What Gillette and Dollar Shave Club Teach Us about Decoupling

For more than a century, Gillette has been associated with one of the most famous business models in the world: sell the razor, create repeat demand for the blades, and build a long-term customer habit around the system.

The simple version is easy to remember. The strategic lesson is more important.

Gillette became powerful not only because it sold razors and blades. It became powerful because it understood something deeper about business design: reduce friction at the start, build usage, create repeat demand, and capture value over time.

That is a sign of strong business thinking.

It shows a culture capable of seeing beyond the first sale. The handle was not the whole business. The habit was the business. The repeat purchase was the business. The customer relationship over time was the business.

But every successful model carries a hidden risk.

The model that creates success can later become the model the business protects too strongly.

That is where Dollar Shave Club becomes important.

Dollar Shave Club did not need to invent shaving. It did not need to outspend Gillette. It did not need to win by being more complex.

It looked at the customer journey and asked a sharper question:

What does the customer actually want, and what are they being forced to tolerate to get it?

That question is where decoupling begins.

The story has three lessons.

Gillette shows how strong business thinking can create a powerful model.

Dollar Shave Club shows how customer friction can be decoupled.

Unilever’s later ownership of Dollar Shave Club shows why buying a disruptive model is not the same as preserving the culture that made it disruptive.

01 — The Lumen Diagnosis: How Decoupling Works

This is not a story about Gillette having a bad business culture.

It is more useful than that.

This is a story about how a strong business culture can create a brilliant model — and how decoupling reveals the blind spots that emerge if the organisation stops questioning it.

There are three lessons for business leaders.

Business culture creates the model.
Gillette’s strength came from seeing the business as a system, not a single transaction.

Business culture also protects the model.
Once a model works, people build pricing, incentives, sales habits, reporting, language, and management expectations around it.

Business culture must keep questioning the model.
If the business does not ask where customers feel friction, a competitor will use decoupling to capture that value.

Dollar Shave Club succeeded because it listened to the friction inside the shaving journey.

Gillette became vulnerable because the bundle that once created strength also created something customers were ready to separate.

That is the real business lesson behind customer decoupling.

02 — The Original Genius of Value Chain Decoupling

The model Gillette became famous for was powerful because it anticipated value chain decoupling by separating the first sale from the long-term value.

The razor helped the customer enter the system. The blades created repeat demand. The routine created habit.

That is not just pricing.

That is business design.

A weaker company thinks only about the first sale. A stronger company thinks about the customer relationship over time.

This is why the Gillette lesson still matters.

The customer did not really want a handle. The customer wanted a clean shave, confidence, convenience, and a simple routine.

The handle helped them start.

The blades kept them in the system.

The first lesson for business leaders is this:

The most profitable part of your business may not be the first thing you sell.

Sometimes the first sale should reduce risk.

Sometimes it should build trust.

Sometimes it should make adoption easier.

Sometimes it should let the customer feel value before the business captures the full value.

That can be a strategic sacrifice.

But a strategic sacrifice is not the same as a random discount.

A discount weakens a business when there is no model behind it.

A deliberate sacrifice strengthens the business when the recurring engine is built on purpose.

The question every business should ask when assessing decoupling opportunities is:

After the customer enters, what valuable reason do they have to stay?

If you cannot answer that clearly, the model is weak no matter how clever the entry point looks.

03 — When Bundles Prevent Proactive Decoupling

The same model that made Gillette strong also created the opening for disruption.

Over time, the razor-and-blades model became more than a strategy. It became a rigid bundle to defend.

Customers could not simply buy what they valued most. They had to accept the system around it: the premium brand, the retail markup, the cartridge format, the inconvenience of remembering refills, and the high price of replacement blades.

That does not mean the original model was foolish.

It means the model had matured.

And mature models often create cultural blind spots that prevent proactive decoupling.

The company starts defending what already works.

The sales team is trained to justify the existing offer.

The reporting system measures the current model.

The pricing structure protects the current margin.

The brand story reinforces the current position.

The internal language makes the bundle feel normal.

That is how a successful idea becomes difficult to question.

This is the danger for every business.

The model that made you successful can become the model that stops you hearing the customer.

04 — What Dollar Shave Club Saw in Shaving Friction

Dollar Shave Club saw the customer journey differently.

It did not ask:

How do we build a better version of Gillette?

It asked:

Which part of the customer journey can we make simpler through decoupling?

Customers wanted sharp blades.

They wanted convenience.

They wanted a fair price.

They wanted not to think too much about the buying process.

What they tolerated was everything attached to that need: the retail trip, the locked-in cartridge system, the premium price, and the feeling that replacement blades cost more than they should.

So Dollar Shave Club decoupled the core value from the surrounding friction.

Blades by mail.

Simple subscription.

Clear price.

Memorable message.

It was not a more complicated offer.

It was a simpler offer.

That is why decoupling is powerful.

A disruptor does not always beat the incumbent by building a better version of the whole system. Sometimes it wins by removing the one part of the system customers no longer want to tolerate.

05 — What Value Chain Decoupling Actually Means

Decoupling means systematically separating the steps in a customer’s journey.

This dynamic was extensively codified in Harvard Business Review’s research on customer value chain decoupling: disruptors don’t invent new technologies; they break apart the customer’s activity chain to eliminate unrewarded friction.

Every product or service is really a chain of activities:

• awareness
• evaluation
• purchase
• onboarding
• use
• support
• repurchase
• renewal
• expansion

Incumbents usually bundle that chain into one complete offer. Then they defend the whole thing as if every part is equally valuable.

Disruptors think differently.

They look for one link in the chain.

They ask where the customer feels the most value.

They ask where the customer feels the most friction.

Then they apply decoupling to separate the two.

Netflix separated watching from owning and returning DVDs.

Spotify separated listening to a song from buying the album around it.

Dollar Shave Club separated getting blades from paying for the brand and retail system around them.

In each case, the incumbent had forced customers to buy friction in order to get value.

Through systematic decoupling, the disruptor simply stopped forcing them.

06 — The Culture Lesson Behind Decoupling

The real lesson is not that Gillette was wrong and Dollar Shave Club was right.

That is too simple.

The better lesson is that business culture has two jobs.

First, it must create strong ideas.

Second, it must keep testing those ideas after they become successful.

Many companies do the first job well and the second job badly.

They build a strong model, then protect it.

They create a successful offer, then defend it.

They learn how to win, then repeat the same logic too long.

This is where business culture enables proactive decoupling.

A strong culture allows people to ask uncomfortable questions before the market forces the answer.

Questions like:

What are customers only tolerating because they have no better option?

Which part of our offer would they remove if they could?

Where are we defending complexity because it protects our margin?

What would a smaller competitor decouple from our model first?

A weak culture avoids those questions.

It explains away friction.

It treats objections as sales problems.

It treats churn as a customer problem.

It treats slow adoption as a training problem.

It treats complaints as noise.

But customer friction is not noise.

It is strategy information indicating where decoupling will occur.

The market usually gives warning signs before it disrupts a business. The question is whether the culture allows people to hear them.

07 — Why Sales Discovery Spotlights Decoupling Opportunities

Salespeople hear the warning signs early.

They hear the objections.

They hear the hesitation.

They hear what customers compare.

They hear what customers avoid.

They hear what customers delay.

They hear what customers say they want — and what they are really trying to escape.

But this only helps the business if the sales team is trained to listen properly for decoupling signals.

A sales team trained only to push the current bundle will defend it in front of the customer.

It will treat objections as something to overcome.

A sales team trained in value-led discovery does something different.

It treats objections as evidence.

It asks:

• What is harder than it should be?
• Where does the process slow down?
• What does the customer keep questioning?
• What are they trying to avoid?
• What do they value most?
• What would they decouple if they could?

That kind of sales training does more than improve close rates.

It helps the business hear the market.

This is why sales training is part of business culture.

If the sales team is trained to defend the old model, the business learns less.

If the sales team is trained to listen for friction, the business learns faster where decoupling will land.

08 — Why CRM Signals Reveal Decoupling Threats

Many businesses already have the warning signs inside their CRM.

They appear as:

• stalled deals
• repeated objections
• poor conversion
• slow onboarding
• low adoption
• support issues
• price resistance
• churn

But a CRM that only records activity is not enough.

A useful CRM should help management see patterns.

Where do deals slow down?

Which objections keep appearing?

Which customer segments resist the offer?

Which products create support load?

Where does onboarding break?

Where do customers need manual help?

Where does the business keep compensating for a weak process?

These are not only sales issues.

They are business model signals.

If a competitor is going to execute a decoupling strategy against your offer, the evidence often appears first in your CRM.

The problem is that many CRMs are designed to track activity, not challenge assumptions.

That is a missed opportunity.

A better CRM should help the business see where the customer journey is breaking, where the sales process is compensating for confusion, and where decoupling would deliver greater clarity.

09 — The Decoupling Process Businesses Can Apply

The mistake is to copy the razor-and-blades model without understanding the thinking behind it.

The real lesson is not:

Sell one thing cheap and make money on another.

The better lesson is:

Understand where the customer sees value, where they feel friction, and how decoupling can capture value over time.

That can be turned into a practical process.

1. Map the customer’s activity chain

Do not start with your product.

Start with the customer’s journey.

How do they discover the problem?

How do they compare options?

How do they buy?

How do they implement?

How do they use what they bought?

Where do they get stuck, complain, renew, or leave?

This map reveals the real business model: not the one in the brochure, but the one the customer actually experiences.

2. Separate value from friction

For every step, ask whether it creates value, reduces risk, or speeds the outcome.

Then ask whether it is just something the customer tolerates because there is no better option.

Many companies discover that what they call “value” is actually friction.

Customers may not be loyal to the full bundle.

They may only be loyal to one or two outcomes hidden inside it.

3. Find the most detachable link

The best decoupling opportunities usually have three features.

The customer values the outcome.

The current process frustrates them.

A competitor can remove that frustration without rebuilding the whole system.

That is the danger.

A competitor does not need to copy your entire business.

It only needs to execute decoupling on the part customers resent most.

4. Decide what to sacrifice

This is where strategy becomes real.

A business may need to sacrifice margin, complexity, control, or tradition in one part of the offer to unlock greater long-term value.

That could mean:

• a diagnostic before a large project
• a fixed-scope starter package
• a low-risk pilot
• a simpler onboarding path
• a more transparent service model
• a better self-service option
• a clearer subscription model

But the sacrifice must lead somewhere.

Without a destination, it is just discounting.

10 — Why Buying a Decoupling Disruptor Fails Without Culture

Here the usual telling stops.

The disruptor saw the friction, removed it, grew quickly, and forced the incumbent to respond.

But the more useful chapter came later.

In 2016, Unilever acquired Dollar Shave Club for a reported US$1 billion. Unilever never officially confirmed the terms, but the figure was widely reported, and it signalled the same thing either way: a global consumer goods company paid a major premium to own a disruptor.

Then, in 2023, Unilever sold a controlling stake in Dollar Shave Club to Nexus Capital Management while keeping a minority share. Unilever framed the move as part of a sharper focus on its core portfolio.

Here we have to be fair to the obvious explanation.

The simplest reading is not a culture failure at all. It is portfolio fit. A direct-to-consumer razor brand may simply not belong inside a company built around foods, home care, and personal care at global scale.

On that reading, Dollar Shave Club was sold not because anything was broken, but because it was always the wrong shape for the shelf it sat on.

That explanation is real, and a business owner should hold it honestly.

But it does not cancel the culture lesson.

It sharpens it.

Because the question underneath portfolio fit is a culture question: why does a fast, irreverent, founder-led brand struggle to stay itself inside a large, careful, process-driven parent?

The fit problem and the culture problem are the same problem seen from two angles.

A disruptor is not just a product line that can be slotted in or out. It is a set of behaviours — fast decisions, simple offers, a willingness to challenge category norms — that large systems tend to slow down by default, not by malice.

So the lesson is not that Unilever was careless.

Large acquirers can and sometimes do protect an acquired brand’s edge.

It is that doing so is deliberate and difficult, and the default outcome of dropping a fast culture into a slow system is that the fast culture gives way.

Decoupling explains how Dollar Shave Club attacked.

It does not explain why a billion-dollar disruptor was easier to buy than to keep distinctive.

Part of the answer is culture.

The subscription model could be copied.

The brand name could be acquired.

The customer base could be bought.

The operating culture that made the company sharp, fast, and distinctive could not simply be wired into a large corporate system — and protecting it would have taken a deliberate effort that runs against the grain of how big organisations naturally operate.

That is the part business leaders should sit with.

You can buy a disruptor. You cannot buy the culture that made it disruptive — you can only choose to protect it, or watch the system quietly absorb it.

Gillette’s risk was defending the old value chain instead of asking what the customer was really buying.

Unilever’s risk was different: assuming that owning a disruptive model would carry the behaviours that made it disruptive.

Both are culture lessons.

One is a failure to keep questioning a successful model through decoupling.

The other is the difficulty of protecting the behaviours that made a new model work.

If you do not deliberately protect the behaviours that drive growth — in your team, your acquisitions, your best people, or your sales culture — you can end up owning the name while losing the reason it mattered.

11 — The Three Decoupling Lessons from Gillette and Dollar Shave Club

There are three lessons worth taking seriously.

First: strong business culture can create a powerful model.

Gillette’s lesson is that a business does not have to capture all the value in the first sale. It can reduce friction at the start, build habit, and create long-term value through repeat use.

Second: strong models must keep being questioned.

Dollar Shave Club’s lesson is that the model that made you strong can also become the place where you are most exposed. If customers are forced to tolerate friction to get value, a competitor will apply decoupling to separate the two.

Third: culture is the asset that does not transfer on a balance sheet.

The acquisition lesson is that the behaviours driving growth are easy to lose and impossible to buy. Protecting them is a deliberate act, not an automatic one.

Together, these lessons are more useful than any one alone.

A business must know what to sacrifice and what to protect.

What to separate and what to keep.

What customers value and what they merely tolerate.

And which behaviours quietly drive the growth — so they are protected rather than standardised away.

Don’t copy the model. Copy the thinking.

The Gillette and Dollar Shave Club story is not only a pricing story.

It is a culture story.

It shows how a business can create strength by reducing friction and building repeat value.

It shows how that same business can become vulnerable when the successful model becomes too protected to question.

And it shows how even a winning disruptor can lose its edge when the culture behind it is not protected.

For business leaders, the message is clear.

Map the customer journey.

Separate value from friction through decoupling.

Use CRM to identify where deals stall and customers hesitate.

Train salespeople to listen for what objections reveal, not only to overcome them.

Protect the behaviours that drive growth instead of standardising them away.

Build a culture that welcomes uncomfortable questions before the market asks them for you.

You cannot outspend customer frustration forever.

You cannot hide a weak bundle forever.

You cannot buy a culture you are not willing to protect.

And you cannot protect yesterday’s model forever.

You can only ask the hard question first.

What part of your business would a smart competitor decouple?

What part of your business would a smart competitor decouple — and which behaviours would you fight to protect if you ever had to defend your edge?

That question belongs in strategy meetings, sales reviews, CRM reviews, and leadership conversations.

Lumen helps businesses review customer journeys, CRM signals, sales processes, and business culture to find where friction is hiding — and which behaviours are worth protecting — before a competitor turns either into their opportunity.

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