Dollar Shave Club Raises $75M to Fend Off Gillette and Harry’s | Hacker News Reader

Dollar Shave Club Raises $75M to Fend Off Gillette and Harry’s

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10 pointshrshtr8 comments

Meanwhile, wet shaving trend is coming back into focus as well. DE razors and straight razors are getting wildly popular and I must admit -- I paid $90 about 4 years ago and I still have enough blades for another 5 years of shaves. The soap/cream is dirt cheap and lasts an incredibly long time too. To top it off, I even have a lifetime supply of cheaper blades my wife can use.

I'm not sure why anyone would want to use any of the modern razors when the old school method works so well and is so dirt cheap.

Gillette is not the best a man can get (unless we're talking about their 7 O'Clock Super Platinum [1] or Silver Blue[1] DE blades which are pretty nice)

It's weird to think that I'm shaving like my grandparents used to. One of my grandfathers was a barber and I'm sad his old gear was thrown out before I had a chance to find it....

I also recall remodeling a wall behind a bathroom in my childhood home and finding hundreds of razor blades stashed in the wall because the old medicine cabinets used to have a slot to dispose of your blades. That always seemed like a bad idea to me because we had tornadoes...

I guess I'll stop waxing nostalgic now :-)

[1] http://www.westcoastshaving.com/Gillette-7-OClock-Super-Plat...

[2] http://www.westcoastshaving.com/Gillette-Silver-Blue-Double-...

I started shaving with a standard safety razor about 6 years ago. Multiblade razors do a number on my skin. I've never looked for any alternative since switching. The blades (single blade/double edged) are about $0.60/each and for me they last about 10-12 shaves; almost two weeks. I order everything off Amazon. I probably spend $40-50/year on shaving supplies.

Good luck to them though, they'll probably be bought up by CVS or Walgreens or some other beauty retailer when they're ready to plant a flag in the online "subscription" world. This isn't a viable stand-alone business.

That's a good prediction. I'm not sure how they could survive independently. It doesn't make sense.

In a similar vein, you can find the fountain pen. It's not quite the cost advantage, but a 20$ lamy pen and a 12$ bottle of ink will last you a long, long time. It will also feel better too, ballpoints particularly need an offensive amount of force to write with, whereas fountain pens just glide across the paper.

Funny how old stuff is kinda having a revitalization, especially with stuff like mechanical keyboards. I wonder what the next oldnew tech will be.

I need to try this... thanks!

Interesting what you say about the friction/glide of pens.

At primary school (UK) I was taught to write with a 'proper' fountain pen. Ink was in little plastic cartridges. We were forbidden from writing with ballpoint pens. (Calculators were also forbidden in maths.)

The reasoning was that fountain pens have more friction. I think it was related to how hard against the paper you pressed. You could hear the scratch of the pen on the paper. This allowed the pen to flow easily in some directions, and with more friction in the 'wrong' direction.

This might explain why some people (myself included) have such terrible handwriting. In the US we're taught on pencils or ball point pens.

> I wonder what the next oldnew tech will be.

Analogue, chemical, film process.

When someone works out how to make it in reasonable quantities I think we'll see people using analogue cameras and chemical film.

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