Dr. Squatch

The whole empire traces back to a flare-up of psoriasis. Jack Haldrup's skin reacted badly to mass-market bar soap, and when small-batch, cold-process natural soap calmed it down, he spotted a gap nobody was serving: men who wanted that kind of gentle, plant-based bar without the apothecary preciousness. Working a regular job by day, he started pouring cold-process batches by hand at home with little capital, a slow craft-soap operation that would have stayed a hobby if not for what came next. The accelerant was video, not chemistry. A run of irreverent, deliberately ridiculous ads, the most famous of which gleefully told men they'd been lathering up with something closer to dish detergent, racked up staggering view counts and turned a Sasquatch mascot and a subscription box into a cultural shorthand for the modern men's-grooming reboot. The brand pressed the advantage with a splashy national TV spot during the 2021 Super Bowl, an extension of its viral playbook built to convert entertainment into recurring subscribers, then layered on a steady stream of pop-culture tie-ins. From soap the range fanned out into body wash, deodorant, hair care and cologne, scaling almost entirely through direct-to-consumer subscriptions before pushing onto mass retail shelves. The honest framing matters here: this is a fragrance-and-grooming brand wearing soap as its origin costume, and the appeal genuinely lives in branding, scent and generous sizing rather than novel actives or clinical correction. The cold-process formulas are perfectly competent and the experience is fun; expectations should simply land on a well-marketed, great-smelling shower upgrade rather than a treatment regimen, and on those terms it overdelivers on entertainment value.

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