How Goodshave (Razor Subscription Startup) Impacts Lives With Its #ShaveItForward Initiative

Goodshave is a men’s and women’s shaving company that sells beautifully crafted and unique razors for men and women.

For every razor @GoodShave sells, the company also donates a razor to homeless shelters and food banks. It’s an initiative called #shavingitforward.

Here is how Mark Hurson (Founder) and his team built a GOOD company. 

Mark writes:

“Goodshave was originally started in January 2015 in a small town north of Toronto Canada. After seeing the Dollarshaveclub youtube video that rose to much exposure and popularity.

We realized there was still a real need for a more affordable razor product in the marketplace. We pieced together a great team of founders who complimented each other in areas such as marketing, distribution, product purchasing and affiliate marketing.

There was no blue print to building a start up online razor company and we certainly “learned as we went”. We first encountered a lot of resistance with even finding good razor product to purchase and had to fly across the Atlantic to secure inventory from a solid factory.

We then had to piece together the technology to handle the online orders, CRM and billing required for a subscription service. We spent a TON of money on many wild goose chases and technology solutions that really resulted in just wasting our time and having to backtrack and start over.

We thought because of the depth of experience with our founders this whole experience would be a cake walk. In reality it was a very long hard grind and we lost partners along the way that were either not contributing or could not “stick it out”. Many times we thought we would just quit and give up and go back to making money in our other businesses we were running.

The “AHA moment” came in September 2015, when we decided to differentiate ourselves from every other online razor company. We wanted to give back and appeal to a customer base who were not so sensitive about price and also wanted to be socially responsible.

We called this new campaign “Shaveitforward” … We decided to donate a razor to homeless shelters and food banks for every razor we sell to consumers (refills included). We found that many people associated their personal grooming to a sense of self respect and dignity.

Those less fortunate could not afford to spend $20-30 a month on overpriced razors…. So we decided to build the cost of these donation razors into our subscription model and then everything BLEW UP!!!

We found that there was a huge amount of customers that loved our story of giving and would gladly share our story (for free!) with others on social media, e-mail and by word of mouth.

Our twitter followers spiked, our Facebook likes massive increased and our instagram account grew to thousands immediately.

Over the holiday season we donated over 2500 razors to organizations such as the Orangeville Food Bank, St Anne’s Church, Daily Bread Food Bank, Covenant House and Family Transition Place.

To go in and drop off these donation razors to these organizations felt fantastic and we got to meet some really wonderful caring people.

In closing Goodshave is still a startup and we still encounter a lot of challenges but we are so glad we stayed the course. 2015 was the practice lap and 2016 will certainly be game time for us.

We look forward to building out more products to offer our customers and creating more awareness for our brand and helping those less fortunate.

After running online businesses for the past 15 years I can certainly say this is the best work of my career and what i am most proud of.”