Full Description

In 2010, I spent the better part of a year hunting for new places for J&J's beauty business to grow - and ended up watching us slowly dismantle the very brand we'd acquired to get there. It's a mistake I've seen play out again and again, at every scale.

In this episode, I trace the rise and fall of Dollar Shave Club: the 90-second video that rewrote the razor category, the billion-dollar Unilever acquisition that was supposed to teach a giant how to win online, and the quiet, reasonable decisions that hollowed the brand out one at a time. I dig into why some acquisitions elevate a brand while others blunt it - and the five questions every leader should ask before they buy, or steward, something sharp.

In This Episode

• The Korres / J&J story: buying a capability, then dismantling the parts that made it work
• How Dollar Shave Club rebuilt the razor category on four ideas at once - DTC, subscription, price, and irreverence
• Why Unilever really paid $1 billion: the foothold in razors, but more importantly the DTC capability it didn't have
• How "the Club" stopped meaning anything - retail distribution, portfolio bloat, and a voice that got safer
• The 2023 sale to Nexus Capital, and what Unilever's own CEOs admitted out loud
• Why Covid explains a chapter of the story, not the whole book
• What separates the wins (Liquid IV, Pixar inside Disney) from the cautionary tales
• Five ways to protect the core you paid for
• The Dr. Squatch bookend: a $1.5B bet on the same kind of brand - will Unilever repeat history?

Key Takeaways - Protecting the Core You Paid For

1. Name the core before you close. If you can't state the brand's central idea in one sentence, you can't protect it.
2. Audit compatibility, not just attractiveness. A great category means nothing if your operating model is built to reject what makes the brand work.
3. Protect the engine, not just the name. The capability you bought is a business, not a cost line.
4. Decide who's changing whom - and mean it. If the point is to learn a new capability, adopt it; don't assimilate it.
5. Resist the regimen. Every capability you bring will tempt you to extend the brand. Simplicity is a position you can give away one line extension at a time.

Mentioned in This Episode

Dollar Shave Club, Michael Dubin, Gillette, Schick, P&G, Unilever, Korres, Sephora, Johnson & Johnson, Proactiv, Walmart, Dove, Vaseline, TRESemmé, Axe, Liquid IV, Pixar, Disney, Dr. Squatch, Nexus Capital Management.

A Line Worth Remembering

"You shouldn't pay a billion dollars for a brand's core if you can't keep it."

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Levi's name is covered. But the batwing shape - unchanged since 1967 - is so familiar that the FIFA policy has provided more attention to the brand, not less.

Levi's didn't fight the mandate. They leveraged an asset they'd spent decades building, and outmaneuvered most of the official sponsors in week one of the World Cup.

This week I broke down how patience AND agility - two attributes more closely connected than you think - scored free attention for Levi's.

So Let's Buzz!

There are two kinds of pride.The kind we celebrate in June. And the kind that got in my way twelve years ago when my son came out.I've written about my rainbow family each of the last three years in recognition of Pride Month.This year I wanted to share honestly what made that summer so hard. And why sharing my family's story since then has created a new identity that I'm proud of.

e.l.f. has a rule: no post-mortems.

Not because they don't evaluate what went wrong. Because the word implies something died — and at e.l.f., every failure is just the input for the next attempt.

They call them After Action Reviews. They run them in real time. And they're a big part of why a beauty brand compressed its Super Bowl production timeline from three weeks to eleven days over three years.

In a marketing environment that’s made agility mandatory, every marketer should be studying e.l.f.

In Part 2 of my Brandistry Buzz series on e.l.f., I explore the e.l.f.'s culture - the operating system that sits behind their 26 consecutive quarters of success.

Every CMO Kory Marchisotto consulted gave her the same advice: build a persona. Name it. Decide what handbag it carries.

She read every customer letter in the company's files instead.

What she found wasn't a persona. It was everyone. So she leaned into that reality — and ignored the advice.

The results speak for themselves. $1.64B business growing at 28% per year. 26 consecutive quarters of growth.

e.l.f. is doing something genuinely different and every marketer should be paying attention.

Listen to Part 1 of my two-part series on e.l.f. in this week's Brandistry Buzz.

A good friend just got back from South Korea. Her first text to me wasn't about the temples or the food. It was: "Have any other countries done what Korea has done with a single letter?"

And thanks to Ruth Jouanne, I've been turning that question over all week.

No other country has built what Korea has built. Not Bollywood. Not the British Invasion. Not Nordic Noir. Each of those is a landmark. "K-" is something different. It's a master brand that extends across music, drama, beauty, food, and film, with each new category inheriting the equity of everything that came before.

And here's the interesting part: Korea didn't design it. The world named it. Korea was just smart enough to build on what was being handed to them.

This week's Brandistry Buzz is about what they built, how they built it, and what it means for your brand.

Marketers rank among the least trusted professionals in America. Just above lobbyists and members of Congress.

Then again, we've all driven past a diner advertising the "World's Best Chicken."

Maybe we earned it.

But here's what I actually believe: most marketers aren't trying to deceive anyone. They're trying to get people to experience something they genuinely believe in.

The problem isn't bad intent — it's bad execution.
👉 A study that proves something nobody cares about.
👉 A ranking that was accurate when you printed it.
👉 A statement that's factual, but falls short in what's delivered.

This week's Brandistry Buzz is about the claim game — how to win it, how brands lose it, and where the line is between creative marketing and something that ends in a courtroom.

I just returned from my fifth cross-country drive in nine months.

My wife Eva and I have now covered 17,000 miles together driving back and forth from New England to SoCal in our Kia Telluride.

We've seen the Heinze Museum, the Hoover Dam, and a hand-painted sign in North Dakota that kept us laughing for two straight days.

We also survived a moment in a New Mexico truck stop that I can only describe as "fourteen days of road food catching up with us at the worst possible time."

This week's Brandistry Buzz is about what 250 hours on the road reminded me about leadership. Three lessons. Five takeaways. One story I probably shouldn't have included but did anyway.

(Originally from April 26, 2026)