, because we struck a chord. We started building a community. And of course, those days are gone. Our CAC is higher than that now. But it was all about performance media.

10:43And I don't know your cohort of the audience. So I'm going to just kind of take a step back. There's performance media. There's brand media. performance media drives to sale brand media builds your brand and i'll give you a a funny a funny story so on on facebook there's there's this toggle right um where or the meta platform there's this toggle where do you want to do you want to drive for conversions or do you want to drive for reach right and any advertiser in the digital space will know that you never switch that toggle over to reach because it will spend your money so fast and not get you any conversions that your head will spin.

11:27So very early days, I remember getting a call from, at that time, our head of media. His name is Ryan. And he's like, Paul, dude, I just spent$18 ,000. and it was just like that. It was literally in the span of an hour. And I'm like, wait, what? Like how many, what did we drive? And for, you know, for 18 grand. It's like, we didn't drive any sales. We hit that reach button. I didn't realize I hit that reach button. And it was a shock. Cause at that time,$18 ,000, you know, losing$18 ,000 was a big deal. Cause we literally started the business with$50 ,000, right? And so it was the inventory cycle and it was because we were digitally native.

12:20It was all D to C. You can recoup that cash very quickly. Now we're omnichannel. So, you know, we have Target, Walmart, you know, Best Buy. Those are on net 30, net 60. So it's the cash cycle is very different now. But back then you can recoup the cash very quickly and put it back into inventory. But$18 ,000 is a big hit. right? And I'm talking to you through the evolution of how we market. We actually spend money. We actually flip it to reach these days. So, you know, as we build out our campaign and our marketing strategy, there are campaigns that are focused on conversions. And believe it or not, there are campaigns that focus on reach, where we just want to drive brand and drive eyeballs and awareness and tell our story.

13:10And that's top of funnel marketing. And that's a good example of like the Super Bowl. Like when you run a Super Bowl commercial, you're not expecting to drive conversions. You're expecting to drive brand and awareness. Yeah. So when did you guys start raising money? So you scaled pretty quickly. Like that's crazy. zero to 300 million in 36 months. You raised 23 million along the way. When did you start raising money? I think it was, well, we started raising money. I can't remember exactly when, but I do know that number that it only took us 23 million to get to 300 million in revenue. And the fundraising cycle for us was, it wasn't just a, here's a chunk of 23.

14:07It was friends and family along the way. And as the business scaled, we were funding additional inventory. um for there was there was a pivotal moment that we we we knew that we uh we wanted to hold off on going into retail until we were ready and it for us what defined ready was we wanted to be like i think 50 60 million in in marketing spend to drive awareness through at that time it was really just D to C, Amazon had just activated. So we wanted to make sure that we can drive door swings for our retailers. And that's one of the things that I think hurts a lot of small companies, that they go into retail when they're not ready and the product sits on the shelf.

15:04And what ends up happening is you have markdowns and if it doesn't sell, the retailer either destroys it or sends it back to you, it's not a desirable outcome. So we were really careful before we entered retail. And we wanted to make sure that when we did, our first partner was Target. Now we have many retailers, including Walmart is a wonderful partner of ours, Best Buy, CVS, and not to mention all the international retailers. but that's a if your listeners are are listening there's retail is an amazing vehicle just make sure you have the right strategy for retail and many digitally digitally native startups don't don't necessarily have that that strategy or that expertise in-house yeah so a question that has come up in our community that i do see that is common is you have traction you you know you're doing well with the brand you might be doing seven multiple seven figures you've got a big retailer opportunity you want to jump at it because you're worried that competitors might get in before you um then i'm sure you you know you guys experience this too right you've got a great brand you built that white space like there's a white space you built out this blue ocean but then copycats come, you know, 50, 60 million in annual media spend.

16:37That is crazy scale. At what point should a brand know when to go into retail? Like, because you have 50, 60 million annual spend, like that's crazy. I think it depends on the product and the category. I'll speak about us in our category and then I'll speak in general. So for us, we were where our competitors are, are centurions, right? They, they've been around for over a century. If you think about our competitors, they've been around for over a hundred years. Most of our competitors have been around for over a hundred years. So they're very established. They're very entrenched. So it was really important for us to, to define really who we are, what we stand for to the new audience, to capture this younger audience.

17:33If you talk to your dad, he'll know of our competitors. But if you talk to a younger male audience, right now it's literally down to 18 to 45, even 55. They all know Manscaped. And so that was the audience that we wanted to capture. So it was important to us that we felt confident that we had a really great brand awareness and connection with our audience before we went into retail. So that, and there's no way to really peg a number on it. It wasn't, you can't peg a number on it. And definitely retail can help you grow and build brand awareness because our partnership with all of our retailers is phenomenal.

18:22And we have signage, the brand is prominent in the store. So all that helps the brand. But just, I'm going to go back, just be careful and mindful that you have to drive sell-through for your retail partners. It's not a one-way thing where you sell into retail and you expect them to just sell for you. So that's on our side. In general, depends on the category, right? If you're food and beverage, shipping water is really expensive. You know, you can't, and the margins there don't support D2C. You're not, you're never going to be profitable. Your CAC is never going to make sense as a D2C business.

19:06You might have very, very, a very small business, very niche, but it'll never be able to scale without retail. So it very much depends on the business if retail is the catalyst for your growth and scale. So I would say D2C native, seven figures, multiple seven figures. You're doing well. You've got a big retailer opportunity. You're worried about competitors perhaps coming in and getting in before you. You've got a niche product like yourself. There are copycats starting to come up. You want to be that first in that big retailer. How do you still know? Okay, that's a complicated question. Let me try to tackle that because it's a very specific...

20:00My answer would be very specific to the brand, the product. But I'll try to be as general as I can. Um, going, if you're a seven figure business and you're, you're contemplating going into retail, you have to ask yourself, is it niche enough that you're going, is it, okay, let me rewind. Is it, is it niche enough? And will it stand out on the shelf? Here's what I, here's what I mean by that. If it's, if it's too niche and you're not able to get it to stand out on the shelf, nobody's going to recognize it. right? That's, that's the, that's the challenge, right? It, because I don't know, I'm going to make, I'll make something up.

20:45Almond water, cashew water, right? You got some amazing cashew water. That's whatever, making this, I'm making this up guys. So just don't, don't go out there and make cashew water. And it tastes amazing, but nobody knows what cashew water is or how it tastes or how it should taste. Right. And if that's, if sitting on, if it's sitting on the shelf and you can't tell your story with it, with the packaging and the design of the packaging, it's going to sit there. It's going to be really hard to move. A good example is Liquid Death. They sell water in a can, right? They spend a tremendous amount of energy and capital branding, telling their story, right?

21:31And creating followers and a community around it. They know that their distribution is through retail because once again, shipping water is, you just can't make money shipping water. So they know that their eventual distribution channel is retail. But you kind of heard of liquid death outside of the retail channel, right? It's not like you walk down the aisle, you saw liquid death for the first time. And I'm going to pick up a can of liquid death because it has skulls on it. And I know that it's selling water. There's water in that can. right you already followed the brand you like the brand and you know that there's water in that can that's why you pick it up yeah got you okay that makes sense thank you so let's go back to the the spend because that's really interesting um you guys spend nine figures annually on on media um and you have to walk a very fine line like you said between brand and performance and you have to be edgy enough to destigmatize male grooming without crossing into territory that alienates or offends.

22:38So what was the exact testing strategy that led to the viral success of ads like the singing hairball monsters Super Bowl spot? Use a lot of humor in ads. I think it's very clever. Talk us through that. Well, we never wanted to be, and I'll give you an interesting story also on walking this thin line. You know, if you think of your favorite comedian, right? Comedians are really good at this. You kind of have to be edgy, but you also can't cross a line, right? Because you cross a line, you get canceled. And it's really hard. It's very difficult to walk that line. and at the same time appeal to a mass audience.

23:29So the way that we look at it is we want it to be witty and of course there's humor in everything that we do, but it's witty humor. It's not slapstick humor. It's not vulgar humor. So very early on, and this is really for us, we firmly believe. Very early on, as you know, our core product started as a groin trimmer, but now we've expanded way beyond that. We have head shavers, beard shavers. We take care of men from head to toe. I mean, everything that you can think of, including skincare. But in the early days, it was the groin. And if you think about it, one of the things that you must test is women marketing your product.

24:17So of course we tested women marketing our product, influencers marketing our product. And of course, what sells provocative images of women get clicks, right? And as you know, the more clicks you get, the more people get to your website, the more people will convert, and better, better cack. We saw that. We saw that in our data when we worked with influencers that were women influencers that were more provocative, it drove better and higher sales. We made a decision internally that we were not going to do that. And that was a firm decision within the company that we didn't want to have that kind of marketing.

25:07we wanted to stick with the focus of empowering men, not showing provocative pictures of women to sell our product. And that was a key moment for us. Because I think that if we went down that path, sure, we would have made more money at that time. We would have driven better cash, but it wasn't who we wanted to be. So you talked about bundling and kits when you first started. And we talked about your initial average order value being$89. So that's really solid, right? And your business maintains a 4 % site conversion rate. for founders that are listening to this what specific bundle structures or pricing tests led to 66 percent of first-time buyers choosing a starter set because that's incredible for for a cac for for a cac to ltv even even just a 30 day like that's that's amazing and then you've got subscription on the back end and all of these other parts of your ecosystem from an economic standpoint, it makes sense how you were able to scale.

26:26Yeah. So I'm taking you back now. This is three, four, five years ago when we were still very DTC prominent and DTC heavy. Now we're omnichannel. So it's a very different business now than when it was when we were much smaller. um so when we're talking about when we're talking about um cac bundling and kits the i would say it's value it if you're if you're trying to bundle the reason that you bundle is so your customers gets a better value right and with that value you're driving a lower cac and higher conversion Right? So if I were to guide the listeners, if you're trying to test your CAC versus LTV, and you're looking to bundle, test many different bundles, but really understand what those customers want and the value that they associate to that bundle.

27:37because that's where you're going to hit the right CAC metric versus the right AOV. Because ultimately, that's what you're trying to do, right? And especially if you have a consumable, right? Because we have consumables. So you buy a kit. It'll come with a body wash and our chairman or our beard trimmer, whatever that is in our kits, right? or shaving cream or power shave cream or beard oil. And that's a replenishment. We want you to try that because we know that you'll love it and then you'll come back and you'll either buy online or you'll buy on Amazon and you'll buy at retail. Yeah, so when it comes to, I guess, post-purchase, upsells, downsells, all of that good stuff, what advice do you have for founders there we've got we talked about bundling but also just on the kind of maximizing AOV is there any tips tricks hints or tests that you've ran that could be really helpful oh yeah um I I think it I think it comes back to once again value for your customers and I want you to I want your listeners to think of of value as value to you and value to the customer.

28:57And this is what I mean by that. When I say value to you, it's expensive to drive someone to your website and expensive to drive that conversion, right? So when they're there, you want to present them with the greatest value that you deem for that session, right? That cart. So if you're thinking about upsells, right? There's multiple ways to upsell, right? Upsell upsell right you can hit one more time with an email upsell to add things to to to the cart but once again that comes back to value to the customer and value to you right how much are you willing to get them to to add something into their cart because it drives up to incremental alb while balancing the value to the customer so once you once you figure out that balance that's the right state to be in.

29:56Yeah, because the reason I ask that question is you guys are clearly incredible marketers and you clearly worked out pretty early on. But one common thing that I see amongst founders is they don't have post-purchase one-click upsells in place and they're leaving an extra$5 or even$10,$15,$20 sometimes depending on the price point in increasing average order value, depending on the offer, which is crazy. Like that's the difference between being profitable on first purchase and not in some cases. Oh, absolutely. You're absolutely right, Nate. That is, and these days, it's so easy. You install a Shopify app.

30:31Everyone's on Shopify. If you're on BigCommerce, I don't know what you're doing. You're still in Magento. I don't know what you're doing. Everyone's on Shopify now. It's a Shopify app and you literally just add in and you're up and running. Yeah, it's crazy. So I'd like to talk about, we talked about this offline. you said that if you were to start a brand now it would be very different to when you started you know seven eight years ago you would do things very very very differently and you guys are at a very different phase compared to most of our listeners right so most of our listeners are early stage recently hit product market fit or in the scale phase but not the level of scale where you guys are at multiple nine figures, you know, nine figures in annual media spend like that's that's very, very large.

31:21So what would you do differently? The landscape has definitely changed. And what is do you have any kind of controversial takes or things that you would do differently? Do you like to share? I think where I think, well, so if you just look at the landscape over the last eight years, right? Media, what does it mean? Media has gone much more expensive. right? There's much more competition in the space. It's much easier to put up a brand these days, right? Literally, you can tell Claude to put up a website. And remember, keep in mind, back in the day, you know, I'm sitting there cutting up Photoshop files to code a Shopify theme.

32:03Now, literally, Claude can do that for you in 15 minutes. So if you know that it's really easy to create a product, it's really easy to set up an e-commerce site, it's really easy to create ads through AI, then what is your advantage? What do you need to do to outpace your competitors? And I think that, number one, you really got to understand AI and how to utilize those tools. So if I were to do it again, I'd streamline the workflow to iterate and test much faster. just because the tools are there to be able to do that.

32:47We thought that when we were iterating and testing, at that time, we were so fast already. It was daily turnaround because my back were on software, so we would design the sites, design the landing page, and it would be sent offshore to be coded. The next day, we have a new landing page that we're testing. Now you don't have to do any of that. And now even there are AI software out there that will help you iterate through all of your testing. So testing your landing page and your funnel can be so easy. And you really don't need to have a team of 10, you know, I'm exaggerating, maybe a team of five to do that, right?

33:27You can literally do it one or two people sitting in a room and iterate through ads and find the right landing page, the right offer, the right ads, and see if you can achieve product market fit or not. Then you're getting to scale. Now, as soon as you hit product market fit and you understand who your consumers are, how to speak to them, it's all about scaling, right? So I see startups as, and I have a workflow that goes in my mind on how startups should, especially consumers should be started. You create the product. You make sure your product's really good, right? That's a given. Whether it's food and beverage, trimmers, soap, shampoos, whatever that is, you figure out what's differentiated, what's lacking in the market, and you create that product.