Harry’s founder Jeff Raider talks business strategy

Harry’s co-CEO Jeff
Raider.
Hollis Johnson/Business
Insider

• Harry’s co-CEOs
  Jeff Raider and Andy
  Katz-Mayfield are intentional with every move they make — and
  don’t make. 
• Raider told Business Insider that while the company has a lot
  of opportunity, it has finite resources and a small team relative
  to competitors, so it has to be strategic about where it
  invests. 
• That’s why Harry’s sells only a small number of high-quality
  products. “We’d rather do three things incredibly well than 100
  things not so well,” Raider tells his team.

Since its first round of funding in 2012, razor company
Harry’s has raised nearly half a billion dollars.

Harry’s razors are marketed toward men who value
simplicity, Jeff Raider, Harry’s co-CEO, said on an episode of
Business Insider’s podcast “This Is Success.”

And for Harry’s, simplicity isn’t only a marketing tool. It’s
also a business strategy. Raider said he and co-CEO Andy
Katz-Mayfield are intentional with every move they make — and
don’t make. 

“One of the things we always talk about is that strategy is what
you don’t do, as opposed to what you decide to do, because we
have all these opportunities,” Raider said. “And so for us, it
was about thinking about, ‘OK, what are the things that we really
want to do, and the things that we’re not sure about,’ and then
getting input from our team, and board, and advisers, and other
people at the right points in time, to help us where those
answers may not be as clear.”

As Raider said on “This Is Success,” Harry’s is strategic
about the opportunities it chooses to pursue. “We only have a
finite set of resources,” he said. “And we still have a pretty
small team, relative to our competition, which are these giant
companies. And so for us, we need to be really intentional about
the things that we decide to do, and then, in turn, the things
that we decide not to do.”

Unlike Harry’s competitor, Dollar Shave Club, Raider and
Katz-Mayfield own their razors and every aspect of the
business. In the past year, Harry’s raised $112 million to
create a variety of personal care products for its nearly five
million active users.  But rather than selling a wide
variety of products, Harry’s only sells one type of shave gel,
one post-shave balm, and one face wash.

Read more:  

I cofounded Harry’s and Warby
Parker. Here’s the best advice I can give you about raising
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“We haven’t launched a million different men’s grooming
products, because we care so much about the quality of each one
of our products, and about the idea that we want guys to be able
to really understand what we make, and how those products are
different from each other,” Raider said.

If Raider and Katz-Mayfield disagree on a company decision, the
co-CEOs look to Harry’s advisers and present the question in a
unified front. 

“At the end of the day, we try to come to our team, then, with
saying, ‘Listen, we’d rather do three things incredibly well than
100 things not so well,'” Raider said. “And that’s allowed us to
be pretty deliberate in the way that we’ve built the brand.
Harry’s is now five years old. We sell in the US, Canada, and the
UK only, as opposed to all over the world, which is a choice we
could have made.”

Listen to the full episode and subscribe to “This Is
Success” on
Apple Podcasts or Art19.