CEO Corner: Woodie Hillyard on W, Disrupting Men’s Care With Jake Paul
Under Hillyard’s leadership, W has leveraged its affiliation with co-founder Jake Paul to quickly disrupt the men’s personal care category
Celebrity and influencer-founded brands are a dime a dozen these days, but W is doing things a bit differently.
Co-founded by social media star Jake Paul, along with entrepreneur Geoffrey Woo and consumer/retail industry vet Woodie Hillyard, W is out to disrupt the men’s personal care space with a line of “better-for-you” products including body wash, deodorant, bar soap and more.
W’s products all retail for less than $10 and are free from parabens, sulfates, phthalates and artificial dyes, bringing young men into the era of natural wellness.
Leveraging Paul’s popularity on social media, W has quickly built an impressive brand: the company launched in June exclusively at Walmart and did over seven figures in sales in its first month, being touted as the best launch in the history of the retail giant’s “Emerging Brands” category. A month later, W announced that it had raised $14 million in funding to drive product and retail expansion.
Hillyard, who serves as W’s CEO, sat down with Athletech News to discuss W’s mission to disrupt the men’s personal care category, how the brand leverages its affiliation with Jake Paul to drive awareness, and what’s coming next for W as it plots a category takeover.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Athletech News: Can you tell us about your background and why you decided to join W?
Woodie Hillyard: I’ve always loved consumer-facing businesses. I realized when I was in private equity and investment banking, I was more interested in the brands we were working with than the financial engineering aspect of it. Around 2015, I joined Casper, the direct-to-consumer mattress brand, when it was very much still a startup. I was there for almost five years, and I got to do a lot of different things including finance, marketing, a bit of product, and then my last role was running the e-commerce business.
I moved to LA about four years ago when I got an opportunity to be on the founding team of Safely, which we started with Kris Jenner. I was a chief revenue officer there – we didn’t have a CEO in the business, so I got to play day-to-day CEO. We launched that brand in Walmart, which showed me the opportunity to build big brands at Walmart.
When the opportunity came along around two years ago to start working with Jake and Geoff on a new brand, I got really excited because Jake’s demographic is aligned with the American consumer. This brand has been a perfect opportunity for me to combine my unique skill sets and the career experiences I’ve had so far.
ATN: Why did you choose men’s personal care for W?
WH: When we looked at men’s care, we saw a lot of brands targeting and serving that older generation, but Jake’s demographic – 10 to 30-year-old males – wasn’t being focused on. There’s this massive gap in the market that Axe used to fill, but no one really fills it anymore. We just felt like there needed to be a different brand, with a unique mission, in this space.
ATN: What does W do differently than other men’s care brands to appeal to the 10 to 30-year-old male demographic?
WH: We do a lot of things differently. First, there’s just a level of authenticity that we bring relative to other brands. I think everyone is trying to be “cool” as a brand. But the amazing thing about working with a creator like Jake is he is cool, and he knows what this generation thinks. That’s a huge differentiator for our brand.
It’s also our product. I’ve seen this firsthand with several brands – the majority of Americans aren’t ready for an all-natural product, but they’re open to better-for-you products. So when developing this product, we took out parabens, phthalates and sulfates, a lot of these negative chemicals that are included in a lot of personal care products that just don’t need to be in there to have an effective product. We also produce everything in America, which we think is important, and it also makes our supply chain more manageable. And then price-point: a lot of new brands in this category launch at a premium price. We wanted something a bit more approachable for the average consumer.
ATN: What does W do on the marketing front to appeal to young male consumers?
WH: We’re trying to have fun. I think because we’re a creator-led brand, we have permission to have a lot more fun and to be a bit more irreverent relative to a normal brand. If you look at our (social media) feed, we’re trying to entertain our consumers and bring our brand to life through entertainment.
We’ve done that quite effectively since we launched. We have about 5x the number of organic, tagged social posts relative to every other men’s personal care brand in the space. We have over 100,000 followers on our Instagram account, and we’ve had several videos get over 100 million views. To me, this shows that our product is resonating with digitally native consumers in a way other brands aren’t.
ATN: Jake Paul is one of the world’s most popular influencers, with millions of social media followers. How much do you lean into Jake to market W versus letting the brand stand on its own?
WH: Jake is obviously a very important part of the brand. He’s our co-founder, and his DNA is in this brand in a lot of ways. But we intentionally didn’t name the brand after Jake Paul, unlike a lot of celebrity brands. It’s W, which stands for “Win.” We’re meant to inspire men to do their best and get audacious wins every day.
We’re always going to leverage Jake for inspiration, for creativity – we talk to Jake every day. He’s a huge part of this brand, and ultimately, he’s a great channel for distribution and awareness. But if we’re successful, the people who are buying W 12 or 24 months from now hopefully won’t know it’s a Jake Paul brand.
ATN: W launched in Walmart stores only. Why did you choose Walmart as your first distribution partner?
WH: We talked to a few retailers, and from the get-go, Walmart was excited about our vision for the brand – I think they understand the power of someone like Jake. We also did some data analysis prior to launching the brand to see where Jake’s followers lined up with the demographics of some of the different retailers in the U.S., and Walmart really made sense for Jake’s demographic. His fans are America, and 90% of America shops at Walmart. We were in over 4,000 Walmarts nationwide from the jump. It takes most brands years to build that scale and distribution.
ATN: Besides partnering with Walmart, what’s been the key to W’s quick success in the men’s personal care category?
WH: We did a great job of announcing to people that we were here in a big way. I’m biased, but out of all of the launches I’ve seen, I think we had the biggest launch of the year, especially in the consumer space. I also think Jake has done an amazing job. He really lives the brand. You always see him with a product in the background of his videos or wearing merch. A big part of our success is that people see the brand out in the world.
ATN: Could W look to expand into other retail channels or are you exclusive with Walmart?
WH: We don’t have exclusivity, but at launch, we just focused on Walmart because we wanted to make sure we executed well. Next year, we’re going to be expanding into nationwide grocery chains. Grocery is a very different channel than Walmart, so it’s going to be an exciting opportunity for us to win there.
ATN: What does W’s product mix look like right now, and could you expand in the future?
WH: Our current lineup is the core categories within men’s personal care. We have our deodorant, body spray, body wash, bar soap and a two-in-one shampoo and conditioner – the basics of a shower routine. We also have three face-and-hair SKUs: a pomade, hair gel and face wash.
In 2025, we’re going to be bringing some new innovations. One of the products we’re excited about is a natural deodorant. The exact launch date is TBD, but I’ve been using it for the last few weeks, and it’s great.
ATN: Looking ahead, what’s your vision for the future of W?
WH: I want W to become the next multi-generational brand in men’s personal care. I think if we can keep building the brand around this idea of instilling confidence in men and trying to inspire people to get the W and just be a better version of themselves, there are a lot of cool category adjacencies we can go into as well.
Ten years from now, I see W being a multi-billion dollar company that is playing in personal care and also playing in some of these adjacencies. We’ll be a fixture in the lives of most men in America, because they resonate with the message and they want to be associated with a brand that stands for being a better version of yourself.