By Maxim Tamarov, News Staff
Just as he starts any company meeting at Harry’s razor, Jeff Raider asked the audience to stand up and engage in a giant tournament of rocks, paper, scissors at the Curry Student Center Tuesday. This is Raider’s way of getting everyone present engaged in the group process. Raider, the co-founder of Harry’s razor and Warby Parker eyewear, was invited by the Northeastern Entrepreneurs Club to speak to students about his experiences building his companies.
Warby Parker and Harry’s are social enterprises — they donate a percentage of their profits to various organizations that help out the community.
Raider told the audience that he co-founded Warby Parker when he was in business school, and recently, with former classmate Andy Katz-Mayfield, founded Harry’s, a company based on men’s shaving products. The company sprang up as a response to poor customer treatment and lack of choice in the razor industry.
“Andy started living on the west coast,” Raider said. “He paid $25 for four razor blades and some shaving cream.”
This was way too expensive for such a product, Raider said. He said that like any entrepreneur should, he started thinking: I had this experience. Didn’t feel so great. Wonder if I could do it better.
As the company expanded, it decided to buy its own blade producing company — the one they thought best matched up with their values was 90 years old and in Germany.
“No one in our LinkedIn overlapped with rural Germany,” he said, so the pair headed out to meet the producers in person: “two young American guys driving on the Autobahn.”
The point of acquiring the German company was to control the entire process of the brand’s product output, a step which Raider explained allowed Harry’s to better accommodate to the needs of their customers.
“I think he really represented the start-up mentality,” said attendee Alyssa Rubin, a sophomore international affairs major.
Rubin had recently taken a class on social enterprise in which she studied Warby Parker and similar organizations.
“Warby Parker is a social enterprise where the end goal is social impact,” she said. But as a budding entrepreneur, Rubin said she would liked to have heard more about the failures that Raider encountered in forming his start-ups.
“As we think about our brand, it’s important to have focus,” Raider said in response to a question from the audience about the main factors to keep track of when starting a business.
He pointed out three factors that were central to the foundation of his brand, and any brand that wants to succeed as a start-up.
“We loved the idea of clean design. The next was affordable pricing.”
The third point was community outreach. Harry’s donates 1 percent of their profits and 1 percent of their time to the community.
“We were pretty inspired by an organization called City Year,” Raider said. City Year told the guys at Harry’s that their time was actually more valuable than their money. Harry’s was able to impact City Year directly more than they could financially.
“It’s extremely beneficial for our team because we can see our impact on the world around us.”
