Unilever Buys Dollar Shave Club

Stratechery

Unilever purchased the Dollar Shave Club for $1 billion. Ben Thompson, writing at Stratechery, has a really good analysis of the purchase and how it fits with the disruptive power of the internet:

Probably the most important fact when it comes to analyzing Unilever’s purchase of Dollar Shave Club is the $1 billion price: in the world of consumer packaged goods (CPG) it is shockingly low. After all, only eleven years ago Procter & Gamble (P&G) bought Gillette, the market leader in shaving, for a staggering $57 billion.

To be sure Gillette is still dominant — the brand controls 70 percent of the global blades and razors market — but there is little question that Dollar Shave Club is a much better deal, in every sense of the word.