How I Built This with Guy Raz - Live Episode! Walker & Company: Tristan Walker

Episode Date: September 30, 2019

The very first time Tristan Walker shaved, he woke up the next morning with razor bumps all over his face. "I was like, what is this?" he remembers saying. "I am never shaving again—ever." He soon discovered that like him, many men of color were frustrated by the lack of shaving products for coarse or curly hair. Fifteen years after that first disastrous shave, and after countless meetings with doubtful investors, Tristan launched Bevel, a subscription shaving system built around a single-blade razor. Eventually his brand Walker & Company grew to include 36 hair and beauty products, used by millions of men and women across the U.S. In 2018, Walker & Company was sold to Proctor & Gamble, and Tristan became P&G's first black CEO. Recorded live in Washington, D.C. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better your home might be worth more than you think find out how much at arbb.ca slash host i remember the very first pitch deck which was a PowerPoint of graduated to keynote but like we had a powerpoint of like clip art because i didn't have the things i remember

being so embarrassed so i had like this 15 slide pitch deck that just sold a hope and the dream. And we pitched 50, 60 VCs, and folks were turning this down. And it wasn't until they started to push back that I realized, hmm, they just don't get it. From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how a lifetime of shaving with products that irritated his skin inspired Tristan Walker to build a better shaving and beauty brand for men and women of

color, Walker and Company. So one of the guiding principles of creativity is that some of the very best ideas come out of sheer frustration, products like Honest Tea or Cliff Bar or Albirds or Dyson. These all came about because their founders couldn't find the beverages or energy bars or shoes or vacuum cleaners that they wanted. So they invented them. But in the case of Tristan Walker, I think it's safe to say that he didn't just start from a place of mild frustration.

He actually started from a place of being fed up, even angry, because for most of his life, he had felt completely ignored, totally overlooked, whenever he walked into the shaving aisle of a drugstore. Virtually all the big shaving brands were making products that worked well

on men with relatively straight hair. But Tristan couldn't find a high-quality razor that worked on his curly facial hair without leaving razor bumps all over his neck and jawline. And he knew that like him, many African-American men were dealing with the exact same problem. So he decided to design bevel, a shaving system with a simple, single-blade razor that was easy on his face.

And he wanted everything about the product to look and feel great, Not like the dusty boxes of shaving products for African-American men that always seemed to be on the bottom shelves of the drugstore. And his ambition? To build a black-owned and lead consumer brand as big as Johnson & Johnson or Procter & Gamble. But of course, when he first tried to raise money

from all those VC firms on Sand Hill Road and Silicon Valley, he got a lot of nose. But eventually, he was able to launch his company with a razor, some shaving cream, a bit of oil, and a brush. And over the past five years, his brand has grown to include more than 30 specialized hair and beauty products for men and women, which are now sold in lots of big retailers across the country. A few weeks ago, Tristan sat down to tell me how he did it in front of a live audience at the Lincoln Theater in Washington, D.C.

Thank you. This is like Tristan Walker Central. I'll take it. So let's start to the begin. Tell me about your childhood. You grew up in Queens. Yeah. The way I like to describe it is, you know, I had a bit of the rows that grew from concrete story.

I grew up in Queens, New York, projects, welfare, belts of homelessness, that sort of stuff, right? And I realized very early, I had one goal in life. And I was to get as wealthy as possible as quickly as possible. I realized three ways to do it. The first was to be an actor and an athlete. that didn't work. The second was to work on Wall Street. That didn't work.

And the last was entrepreneurship. And thank goodness I came to that realization. When you were a little boy, your dad died. He was killed. He was killed. And you grew up with an older brother and your mom. What did your mom do for work? So my mom worked three jobs, mainly for New York City Housing Authority,

administrative assistant. She spent some time working for Time Warner Cable, and she did some retail, all at the same time within seven days. I don't know how she did it. She did it. Thank goodness for her. It was not easy, but she persevered as a result of, I think, her perseverance. I had a good fortune to be first graduate college in my family. Wow.

And she really forced that year. What do you remember about your neighborhood growing up as a kid? Was it, I mean, I don't know, what did you do? Did you... You know, it's funny. I didn't do much because I couldn't do much. Like, my father was killed when I was three years old. I don't remember too much about him other than the fact that he was killed when I was three years old,

which is a little bit telling to kind of the type of environment that I did grow up in. So, you know, I lived probably the first six, seven years in my life in Jamaica, Queens, New York, 40 projects. And the time I turned around seven years old, we moved to Flushing Queens. another project kind of development, and it was much of the same, right? And my mother was like, you're going to be the one, you're not going to go through this stuff. So it's very disciplined. Stay home, get your studies done, you're not going outside. When I snuck outside, she caught me, I got in a lot of trouble.

But, you know, that was really kind of my life, right? Get to school, get home, do your work, repeat. Wow. And, you know, that discipline actually kind of got me to where I am now. Was school easy for you as a kid? Yeah. You were a good student. I was a good student.

Because of the discipline that was inspired in me, I always excelled, right? I tended to be, you know, at least up until high school anyway, at or near the top of my class. You know, and I kind of slow down when I say that stuff, because by the time I got to high school, I realized I didn't even know what a verb was, right? I went through this entire kind of time all the way up until my high school years, doing really, really well at the top of my class, not even knowing what a verb now. that sort of thing was. As a teenager, you ended up going to this really elite private boarding school, Hotchkiss in Connecticut. Oh, shut up to Hotchkiss.

So the way I like to describe Hodgis is the first time I got to see how the other half lived. I went to school literally with Rockefellers, Ford's, right? And I learned a couple things. First, name mattered. to being wealthy, wasn't the same as being rich. And the last and probably the most important was I can compete with each and every one of them.

While I didn't know what a verb was, I learned. And by the end of my four years there, on a roll, like that sort of thing, it was an absolutely just wonderful experience for me, but transformative and a little bit different from how I grew up. Was it, I mean, was the transition for you when you got there?

Because you were, what, like 14 years old? Yes, I've been living away from home since I was 13, 14 years old. And were the first few months that are hard for you? Academically, yes. We get to the school and I realize I don't even have a computer. And, you know, all of my other classmates, I had computers, that sort of thing. And, you know, I went to, I believe it was the English professor who was my advisor at the time. And I remember he took me to, like, this basement where all to use text

books are. And then there was this old compact, like, proserio computer that we had to, like, haul out and take it to my room. So academically it was very tough because I wasn't equipped with the tools to compete. But over the years, that kind of accelerated in one way. So you finish Hodgkes, you go to Stony Brook University in New York to study economics. You know, most college students don't necessarily know what they're going to do. But did you have a sense of what you want to pursue there and what you what you thought you would do after? Yeah, I mean, I was always thinking about the after. I wanted to get wealthy.

You know, I was pretty singular in that hope. Very singular in that hope. And, you know, over time, that's kind of morphed and changed and the things that are important have morphed and changed. But I knew, like, I was very, very, very focused on how to get there. And Wall Street was the next greatest option. All this Silicon Valley stuff I had no idea about my world was New England. So you were thinking, I'll do this degree and I'll go into finance.

That was your plan. That was the, I mean, economics. It was the closest degree we had at Stony Brook to get me to Wall Street. And in between my first and second year of university, I got an internship at Lehman Brothers in their back office. Halfway through, I said, you know, I want to try some of this front office stuff. So I left that and joined a trading desk at the time, just observing. So when you graduate, you went, actually went to work for Lehman, and then, as a trader, right? And eventually the J.P. Morgan. In that time, at that time period, did you still think

this is what I should be doing? Like, this is my sort of path to... No, it was the worst two years of my life. This was 2005 when I joined the company. And as a trader, your job is to make money with other people's money to, at the end of the year, make money for yourself. Like, there's just no fulfillment in it. Yeah. Now, I should also say I wasn't really good at it. But even if I were, I realized that there was an emptiness in it that I just couldn't live with. And also, the culture wasn't one that I wanted to be a part of.

And the last thing I'd say in all this, and I observed this, and not only a lot of friends that I had, but also a lot of folks who've been around for 20, 30 years in the industry, is, you know, Wall Street had a good way of locking you in. they pay you more money and they pay you more money and they pay you more money and at some point your opportunity costs gets so high that you don't want to leave that you're unwilling to leave and fortunately and kind of unfortunately at the time I got laid off at a time that made me not have to think about that you were laid off by jp morgan at the time yeah this is the middle of financial crisis um well actually it was right before so here's the blessing and this is a true testament to faith

I got laid off in January of 2008. I was applying to Stanford for Business School. I applied there in the fall of that year. And fast forward, I started Stanford, September of 2008, crash happens a month later. Wow. So you get to Stanford. And from what I've read, like, you didn't really have a sense of what Silicon Valley was and what the tech world was or any of that at all.

So what did you, like, what was your impression? when you got there. So at Stanford, I got there. It was 2008. I was 24 years old. And very quickly, I knew it was where I needed to be. Primarily because I saw the other 24-year-olds not only making millions of dollars, but fundamentally changed in the world.

I'm like, hmm, how come I had no idea about this place? Seriously. You know, I thought Silicon Valley was a place where semiconductors got made. Right. That's it. Right, right. That's it. This was before

kind of, you know, Facebook became what it did. Just for Airbnb. Twitter, Airbnb, Uber, all that stuff, right? For Square. And I said, wow, I can participate in this. And I started to have that kind of Hotchkiss moment again, right? Yeah.

This is something new, but I can do it. While you are a student at Stanford, you start to reach out to Foursquare. I mean, what's the story? What was 4Square at the time? 4Square. It was a location-based app. Had 10,000 users at the time.

It was getting me to explore my city. It was getting me to do things that I didn't want to do. It was getting me to go to the gym more, right? I was like, how is this thing actually inspiring me and changing my behavior? And I said, wow, like, I want to figure this out. Found the founder's emails on the internet. This is the classic story. I emailed Dennis Crowley.

the CEO founder eight times, and the eighth time, email me back. And I'll never forget this, he said verbatim. He said, after all these ideas I shared with them, you know what, comma, I just may take you up on some of this, period. Are you ever in New York? Question mark. Dens. My wife and I were watching Lost. We were binging on Lost at the time.

I remember this very vividly in Leverum. And I looked at her, I was like, what should I do? And five minutes later, I said, actually, yes, I was planning on being in New York tomorrow. So I booked my flight that night, flew out the following morning. You show up at the office and you're like, I'm here. Yeah, no, that's literally what happened. It was 36 Cooper Square. We were on the fifth floor.

Were they surprised to see you? I opened the door. Dennis was facing the back. He turned around. And he looked at me surprised as if, like, I was. wasn't actually going to come. And there's this awkward moment, like, what does he do now? And it so happened that there were like two empty desks.

He was like, yeah, go over there, go over there. And throughout the day, I mean, he had a meeting, he had a couple meetings. And then when he's done with it, he came over, he's like, all right, so what do you want to do? I was like, I don't know. Yeah. And, you know, I sent him some ideas over email around kind of signing up retailers, merchants, that sort of thing. Anyone who's familiar with Foursquare, it's a very small business focus.

He wanted to get merchants on the platform to start engaging with their customers. He said, all right, I'll tell you what. Sign up 30 merchants by the end of the week, and you get a job. And he's like, what do you want your title to be? And I was like, business development, because it has the word business in it, and I go to business school, so it makes a lot of sense. And how many people, by the way, how many people worked at Foursquare at that time? There were two and a half.

Two and a half. Dennis, Neveen, they were co-founders, and then Harry, he was leading engineering, but he wasn't quite full-time yet, but I guess theoretically. So he gives you a challenge, signed 30 businesses up by the end of the week, and we'll see what we can do. Yep. And what happened? Signed up 300, 400, something like that.

Wow. So you end up going to work for 4-square after you graduated from... Nope. It was actually... It was in between my first and second year of business school. So I worked full-time at 4Square during my second-year business school. And Foursquare gave me a gift. Because I was so early there, I felt it was as much as my company as everybody.

It was like it was a family there. We were doing something completely different. We had folks like Facebook trying to come after us. And that felt, that was energy. I loved it. And I felt like my work wasn't done. So, you know, Dennis was kind enough to let me work on the West Coast to allow me to get a platform for people to know who I was.

After I graduated, he didn't ask me to come to New York. He was like, yeah, you can stay L. West. The company was growing. Yeah. There's a lot that I had to learn too, right? And through that process in not only kind of growing the business, what does it look like to go from two employees to 150, to raise tens of millions of dollars,

to build something uniquely authentic, it was in education that I wouldn't have gotten alone. So you were there, like, I think, three and a half, almost four years. Three years. Three years. So you decide that's run its course, and I'm going to do the next thing. And it turns out that you either met or you knew Ben Horowitz, one of the partners of Andreessen Horowitz, and he convinced you to become an entrepreneur in residence there.

How did that happen? How did you meet? Yeah, so Ben Harrowitz, he was on the board of four squares. So they were one of four squares largest investors. I had known Ben not very intimately. It was just kind of as board member, and he knew of the work that I did. So when I told Dennis that I was leaving the company,

Dennis reached out to the board, told them that I was leaving, and then Ben reached out to me a day or two later. He said, Tristan, I get it, right? I understand. You should not be an entrepreneur in residence, right? He gave me his reasons why. And he said, but if you're going to be an entrepreneur in residence,

you should do it with us. And what were you going to do as entrepreneur residents basically come up with ideas and pitch ideas to them and in theory they would fund those ideas? Yeah, so in, as I think about the job, it's one of the craziest jobs in the world. You get paid to think of ideas all day. He said, come spend six to nine months with us to figure this out. And I was like, I'm going to spend all nine months to figure this out. Being an entrepreneur in residence, it's interesting because I've never met one who's enjoyed it. That's myself included. But it's spending a lot of time to think about things in

in an inauthentic way. Right. You know, the lesson that I learned and Ben taught me a lot, he's like, Tristan, you got to understand that you need to do the thing that you fundamentally believe that you are the best person in the world to do, right? Where you have a unique proposition giving your story to solve that problem? So again, if you're doing something that's like inauthentic, this is hard enough, right? You can't do that.

And it took me seven months to realize that I needed to do the thing that I felt. that I was uniquely positioned to do. You were basically trying to come up with an idea that you thought they would back. Well, I was trying to come up with a good idea. Yeah. And the lesson that I've learned and Ben, I have to thank him for this.

He said, Tristan, usually it looks like good ideas or bad ideas. And usually it looks like bad ideas are good ideas. The problem with good ideas is that everybody tries to do them. Right? And as a result of it, there's so many people working on the same things. There's no value to be created. Yeah.

Like Airbnb was a bad idea. Right. Right. Like folks actually like renting out. Yeah. Rooms to strangers. Yeah. It's a terrible idea. But they've created tens of billions of dollars in value to do it. Right. It's those ideas that actually create the value. And were you thinking at that time tech, tech, tech, tech, tech as you were in Silicon Valley. Was that where your head was? I was trying to do the thing that I felt was the most ambitious that would make the folks who supported me proud of what I was doing. As opposed to doing the thing that I was. was uniquely positioned to me. Let me ask you about it. I mean, you come up with a bunch of different ideas. I think one was like a hair extension mail order idea. I still think that's a great idea. You guys should take it. Direct to consumer hair extensions. Yeah, that's a lot of money. So at some point, you come up with this idea for... Sorry, it's a good idea. Or a bad idea, but yeah, you get it. So at some point, you come up with this idea. So at some point, you come

up with this idea for a razor to just describe first of all before you told me how you pitched it how did the idea come to you this is the first idea that came to me actually and it was the culmination of 15 years of experience i when i went to boarding school for high school you know it's in lakeville connecticut there's no retailer nearby if you went um you know if i had the shave you know you get the peach fuzz on your face right it's like oh it's the right of passage time um and i'll never forget I went to I believe there's like a CVS type store in the area and you pick up your multi-blade razor with the shave gel because yeah I didn't have a father at home to teach me how to shave my brother didn't shave that sort of thing took it home to the dorm shaved woke up

the following morning my face completely broken out and raisin bumps I was like what is this I'm never shaving ever that was the last time I had shaved until I started Bellw um so What did I use? I used for 15 years this thing for folks who are not familiar with it called a depilatory cream. Which is like a chemical. It's gross.

So folks who aren't familiar with it, a lot of women are familiar with it because it's a neer. Yeah. Yeah, see. But a lot of black men are too because that's all we're able to use, right? So depilatory creams is cream, it's thick. You put it on your face,

It sits for six to eight minutes and he just wipe it off and the hair goes away. It dissolves. It dissolves it. Which is crazy, right? You know, the funny, one of the most interesting things is if you actually read the back of the pack, the caution statement says, do not use this two days in a row, right? It's something that smells, it burns your face, it discolored your skin, but there was no other option. And in January of 2013, I remember being fed up.

my wife is fed up I said I've had to do this for 15 years I want to shave because this is terrible so I wanted to learn how to do it look I'm not thinking about a business idea at all I just want to solve a problem you just wanted to and you didn't want to get razor bombs

I did not want to get razor bombs it's not a good look and the entire right the market for razors in the United States had been two three four blades right because that was that was seen as like the you know it was all but a close shave.

That's right, but not everybody needs that. You know, I realize that are kind of trying to get the closest shave possible cause the issue. And I said, all right, if I can do this and combine it with kind of products to help ameliorate this issue for people who look like me, I know that 80% of people who look like me, men or women have this issue. I know 30% of people who don't look like me have this issue. It's the worst. And I remember walking in.

It's a specialty retail store. Like one of those, like, art of shaving or... Correct. I did this a couple times in different cities, just to test it. I go to the salesperson, and I'd say, you know, I've had to deal with this issue related to raising once my entire life. What should I use? Now, these salespeople are totally incentivized to take me to the on-brand, like, Multi-Blaid Raisin with a nice handle. They're expensive.

They cost $150 and all that stuff. And none of the stores did they do that. They've always taken me to use what they recommend, which are these off-brand, single-blade, double-edged safety razors that your grandfather and grandfather's grandfather used to use. Right? I was like, okay, let me try it. Took it home, used it, no razor bums on my face. And that got me to try and understand why that was actually the case, right? And I'm not going to belabor the point too much, but it turns out that a single blade cuts the hair level with the skin, not beneath.

If I have curly hair and I have blades cutting the hair beneath my skin, it grows into your skin gross. And it's one clean cut, so there's no pulling or tugging or anything like that. So this solution has existed for the past hundred years, right? Just no one had the incentive to sell it because there was no more patent protection on it. And that's when I knew I had something. And this was around the time when a lot of the e-commerce companies started to pop up. I was listening to their pitches. I understood the types of companies that got funded in the time.

types that didn't. And it was just great timing to start something like this. And to go back to the kind of Ben Harrod's thing, who else in the world was uniquely positioned to share that story to venture capitalists, to raise the money to do this, to build a health and beauty products company for the majority of the world? I couldn't think of anybody else who was able to do that. So when you talked about this idea to friends of yours who had similar issues, were they like, this is exactly what I've been waiting for? I need this. I didn't have to talk to them. I had to give them a safety razor. They shaved and didn't get razor bumps the following day.

This was like a first moment of truth thing that when folks woke up the following day and didn't have to have this issue, that's transformative. My first internship on Wall Street, you're told you got to shave every day. I remember being mortified. I was on the trading floor.

I opened the doors. And as a gentleman, got up. I can't curse. I can't curse. He said, take that bleep off your phone. face.

Wow. And I was like, okay, I can't because I don't know what to use. Wow. That story scales. So when you, when you had this idea, you go to Ben and what, you say, hey, this is the idea. It's to create a health and beauty products company for people who look like me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What was his response?

Well, in fact, Ben really wanted me to do the hair extensions idea. Okay. And at that point, at that point, I knew he. was in because he had he he understood an insight that folks were unwilling to down the rest of sandhill road so by the time i came to him with the shaving idea then he was really into it because he was like that's you right like you've got it and you have a uniqueness here that can help you accelerate let us help you in that vision all right so you've got sort of sign off from ben and you've got to start to look for money yeah to pursue this

idea. And just to get a sense of where you were, was the initial idea to just start with a razor or was it to start with a whole kind of ecosystem of products? Yeah, so came up with the idea of January. My ninth month was April, so I knew I had to hurry up. Your ninth month as entrepreneur and residence. And that's when I was thinking about starting to go out and raise money. So my thought was, all right, I had this razor. I also had kind of set of other products. There was kind of the blades, priming oil, shave cream. And did you create a prototype at that point? So it's a great question.

Two things here. There's the razor and the design for the razor. Then there's the products that go into the bottle. And then there's like the design for the bottle, each of which had to kind of coalesce before I actually started pitching. And you needed some seed money for that. Correct. So, you know, it's cart before the horse kind of thing, right? In order to kind of start what we did, you need like $2 million to do it, right?

but I knew that there are things that I can do to get that $2 million to do it. The first was on the razor design. I actually found some folks who were ex-Ideo, wonderful, brilliant, brilliant folks. My pitch to them and their pitch to me was as follows. Tristan, for this razor, we can do it. We will design six types of razors that you can select from. If you decide to choose one, you just need to pay us $10,000 to do it. But if you don't, then we just get to keep these designs.

So I was like, okay, let me have these designs so I could put it in my pitch deck, right? And if I raise the money, you'll get your $10,000. Then for the kind of oils and creams that go into the bottle, there was a website that actually had a list of all the private label manufacturers in the country. I click on the link. I point my finger out to the screen, and I find cosmetic specialty labs in Lawton, Oklahoma. I call them up and I say, I'm thinking about starting this concept. I think it's going to be great. I could potentially have the backing of all these kind of VCs.

This is a company that made like lotions and shaving creams and things like that. They did it for small companies and some big as well. And she said, great, I can get you these samples for free. Let me make you some samples for free. I didn't have to pay for any samples. Now, that never happens, right? Like, never happens. So by the time the end of April comes, I have designs for race.

like a hard good. I have formulations for the soft goods that I need. And then one of my best buddies, he's one of the best package designers on the planet. He helped me with some initial designs for what Beville could be. But this was all on paper. You didn't have any physical like prototypes yet. Correct. But that would allow you to make the pitch deck to show what it could look like. Kind of. The pitch deck, actually, I remember the very first pitch deck, which was a PowerPoint. I've graduated to keynote, but like we had a PowerPoint of like clip art because I didn't have the things. I remember being so embarrassed. So I had like this, you know, 15 slide pitch deck that just sold the hope and the dream. And I mean, you at this point, this is like 2013, I guess, was this the thing,

the first thing since, I don't know, you graduated college that really got you excited that you thought this thing could have legs. It was the first time I realized that I saw something that people, like other people didn't. They didn't see. Now, I had some of that for like 4Square, but it was the first time that something came to me that I actually had a competitive advantage based on my just being, right?

Like 15 years of experience of trying those terrible products, right? And I knew that I can compete here with kind of some of the best venture capital firms on the planet. Right. So at this point, before you even have a prototype, right, what was your sort of value proposition? Because there were products on the market for razor bumps, and you could get shaving cream that was designed to ameliorate that issue. But what was the problem with those products in your view?

Here's my pitch. I would walk people through this story. I always have to go to a retail store. At that retail store, you have aisle 15. Isle 15, if you look up, it says ethnic beauty aisle. The ethnic beauty aisle is always next aisle 14, which is beauty aisle, which never made any sense to me. I have to walk down that aisle in the ethnic beauty aisle, which is never really an aisle because it's a shelf. And then there are products and packages that are dirty with kind of old folks in it from the 70s with like Jerry Curls on it.

And this packaging has not changed. So here's what's really, really interesting. This is exactly what I tell people. I walk them through this whole story in the VCs laugh. And the first slide that I show them are photos of the packaging. They all shut out. Right? Because it hasn't changed.

I don't Photoshop those things. Now, what's the pitch? Folks of color spend more money in every single health and beauty category than anyone else. Folks of color, or especially when you consider black folks, yeah, I'm one of them, the most culturally influential demographic group on the planet. When we think about folks of color, not only will be the majority of this country in 20, 30 years, we are the majority of the world. Right? So, if you're a VC, right, why wouldn't you invest in that?

And it wasn't until they started to push back that I realized, hmm, they just don't get it. That we're afterthoughts, right? And that's just a testament to complacency. And I can compete when there's complacency. Just to understand, I mean, essentially what you were saying, was, look, there is an opportunity here to create

really great, beautiful products for a market that just is totally underserved. Was that what you wanted? I had the graph. It was up to the right. I had the kind of beautiful inspiration and all that stuff. Like, look, VCs say they want

founders that they've worked with in the past that have pedigree and experience with a blue ocean opportunity. It was like, check, check, check, check. check and folks are turning this down. But I mean, this is what I'm curious about. You're going there. You're showing them the numbers. You're saying this is a, you know, there's a trillion dollars or whatever, however much

money there is when it comes to consumers of color in the United States. This is a market where African American men, particularly are spending women are spending more money than any other group in the country. And VCs were saying what to you? Razor bumps are not a problem. go figure. Literally, I had one BC was like, oh yeah, is this like that Chris Rock movie with good hair?

I was like, literally, there's no... No joke. You would sit with VCs, and presumably most of them were men, most of them were white men. That's right. And people were saying, this is not something I've ever heard of as a problem. Yeah, they just didn't want it to be a problem. I mean, and it wasn't only kind of the white men.

It was like folks of color too. And we pitched, gosh, 50, 60 VCs. You know, like Silicon Valley, particularly venture capitalists who are investors who've never operated before, almost have this really interesting kind of world view that, you know, they're always right. But you also have to realize it's their job to be wrong 90% of the time. And I had to realize that very, very quickly.

Maybe it was the case that they just, haven't caught up to the concept yet, but they will. You know, we spoke to 60 of them. There were another 60 behind that. Like, we were going to figure it out. Did you, would you get irritated during pitch meetings? Oh, all the time. I mean, like, those Chris Rock comments used to piss me off. Um, but I knew like every time they were saying, no, I knew that bad idea was good as hell. Like, I just knew it. What was it? It was just an intuition? No, I just knew if they were turning them down, they're not going to fund anybody else that was trying to do this. like if anybody else

like if anybody else was qualified to do this it was me we didn't have any competition and still don't you know it gets to some point where even if folks wanted to go and pitch this idea they'd say well let's see if Tristan's works first and by then it's too late I'm curious like for people who have straight hair

most of them most men who have straight hair don't think about shaving they shave and then they go to work and whatever were you sort of trying to explain to investors like this is a really big issue. This is like something that black men, men of color don't talk about, but is sort of painful. I mean, I think it's even bigger. It's me, my trying to explain to people, that people are different, you know, and that wasn't even registering. You know, if you can't even level set there, you know, you're going to have a pretty steep uphill battle. When we come back in just a moment,

how Tristan Walker finally launched his shaving subscription box and eventually got his products into retail stores. And how that led to maybe the most transcendent moment ever experienced by anyone in a target. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This, I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2013, and after eight months of trying to raise money, Tristan finally gets a handful of investments. to invest in his idea for Beville, a new subscription razor company primarily for African-American men. He's got about $2.5 million, a preliminary design for a razor, and some ideas for the shaving products to go with it. So you have the seed money. Where do you go next? Where do you get the manufactured? Who do you call?

So I had to pay him $10,000. The design firm, $10,000. Okay. Now I own the razor. And then as far as the soft goods, manufacturer. We started manufacturing. With that company in Oklahoma. Yeah, we went through for each of the products, four or five different kind of prototypes until we got to something that we were excited

about. Tristan, how did you know about I mean, you know, how did you know what ingredients to use shay butter or cocoa butter? I don't know. Like, how did you... So a couple of things. Number one, you relied on the experts, right? So they had actual scientists. At their... That's right. And then my

own experience. Like, I'm a black man who needs to deal with these issues, who knows that there are certain ingredients to help ameliorate these issues for us. So include those things, the shay butters, the tea tree oils, the salicylic acid, the witchate, like all that stuff, right? Things that soften skin. And the wonderful thing about, like, what we have built is that we've just developed things that solve problems.

And it's not rocket science. We just package it together in a way that's delightful and works. We haven't kind of traveled around the world to find that ingredient that's like in the earth, right? we like put into the bottle, no, these things exist. We've packaged it in a way that is proprietary to the needs of the audience that we serve, and we've continued to do that for the past six years. And so for people who are familiar with the blade, just describe what it looks like. Yeah, yeah. So a double-edged safety razor is, you know, think about this kind of single blade

that has kind of two different sides. It's very, very sharp, right? So you take this single blade, house it within a safe head. That's why they call it a safety razor. So there's two different plates, one up top, one at the bottom. Right. You squeeze it together, blades in the middle, and you attach a handle to it, and now you can shave. And you shave straight down. A 30 degree angle.

30 degree angle. That's right. So that actually started the mass market shaving industry back in 1904, 1905. There's this guy's name is King Gillette. That was what razors were. That's right. That's what razors were. That's what razors still are today.

if you find them and use them, but efficacious enough. So attaching a handle to a head and shaving with it, you know, we know it now today is just razors. It's just the amount of blades that you bring along with it. I read that you were really like interested in like the whole unboxing experience, right? Like when you get an iPhone, it's so beautiful. It's simple. You just pop off the top. You open it up. No instruction book. It's seamless. It's clean. What was that sort of your idea of what you wanted that razor? Yeah, I wasted a lot of money on packaging boy.

Look, I mean, I felt if we were going to deliver an experience to folks who have not been treated well, we have to wow them with that experience. We went through like 10, 12 different prototypes of the amount of suction that like comes up when people lift the top box from the bottom. It matters. when folks kind of lifted up and it takes that kind of two and a half seconds lift up and they see this beautiful razor underneath, that's something that they deserve. And those 10 to 12 prototypes had to happen. What do you remember when you got the first shipment and you saw this idea in your head in boxes?

So funny enough, the first shipment actually froze on a truck because we were doing the manufacturing in December. And, you know, fulfillment in Oklahoma, right? Like that sort of thing. And a few of the trucks actually had things freeze on it. So before we kind of shipped, we had to do like another batch run in order to deliver it to customers. This was going to be a subscription model from the very beginning. Subscription in the beginning.

Yeah, that was the thing that actually got me to get the funding that I needed because a lot of these VCs were subscription, subscription, subscription. And what was like Harry's and Dollar Shave Club? Were they out in the world at that point? I believe Dollar Shave Club is in the world at that point. Harry's launched a little bit before we did. And so there was this sort of sense, you're saying there was a sense among VCs, or there was excitement around a subscription model. Just e-commerce.

This was like Warby Parker Days, bonobos, right, like that sort of thing. So, you know, fortunately we had good timing because that kind of fell out of favor very quickly. But we started with subscription, and the subscription model worked for us because, you know, we wanted to build that habit, right? You got to keep shaving and we had this promise. We had this clinically proven solution that would work if you use our product for the first four weeks. So it naturally lended itself to subscription. All right. So you've got all of these boxes made and it was the razor. It was going to be a system, right? Razor, shaving cream, oil, a brush. That's right. But you had $2 million. How do you get the word out? No marketing legend. Yeah, yeah. So funny

enough, you know, when you build something that works, people talk about it. That first moment of truth, when you don't wake up with razor bumps on your face, you're going to talk about it. Even today, well over half of our customers come organically. A friend is like, you've got to try this razor. Mm-hmm. Right? Well, I mean, now it, like, Nas has wrapped about it and stuff. You know, that helps. Yeah, so, but that helps. But before he... We didn't ask him to do it. But before he talked about the fade and the blade. Yeah, that's right. How did you get, I mean, okay, day one, you got to sell the products, you got a website. How do you get people to start buying it?

So I've been fortunate, particularly for my four square days, because we did so well and had a whole bunch of publicity, that sort of thing. I was building relationships with journalists from way back with. So you had a little bit of a network. Yeah, and like the thing, you know, Walker companies had a ton of press that we're very, very thankful for. but I was speaking to a gentleman who's written a number of articles about us around like, why is it that we've gotten so much press? And he said, you know what, Tristan, you don't kind of treat journalist transactionally. You know, like you build relationships with them.

So by the time you're actually working on things, they want to talk about it. So we launched with a whole bunch of folks that were willing to talk about it. It was a time when we were talking about diversity and technology. Right. So not only did I have this new. company that had raised money. I had my not-for-profit that was thriving at the time. And your non-for-profit, we should mention, it was a Code 2040, it was nonprofit to help train Black and Latinx coders. Yep, to get internships in Silicon Valley, get them full-time

offers, mentorship, and that sort of thing. And that's continued to thrive. So you had some attention from that? We had a ton of attention from that. So it told a cohesive story that folks were willing to continue to talk about. And that's the little push that we need, and the rest just came from people using the product. And were sales brisk right away, or was it sort of a slow climb? Slow grind.

I mean, between the first and second year and third year, I think, our kind of growth rates, 2, 300% first year, 200% the second, and then we started to get into this world where we couldn't raise money, so it started to slow down. But before that point,

I mean, you started to attract more, more money, right? Eventually, you raised, I think, almost 30 million dollars. It raised $39 million, and the story goes, and I tell a lot of entrepreneurs this, I wish I didn't raise a cent of it. Every single problem that I've had at the company was a result of our having raised money. Because? Growth. They expected.

The thing you got to realize about, hockey stick growth. The thing about raising money that a lot of people forget is you've got to return it. And they want it fast. Yeah. I mean, here's. I would go and kind of pitch, I wanted to build a company that was around 150 years from now. I mean that. VCs have a 10-year horizon. That leads to some interesting board conversations, right?

Yeah. And we weren't ready for the growth. And raising more and more money, particularly in a world where your competitors are raising hundreds of millions of dollars. Like, $39 million is a lot of money, but not when your competitors are raising hundreds of millions of dollars, right? VCs weren't going to fund it if they didn't see kind of more opportunity in more things, right? Oh, you're just a subscription company. Subscription's not hot, right? I need to see more innovation, more distribution, that sort of thing.

So we accelerated kind of, you know, we started with the shave system. Then we launched this electric trimmer. And then we launched this hair care brand delivering solutions to this audience. Now, my biggest name. mistake is launching each of those things too quickly. And that got us in this, you know, now you're managing two brands, right, 36 different products, crazy supply chain. You've got to market it, et cetera. And how many people were working at Walker and Company? 12. And what was your life like? Was it just like nonstop, grind, grind, grind? It was hard. I mean, we,

I was wearing multiple hats, right? I'm the CEO of a company. The chairman of the board of that company. New father, two-year-old at the time. So it was challenging. It's a lot of work. Being a CEO is the worst job in the world, but the most rewarding one, and I can't

think about anything else I'd ever do. One of the things that I noticed you did, which really reminds me a lot of, like, away, the suitcase, a travel company, and Glacier, the makeup company, is it wasn't just the products that you were selling. You had websites. You had find a barber.

You had barbers do videos. You had videos of men using the razors and testimony of how these really beautiful videos and kind of men talking about how, you know, this is the thing that I have been waiting for. I mean, was the idea also to kind of build a self-care sort of lifestyle brand? Yeah, yeah. Six months before we started and started shipping, we actually launched what was called. called at the time Bevel Code. Bevel Code is this kind of online digital magazine talking about styling grooming for men of color. Think about this for a second. I'm 35 years old right now. I still to this day do not know where to go with the exception of Bevel Code as a black man

to know what moisturizer to use for my face. GQ, S-Quire, all that stuff. It does not exist. And we're serving kind of this consumer by telling these stories. Not only what moisturizer you use for your space. But what it's like to feel like when you wake up with razor bumps in your face, and you got an interview that morning, right? Like, these are stories that need to be told, need to be scaled, and people should hear it because it's real. You, I think by 2015, did a deal with Target,

where at this point you could get the razors, you get the products at Target. So it wasn't just mail order. It wasn't just direct-to-consumer. Why? I mean, was that sort of a shift in the model? Yeah, it's a huge shift. So we started distribution in February 2016. The way we got there, I'm pretty involved with all of our customers. I read all of our consumer success tickets.

You can rate us from 1 to 10 how likely you are to recommend the product to friends. And then you could write your review of like the brand in it. So I remember reading it one day. There's one guy, you could see the email of the person. and I'm not going to put his name, but first name. It's first name. Last Name at Target.com. Wrote this glowing review.

He was a subscriber of ours for a long period of time. Two customers beneath that, first name. Last Name at Target.com. Glowing review. He was the customer for even longer. So it's like, hmm, what do I do here?

So I go to LinkedIn. I realize like, all right, the first gentleman, he actually was running personal care for Target at the time. He was a Stanford GSB graduate it and a black man. So it's like, I'm going to hit shoe up.

Wow. And then. So this was just like, totally like, just like serendipity. Serendipity. And then the gentleman that was too beneath him, he ran the shave category at Target. Wow. This is the true story.

So I emailed them and, gosh, about a month later, we met three months later, we were in a store. Wow. Amazing. But that was only because you were paying attention to the comment. If I was not reading those things, we would not be in Target right now. And how important did Target become for your sales? Retail now is the majority of our business.

Wow. It became really, you think about marketing, it's a billboard for our brand. And I think more important, it was a statement for the movement that we were trying to create. So let me kind of give you a quick story. And this is probably the proudest moment of my entire career so far. my son was two we started distribution in Target February 2016

so it's like all right I'm going to take my son this is going to be like one of those momentous occasions right like father takes son and sees the product he's in the cart we turn into the shave aisle I get down about a quarter of the aisle

and all of a sudden I hear my son say dad that right so I turn around and I'm on one of the packages I'm on the razor box your face is on the box and he saw me on the box. And I realized two things at the time. First, this is his first time ever in a retail store. Now, he's a two-year-old, has no idea about it. But his first experience in retail is not down

this like ethnic beauty aisle, right? The fact that he's a black child, black, will be black man, who deserves this experience and is getting it. But even more important, he realized that like, or he will realize that he can also produce. Right. So not only is, see a great consumer, but can be a great producer for an audience that needs to, that has gone under-serve for so long. So I say and thank, I thank Target for the movement push, because that story needs to be scaled. And it wouldn't have happened otherwise. And it's getting scaled as we see.

So Target essentially takes a product from just being a direct-to-consumer or a product that would have been in the quote, quote, ethnic aisle. And it's in... They made a bet, and they made the right bet. So, all right, so you guys are steadily growing. You've got this growing product line. You're starting to gain momentum. Things are exciting.

And you sell the company. Yeah. In 2018, Procter & Gamble buys the company out for an undisclosed amount of money. Now, my read of this, I think a lot of, of people hear that and think, okay, that's your exit. And you walk away and you're, you're swimming in cash and goodbye and, but that's actually not what it was. Why, why did you sell it to Procter & Gamble when you were gaining momentum? Yeah. 2018 was a crazy year. Couldn't raise money. You could not raise money. You could not raise money. Because they just didn't believe in,

in the potential. It was a multitude of things. I think, um, You know, you start to get into a weird, vicious cycle when you're raising money. You know, if there's one investor who's unwilling to kind of give you the money, other investors aren't willing to do it. And if you're not raising the money, you can't kind of spend as much on innovation in marketing anymore, which makes it harder to raise money. Like, you get into this, like, really weird cycle. As a result of that, also in 2018, we had to lose some really wonderful folks, right, in the layoff.

Like, because we couldn't, the company needed to thrive. And this is all happening. as like revenues are still kind of like growing. It's like this weird thing. Anyway, at the beginning of the year, we started to get a ton of interest from all the CPGs. The big companies, the Unilebers and Johnson, Johnsons,

whoever they were. I can't say. You can't say it, right? But a lot of the big companies, and you realize, you know, if you're starting to have these chats, you better be serious about it because it's going to take a lot of time away, right?

Yeah. So we came to the conclusion, all right, we're in this world, we can't raise money. We have this 150-year vision. and we want to serve this audience, continue to kind of do what we can, but in a way that's kind of uber competitive. In September, August, September of last year,

Procter & Campbell came knocking on the door, and we realized very quickly our values aligned. Procter & Gamble reaches 5 billion people every single day. Five billion people around the world use their products every single day, the majority of whom of people of color, right? They came to us and said, Tristan, we believe in what you're doing, the way you touch these consumers, the way you speak to them is unique, it's authentic. We still want you to be an independent company.

We will not touch you. But get to leverage our access to 5 billion people, billions of dollars of research and development to do what you do, right? And fast forward a few months later, we close the deal. It only makes me now think about the things that I have to do every day. I no longer have to worry about going out and raising money, being distracted by that. Because they will invest back in. of the company. Correct. I mean, Prokner and Gamble's been doing this for 180 years.

Yeah. Right. The thing that, like, is really, really important for me is that we are set up in a position to maximize our ability to serve. Procter & Gamble set us up to do that, and that's really all that I care about. Well, I mean, I'm interesting because in the beginning of our conversation, you talked about your goal in life was to become wealthy. It sounds like that was changing, because you could have kept the company and grown it and maybe become a billion or whatever, but it sounds like that ceased to be your... That's right. It wasn't about being wealthy?

Yeah, no, I mean, that changed very quickly when I had my first son. I have two sons now. And my kind of definition of ambition changed. That moment when I took my son to target and he said, Dad made me think about the world in a different way. And kind of the goal that I have now, you know, I reflected back on this when I was 20 years old and I think, all right, when I was 30, like, what did I want, right? You know, the house, right? The wonderful wife, the children. I don't need anything else anymore, right? This idea of, like, more money won't get me anywhere. Like, the thing that I care most about is being virtuous human, a virtuous person so that my sons know how to live this world virtuously, right? That matters to me. When you...

Oh, and one other thing I should say, just so you folks know, you talked about this idea of not really being an exit and what the movement means. Procter & Gamble's been around for 180 years, and I'm the first black CEO in the company's history. The amount of impact that that means for the world and what we can do and the investment in that

is very, very important. When you were acquired by Procter & Gamble, you also told them, By the way, I'm moving this company from Silicon Valley, and I want to run it in Atlanta, Georgia, which is where you are now based. Yeah. So tell me the story. Why? Yeah.

Atlanta, I think, is the most important city in the country right now. It has one of the fastest growing economies in the country. You think about diversity, particularly upward mobility of black folks in the country. I'm raising two black boys in this country and kind of their ability to see upwardly mobile black folks matters to me and my son we lived in Palo Alto for some time he had wonderful education right with no diversity and that really started to impact me Walker and company needs to be in Atlanta most of our customers are there our highest revenues are there culture happens there it is these

and they've embraced us with wonderful open arms. And Procter & Gamble has been incredibly supportive of our moving there, which is wonderful. We can do a whole conversation about black tech leaders in Atlanta and entrepreneurs. What is your vision? How put this into context? How big do you want this thing to be? What do you want Walker and company to be in 10 years from now, 20 years from now? Yeah.

When we started this chat, we talked a little bit about Hotchkis, Rockefellers, and Fords. And again, like, I saw that there was purpose and name, right? Proctor, Gamble. You know, a lot of people ask, well, why'd you put your name on it? You're, that's kind of selfish. And I think I did it because there's an accountability there, right? And I want that accountability to this Walker name to mean something. to mean something for an audience that deserves to be served as first-class citizens.

So, you know, what's my goal in the next 10 to 20 years, to be put in a position where I can ask that question of myself again for the company, right? This is a company that needs to be around 150 years from now. I want this to outlive me, and I will be around for as long as that takes. You want in 150 years for people to say, Unilever, Procter, and GERN? Gamble, Johnson, Johnson, Walker and Company. I want people to say Prokner and Gamble, Walker and Company. Tristan, when you reflect on your journey,

how much of all of this do you attribute to your intelligence and your hard work? And how much do you think it was just luck? It's faith. I've learned 2018 was a trying year. I don't know if I told you this. it was the first time that I realized that good seasons end and bad seasons end. And by the time I moved to Atlanta, I had my last kind of session with like a therapist I was working with.

I started with her in June of last year. She said Tristan, man, you've come a long way. When we started, you weren't thinking about selling the company. You weren't moving to Atlanta. You weren't having a kid, right? You didn't do kind of like the layoffs that you had to go through at the time. Like, all this stuff happened all at the same time. And the only thing that got me through it was knowing that I had a faith that was strong enough to get me to the end of that season.

And now I'm in this, like, wonderful season of like immense bouncy, right? like Prokner and Gamble has afforded our ability to really revel in that, but also know that season's going to end, which is fine. But I know now that, like, my faith will get me to the next one, and the next one, and the next one. Do you feel lucky? I feel fortunate and blessed and thankful. I love that.

Tristan Walker, founder of Walker and company. Thank you. I spoke with Tristan Walker at the Lincoln Theater in Washington. DC. And by the way, if you have a minute, you should really check out some of the Beville videos. They feature tutorials, tips, and men talking about their own hair care experiences. Some of them are incredibly powerful. And they include guys like Ryan Leslie, Big Daddy Kane, and The Roots MC, Black Thought. Thanks so much for listening to this live episode of How I Built This.

Our show was produced this week by J.C. Howard with music composed by Rumtina Arablewe. Our live events team includes Jessica Goldstein, Ali Prescott, Ellen Jorgensen, and Andy Hughes. Thanks also to Julia Carney, Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkampur, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Sequoia Carrillo. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.