Good morning,
The experience was surreal.
Jeff Raider and Andy Katz-Mayfield, the co-founders and co-CEOs of the trendy grooming-products startup Harry's, were wearing suits and ties. They were surrounded by lawyers. And they had just experienced an hours-long grilling by antitrust regulators in a room at the Federal Trade Commission headquarters in Washington, D.C., a hulking limestone edifice on Pennsylvania Avenue. Their apparent sin: competing too well against razor giant Gillette. Isn't antitrust law supposed to work the other way?
Raider and Katz-Mayfield launched their New York City-based startup in 2013, and through a combination of direct-to-consumer and brick-and-mortar retail strategies, became a player in shaving--with nearly 7 percent of U.S. nondisposable-razor sales in 2019. In came industry giant Edgewell Personal Care, which offered $1.37 billion to buy Harry’s. The deal seemed a win-win: Edgewell needed some serious modernizing, and Harry’s had global ambition across the entire personal-care industry. Eight months later, the deal fell apart. The FTC announced that it would sue to block the deal, and Edgewell pulled out rather than fight.
Those eight months changed more than one startup’s trajectory. They set many to wondering if the Harry’s experience spelled trouble for other challenger brands hoping to one day engineer similar exits.
Read our story to learn how Harry’s may have accidentally changed the future of exit strategies forever--and how it’s planning to challenge the personal-care industry next. |
0 Comments:
Post a Comment