10-Month-Old Startup Buys 93-Year-Old Business
Before Jeffrey Raider and Andy Katz-Mayfield even launched Harry’s, an online service for men’s grooming products, they had their eyes set on a first acquisition. The pair wanted to buy an old German razor factory for $100 million.
That isn’t how most new startups operate, but then again this wasn’t Raider’s first time around. Raider was one of the cofounders behind Warby Parker, the popular e-commerce service for eyeglasses founded in 2010 and currently said to be valued at around $500 million.
In 2011, Raider received a call from Katz-Mayfield, a friend, who complained about his experience buying razors and shaving cream at a store. “Could you do it better?” Katz-Mayfield asked. That conversation sparked the idea for a company that would sell high-quality shaving products for a reasonable price to compete with more established businesses like Gillette and The Art of Shaving and upstarts like Dollar Shave Club. But it turned out to be harder than they thought to find high-quality razors.
