Jack Black

The idea arrived in 1998, and almost everyone thought it was wrong. Curran Dandurand, a veteran of Mary Kay's global marketing, became convinced there was a serious skincare customer that the industry had written off entirely: men. Conventional wisdom held that American men would never bother to cleanse, exfoliate, or moisturize, and investors passed accordingly. She pressed on anyway, joining forces with colleague Emily Dalton and her husband Jeff Dandurand to build the company on their own terms.

The trio's wager was that men wanted results without ritual — effective formulas stripped of the fuss, the jargon, and the dozen-step regimens marketed to women. The debut lineup was deliberately tight: ten products, anchored by a face wash, a double-duty shave and beard lubricant, and a lightweight moisturizer, sold on the promise that a man could do his whole routine in under two minutes. Formulas leaned on recognizable performers like glycolic acid, menthol, and plant oils, kept fragrance-free or lightly scented and put through dermatologist and ophthalmologist testing to reassure a skeptical first-time user. The pared-down approach became the brand's signature and its differentiator in a category that barely existed at retail.

Momentum built through word of mouth and a few lucky cultural endorsements, including visible fans among the Dallas Cowboys and a public nod from Matthew McConaughey, before the line expanded into department-store distribution. From those original ten items the range has since grown past seventy, spanning shave, hair, body, and targeted treatments, while keeping the no-nonsense positioning intact. That steady, decades-long focus on a single underserved customer is ultimately what made the business valuable — and what carried it to a sale reported at just under one hundred million dollars.

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