Groomed for success: Building an experimentation program for a high growth business

As a global leader in men’s grooming, Dollar Shave Club (DSC) understood the importance of innovation and experimentation. 

In fact, DSC’s leadership team was so bought into experimentation that it had decided to build an internal testing tool of its own – but this came with some unforeseen complications:

Due to the need for engineering resources associated with launching new tests, the DSC team had to choose between building new features or launching new experiments. This led to a guess-work prioritization queue that often resulted in larger initiatives being prioritized, while smaller, low-hanging test opportunities were filed away. 

Combined with other related issues, this meant that neither the program nor the tool were generating the impact that had initially been hoped for. 

DSC’s VP of operations, Tsega Ortega, believed that if the business was going to make a success of experimentation, it had to move away from its internal tool and invest in an external testing tool instead. 

Given the large investment that had already been made – plus the considerable cost of an external tool – this proposal met with much reluctance internally. 

The project had lots of visibility, the stakes were high, so it was absolutely imperative that Tsega was able to show a positive ROI from the tool right away. 

Unfortunately, it soon became apparent that the service provided by the testing tool itself was not going to be sufficient to make the programme successful – which is where we came in:

Conversion was hired with the short-term goal of driving immediate impact and achieving a positive ROI from the testing tool investment. 

Longer-term, we were tasked with fostering adoption of experimentation across the business, while using experimentation to generate significant customer insights that could be disseminated throughout the business to unearth new opportunities and accelerate growth. 

Overcoming inertia

As a customer-centric business keen to understand the evolving needs and desires of its users, Dollar Shave Club had already run some very strong foundational research that we were able to use to inform the first steps of our work. 

This research – a qualitative ethnographic in-home and  in-store study of male personal care shoppers – generated two core insights. 

• There is lots of inertia in the male grooming shopping experience: men are unlikely to change brands unless they have a good reason to do so. 
• This inertia carries over to buying habits too: most men purchase their grooming products off the shelf and they are reluctant to switch to an online subscription. 

This meant that not only did DSC have to convince their prospective customers to switch brands – a big ask in and of itself – they also had to persuade these customers to change their buying habits too. 

We knew this was going to be difficult – changing ingrained behaviors is always an uphill battle – but with strong expertise in behavioral science, we felt confident that we could drive the desired impact.

In the initial 3 months of our engagement, we were able to generate enough additional revenue to cover the costs of our services AND the testing tool for an entire year. 

Tsega’s conviction had proven right – a positive ROI was assured. 

With the initial goal comfortably hit, we were subsequently tasked with expanding the scope of our work far beyond that of the initial engagement. 

Part of this broader remit involved auditing DSC’s existing experimentation capability. Here, we used our PACET framework to identify any bottlenecks and blockers in DSC’s existing experimentation setup. From there, we then worked closely with DSC’s internal team to remedy any deficits and provide upskilling where necessary. 

Another element of this expanded remit involved extending  the impact of experimentation across the entire business. Part of this was simply about using experimentation to optimize other key growth metrics beyond subscription – like monetization and retention. Another was about ensuring that experimentation informed decision-making across all business units – from marketing to product, engineering to design. 

All in all, the program has been a huge success. 

We’ve built a strong consultancy partnership that the DSC team can trust. From fully understanding DSC’s needs to building effective experimentation strategies that drive impactful customer insights, we’ve become an essential part of the Dollar Shave Club team. 

Looking to learn more about our collaboration with Dollar Shave Club? You can watch our webinar with the DSC team at the link below

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