Jake Paul is having a fair amount of success breaking into the industry dominated by ubiquitous brands like Axe and Old Spice. Paul’s body care brand W, which has previously been available as a Walmart exclusive, is now poised to cross over to other retailers after raising $11 million in new funding.
The Series A funding valued W at $150 million, according to execs at the company. One of those execs is chief executive Woodie Hillyard, who co-founded the brand along with Paul and is quoted explaining how W differs from many other newcomers to the personal body care business:
“Most new brands [in the personal care sector] were started in New York or L.A. and launched with the coasts in mind, and they are launched at a premium price point that wouldn’t be accessible to the Walmart consumer.”
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Paul’s core audience is boys and men between the ages of 10 and 30, and W’s quirky branding seems to be resonating with that demographic. And the product itself needs to be able to stand up against such long-standing giants as Unilever (Axe) and Procter & Gamble (Old Spice) to compete.
But Paul is not the only social media influencer trying to make that leap and seeming to have some early success in the process. His own brother Logan Paul has an energy drink line called Prime that reported some $1.2 billion in sales in 2023, less than two years after it first hit shelves. Even Kim Kardashian’s $4 billion Skims shapewear brand could be said to be a part of this trend.
Most of the $11 billion raised by W, which has raised $14 billion in total funding so far, is coming from big venture capital investment firms, but the WSJ article mentions a couple of notable individual investors as well: Paris Hilton and Naomi Osaka.