Earn the Right to Sell the Second Thing

Published 2018-04-16 · Updated 2026-06-23 · By Alan Wizemann

Topics: Product Strategy & Development, Consumer Goods, Growth Leadership, Subscription, Digital Marketing

Every subscription business that actually works arrives, sooner or later, at the same tempting fork, and I have watched companies talk themselves into the wrong turn so many times that I have come to think of it as a rite of passage rather than a decision. You have earned a recurring relationship with a customer around one product, you have their payment on file and their address and their attention every few weeks, and now you want to sell them more, and the math is genuinely irresistible. You already own the member, the billing, the shipping (the three things that usually cost the most to build), so a second category looks like free money sitting right there on the spreadsheet, except that it is not free money at all. The way most companies reach for it is precisely how they damage the relationship that created the opportunity in the first place. At Dollar Shave Club, the discipline we try to hold to is easy to say and hard to honor: expand only as fast as you have earned the customer's permission to expand.

Here is the trap, and it is subtle enough that smart people walk straight into it. When you decide to go beyond your hero product, you are really asking the customer to say yes to two separate things, and they feel like one question but they are not one question at all. The first is whether they are open to receiving something other than the razor from you, on a recurring basis, without thinking too hard about it. The second is whether they trust you as an authority in this broader category, whether they actually believe you know what you are talking about beyond shaving. The tempting move, the efficient-looking one, is to solve both at once. Launch the expanded catalog, rewrite the marketing to position the brand as a full grooming authority, and ask the member to accept a bigger relationship and a bigger claim of expertise in the same breath. It feels like leverage, and it is actually two leaps of faith stacked one on top of the other, and stacking them makes each one more likely to fail, because the customer who was perfectly content getting razors suddenly is not sure who you are anymore.

So we pull the two questions apart and answer them in order. The first one – will they take a recurring shipment of something that is not the razor – we answer while staying firmly inside the category where we already have trust. Before we ever ask a member to believe we are an authority on anything new, we simply extend the recurring relationship to adjacent things they already associate with us, the rest of the shave routine, the things that live in the same drawer. Same category, same trust, just more of the relationship they already signed up for. We are not making a new claim about ourselves. We are deepening one that already exists, and the existing customer mindset does most of the quiet work for us. Only once that is genuinely working, once members have shown over time that they are happy to receive more than the razor, do we take on the harder second question, expansion into genuinely new categories and the authority claim that comes with it. And that one is not solved with a checkout flow. It is solved with the slower, less glamorous work of becoming trustworthy in the new space: the content, the guidance, the product quality that earns a person's belief that you know grooming, and not just blades.

The reason sequencing matters as much as it does is that trust does not transfer automatically across categories, and pretending it does is how good brands overreach and never quite understand why. People trusted us for shaving, and that trust was completely real, but it was also specific. The instinct in a growth meeting (I have sat in plenty of them) is to treat brand permission as a general-purpose currency you can spend anywhere you like – they love us, so they will buy whatever we sell. They will not, at least not at first, and if you push into a category where you have not earned authority, you do not merely fail to sell the new thing. You put a small crack in the trust that was carrying the original business, which is a far more expensive mistake than the failed launch itself.

There is a broader principle underneath all of this that goes well past grooming. Brand expansion is earned, not declared. You can announce that you are now a full-line solution as loudly as you want, and the customer will quietly decide for themselves whether they believe you, one category at a time, based entirely on whether you have actually demonstrated you deserve it. The companies that expand well treat every new step as something to earn before they take it. The ones that stall treat their brand like a license to sell anything at all, and then discover, a little too late, that the license was only ever valid in the aisle they started in. I will grant the obvious tension, which is that this is slower than the spreadsheet wants it to be – the spreadsheet sees a member base and a catalog and simply multiplies. But the spreadsheet does not price in the cost of asking a customer to believe two new things at once and then watching them believe neither, which is the outcome it is quietly steering you toward. Sequenced expansion looks conservative for a quarter or two and then it compounds, because every step lands on a foundation of permission you actually built rather than one you merely assumed was there. Start where you are already trusted, prove the smaller claim before you make the bigger one, and earn the right to sell the second thing. The third and the fourth get easier from there, because by then the customer has learned, from their own experience rather than from your marketing, that when you show up with something new it is worth their attention.