Blade Runners

Harry’s built an old-school shaving brand through online subscription boxes. Now it’s targeting a bigger market.

- Steven Bertoni

A vast loft space with polished herringbone floors, wall-mounted bike racks and desks of trendy twentysomethings (mostly), Harry’s headquarters in Manhattan could easily pass for the Hollywood set of a fictional, well-funded hypergrowth upstart.

But venture inside the razor company, which is taking aim at Gillette’s dominance of the $3 billion U.S. men’s grooming market, and you find a scene that’s more suburban strip mall than SoHo startup. Down the hall from the snack-stocked kitchen in early August stood a mock Target shopping aisle complete with cardboard end-cap displays, rows of razors on metal hooks and neat shelves of shaving cream. And there were Harry’s founders, Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider, obsessing over every detail of their upcoming partnership with the big-box retailer. “You can’t just throw product on the shelf and hope it sells,” says Raider, who before Harry’s cofounded eyewear disruptor Warby Parker. “The challenge around physical retail is telling the Harry’s story. We’re used to doing that online, where we have unlimited real estate.”

In an era when businesses are touting asset-light, e-commerce models, Harry’s has gone against the grain. In 2014 Katz-Mayfield and Raider paid $100 million for a 96-year-old German factory to make high-quality blades. And now, as traditional brands scramble to strengthen their online sway (this summer Wal-Mart paid $3 billion for e-retailer Jet.com, Macy’s announced it would close 100 stores and focus on e-commerce, and Unilever acquired Harry’s razor-subscription rival, Dollar Shave Club, for $1 billion), the pair are pushing hard into brick-and-mortar stores.