Harry's

The whole company traces back to a locked drugstore display case. Andy Katz-Mayfield was standing in a Santa Monica Rite Aid, out of blades, waiting for a clerk with a key to free an overpriced cartridge from its plastic prison — and the absurdity of the ritual stuck with him. He and Jeff Raider had met years earlier as analysts at Bain & Company, and the name they eventually chose, Harry's, was a deliberately plainspoken, slightly old-fashioned nod to the kind of dependable everyday object a man might actually trust.

The early playbook was charity as much as commerce: the first subscription boxes shipped alongside a 'Give a Shave' program that donated razors to organizations serving veterans, a model that later evolved into donating one percent of sales and giving employees paid volunteer days. Buying the German blade factory wasn't enough to keep the company independent forever, though. The proudest moment of its history is arguably a deal that fell apart — when Edgewell, the owner of Schick, agreed to absorb Harry's, regulators argued in court that erasing this particular upstart would specifically dull competition in shaving. The acquisition died, and Harry's emerged not chastened but emboldened, raising a fresh round at a valuation higher than the failed sale and reframing itself as a builder of consumer brands rather than a single razor company.

That ambition took concrete form through an internal incubator that spun up Flamingo, a women's grooming line, and brought deodorant maker Lumē into the fold. By the mid-2020s revenue had climbed into the hundreds of millions, an IPO was on the table, and the brand rolled out its first full visual overhaul since launch. Throughout, its marketing leaned hard into men's mental-health advocacy — an unusually earnest throughline for a company that started by mailing cheap razors to people too annoyed to fish for a clerk's key.

Sources:[1][2][3]