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Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy
Maybe someday
31
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
59/100Critics
4/100Scholars
Author:
Lawrence Ingrassia
Publisher:
Henry Holt and Co.
Date:
January 28, 2020
A former New York Times business editor takes a look at how start-up companies have undermined traditional retailers through clever marketing schemes to sell products ranging from razors to lingerieâin many cases spurring those traditional retailers to buy the disrupter companies for jaw-dropping price tags.
What The Reviewers Say
In Billion Dollar Brand Club, the veteran business journalist Lawrence Ingrassia...ferrets out the most compelling, consequential stories and people behind the direct-to-consumer revolution. He weaves riveting tales of legacy brands caught resting on their laurels, the hungry newcomers who outsmarted them and a network of prescient investors working behind the scenes. In less capable hands, Billion Dollar Brand Club could read like a series of dry business-school case studies, but Ingrassia’s keen storytelling and painstaking reporting ensure a far different fate for readers. In particular, the ascent of Dollar Shave Club (the company from which the book borrows its name) has the pacing of a literary thriller.
Unorthodox as they are, these companies may pose less of a threat to the makers and sellers of consumer goods than Mr. Ingrassia suggests. Precisely because they are founded by entrepreneurs looking to make a killing rather than a livelihood, selling out is at the core of their business plans.
Ingrassia...presents the pulse-deadening chronicle of a group of millennial businesspeople who managed to squeeze their way into the top echelons of the monied classes, all while leaving the lives of consumers almost completely unchanged or worse off than before.
... an intriguing look at what he refers to as start-up disruptors.
