--- title: "Harry's: 100,000 emails before the first razor" canonical: "https://www.roadtoone.space/blog/open-rate-harrys/" pubDate: "2026-10-27T00:00:00.000Z" updatedDate: "2026-10-27T06:32:30.000Z" author: Gaurav description: "Harry's collected over 100,000 email addresses in a week before launch, 77% of them through referrals. Episode 2 of Open Rate." tags: [email marketing, case study, "Harry's", referral marketing] categories: [Open Rate] --- Harry's collected 100,000 email addresses in seven days before it sold a single razor. No ads, no press tour. A two-page website, a team of twelve, and a pile of free shaving product. Co-founder Jeff Raider later published the entire playbook himself: the code, the email templates, the reward tiers, and the referral data. This is the campaign, the numbers, and where the company went from there. **The background.** Before Harry's was a company, Raider and Andy Katz-Mayfield spent the better part of two years researching the men's shaving market. They found the nearly century-old German manufacturer that would make their blades, worked with industrial designers on a handle inspired by pens and knives, and laid the groundwork for a direct-to-consumer brand. Raider had co-founded Warby Parker before this. The central worry, in his words: "Were we going to launch to crickets?" A direct-to-consumer brand without customers is nothing, and Harry's had no customers, no stores, and no audience. The insight that shaped the campaign was about credibility. "The most powerful and effective way to be introduced to our new company was through a credible referral," Raider wrote. They had watched friends do it: Everlane and Fab had both grown through referral mechanics. And the founders had spent months telling the Harry's story to friends and entrepreneurs, building a list of maybe a couple hundred people. The campaign was designed to turn those people into a distribution channel. **The campaign.** The whole thing was a two-page microsite, live for one week before the store opened. Page one was a splash page. It showed a razor, the line "Respecting the face, and wallet since like right now," a small drawing of a key, and a button that said "STEP INSIDE." Nothing explained what Harry's was. The mystery was deliberate: the first customers were insiders, and the copy made them feel like insiders. The only thing you could do on the page was enter your email address. Page two was the referral engine. After signing up, you got a unique link back to the splash page plus one-click buttons to share it by email, Facebook, or Twitter. The pre-written tweet was simple: "Excited for @harrys to launch. I'm going to be #shaving for free." A wooly mammoth carried the message: "Shaving is evolving. Don't leave your friends behind." Then the rewards. "Invite Friends and Earn Product" was the one line on the page with no mystery in it. Five referrals earned a shave cream. Ten earned a razor. Twenty-five earned a shave set with the premium Winston handle. Fifty earned a year of free shaving. Two design decisions matter here. The first reward came easy, at five friends, so everyone could win something. And the team killed a planned tier of a lifetime of free product at 1,000 referrals, worrying it would make the game feel unwinnable. A progress tracker showed each user how many friends had signed up and which prize came next. Raider says some friends took the whole thing like a personal challenge. The mechanics underneath were just as considered. The email address doubled as the tracking ID, so one field powered the whole referral graph. Every signup got a transactional email through SendGrid, and a bounce marked the address as fake. IP blocking stopped any single IP address from signing up more than two emails, to stop gaming. Unsurprisingly, Raider notes, most of the fraud showed up in the highest reward tier. **The seeding.** A referral campaign needs someone to refer first, so the team of twelve seeded it themselves. Days before launch, every employee sorted their contacts into two Gmail groups: people who knew Harry's and people who didn't. They wrote personal, friends-and-family emails in advance, each with an explicit ask to spread the word, some with a product shot and the phrase "Harry's is coming." They wrote everything a day or two early so the team could simply hit send the moment the site went live, and set up email signatures linking back to the prelaunch page before mailing anyone. The founders also asked specific friends individually, especially the ones who could share the link with entire companies. They launched the Facebook page and Twitter handle the same day and answered mentions from personal accounts. Press was deliberately avoided. A referral from a publication would break the premise that the recommendation came from someone you know. **The results.** Before launch, the team wrote their guesses on a whiteboard: 3,000 emails. 5,000. 7,500. One person said 15,000. They passed the highest guess on day one. By the end of the week they had collected, by their own count, over 85,000 valid email addresses, and over 100,000 in total. The launch week that followed brought a flood of tweets, emails, and, Raider's favorite, customer phone calls. The referral data is the part worth studying: - 77% of the emails came through referrals. About 20,000 people referred about 65,000 friends. - The average referrer brought in more than 3 friends. - More than 200 people referred over 50 friends each and hit the top tier, mostly people close to the founders with big followings or access to company-wide email blasts. - About 3,000 people earned free product. A week later, Harry's opened its store to an audience that was already waiting. Reward winners got coupon codes redeemable on the live site, which funneled the most engaged referrers straight into the full catalog. On the first day of business, every employee manned the support queue, answering customers by email, phone, Twitter, Facebook, and text. **What came beyond.** Harry's went on to become one of the defining direct-to-consumer brands of the decade. In 2014, Harry's raised over $100 million and bought the 94-year-old German factory that makes its blades, securing its own supply chain. It moved from internet-only into retail stores in 2016. In 2019, Edgewell, the owner of Schick, agreed to buy Harry's for $1.37 billion. The Federal Trade Commission sued to block the deal in February 2020, describing Harry's as a "critical disruptive rival" whose rise had forced the razor duopoly to cut prices. The sale was abandoned. A year later, Harry's raised $155 million at a $1.7 billion valuation. By 2024 it had filed confidentially for an IPO, reportedly nearing $1 billion in annual revenue and profitable, and by then its brands included Flamingo, Lume, Mando, and Cat Person. **Why email worked.** Every mechanic did two jobs at once. The email address captured the lead and tracked the referral. The reward was free Harry's product, so every prize put the product in a future customer's hands. The coupon code that delivered the reward also delivered the winner to the store. The one-week window manufactured urgency that a standing referral program lacks. And every recommendation arrived from a friend, which was the premise of the whole design: a credible referral instead of an ad. One honest caveat, again from Raider: it is, he wrote, "very difficult to attribute its success to one specific variable," whether the code, the tactics, or the idea. Harry's also had a strong product, good timing, and well-connected founders. **The lesson for builders.** You do not need customers to build an email list. You need a reason for people to tell their friends, a reward worth winning, and a first tier easy enough that everyone plays. Harry's proved a list built before launch can be the demand at launch. Those 100,000 addresses were the first version of the business. --- **Building an email list before your product launches?** Road21 runs email marketing, product-led growth, positioning and outbound for products that need to grow. [Book a call](https://www.roadtoone.space/#book) and we'll look at yours. --- ## Sources - Jeff Raider (Harry's co-founder), "How to Gather 100,000 Emails in One Week," Tim Ferriss's blog, July 21, 2014: https://tim.blog/2014/07/21/harrys-prelaunchr-email/ - Federal Trade Commission, "FTC Files Suit to Block Edgewell Personal Care Company's Acquisition of Harry's, Inc.," February 3, 2020: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2020/02/ftc-files-suit-block-edgewell-personal-care-companys-acquisition-harrys-inc - Forbes, "Harry's Raises A $155 Million Series E At $1.7 Billion," March 31, 2021: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2021/03/31/exclusive-harrys-raises-a-155-million-series-e--at-17-billion-a-year-after-the-ftc-blocked-its-billion-dollar-sale-to-edgewell/ - CNBC, "Razor maker Harry's files for IPO, sources tell Reuters," March 7, 2024: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/07/razor-maker-harrys-files-for-ipo-sources-tell-reuters.html