Harry’s and Coterie owner Mammoth Brands has ambitions to be the next CPG giant

CNBC.COMJun 7, 12:00 PM UTC
Harry’s and Coterie owner Mammoth Brands has ambitions to be the next CPG giant

In this article

Mammoth Brands wants to take on traditional consumer packaged goods companies, armed with a portfolio of disruptors in the personal and baby care categories that have won over consumers and retailers alike.

For the last decade, upstarts like those owned by Mammoth have challenged the relevance and longstanding dominance of legacy giants like Procter & Gamble, Unilever and Kimberly-Clark. The trend has also played out across packaged food and beverage companies, like Poppi and Olipop taking on Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. Consumers’ loyalty no longer draws on just brand recognition. Newcomers can offer shoppers something different: better prices, higher quality or fewer ingredients that scare them.

“A lot of these companies call these smaller brands ‘ankle biters’ — tells you exactly what you need to know about how they view the threat,” said Nik Modi, co-head of global consumer and retailer research for RBC Capital Markets. “But I think that they’re taking it a lot more seriously. I think it’s gotten to a tipping point.”

With brands like Harry’s razors, Lume Deodorant and Coterie diapers, Mammoth is reshaping the consumer goods landscape, and it has ambitious plans.

“We’re trying to build a leading modern [consumer packaged goods] company, like if Procter & Gamble and Unilever were getting built today,” Mammoth co-founder and co-CEO Andy Katz-Mayfield told CNBC.

In 2024, Mammoth saw revenue of $835 million and almost $100 million in adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, according to a statement from the company. While legacy consumer giants still dwarf the company with their tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue, Mammoth said it has seen a greater than 20% revenue compound annual growth rate over the prior five years through 2024.

Soon, a wider swath of investors could bet on the company’s vision. Mammoth is weighing an initial public offering as soon as the second half of this year, according to a Bloomberg report.

“Today, our private company, we make money, which is great, and we have opportunity to continue to invest in the brands in our portfolio,” said Mammoth’s other co-founder and co-CEO Jeff Raider. “We’ll continue to evaluate the right capital structure for the business over time to enable us to achieve that long-term outcome.”

In the meantime, Mammoth seems focused on challenging existing CPG giants.

The early seeds of Mammoth began in 2013, when Katz-Mayfield and Raider founded Harry’s. Katz-Mayfield came up with the idea for the startup based on his frustration with the status quo of buying $20 replacement razor blades.

“I called up Jeff,” Katz-Mayfield said. “We decided to build a men’s grooming brand that was a really high quality product at great value, a better overall experience, online led, and I really do think that’s really at the core of everything that guides Mammoth Brands.”

Katz-Mayfield and Raider had previously worked together at Charlesbank Capital Partners and Bain & Company. Before founding Harry’s, Raider co-founded Warby Parker.

Like the glasses startup, Harry’s began online, becoming another disruptor during the era of direct-to-consumer brands. By 2016, it had gained enough customers to land on Target shelves.

Harry’s DTC origins allowed it to tweak its razors and win over customers who were previously loyal to the traditional grooming giants.

Its DTC operating model also helped underscore who the company views as its core customer: the shopper. But traditional CPG companies typically view retailers as their customer, not the person that eventually buys and uses their products.

That perspective influences those companies’ innovation strategies, according to Katz-Mayfield. For example, a CPG company could make a few small tweaks to create a new SKU, or stock keeping unit, to replace an underperforming product SKU, allowing that brand to hold onto its existing shelf space and placate its retail customer, according to Katz-Mayfield.

“It’s not that some of those brands aren’t great and some of those products aren’t great, but ... the innovation was driven by a strategy which is, the only way we can grow is to increase prices, and so on,” Katz-Mayfield said. “The only way we can justify price increases is to add bells and whistles that consumers don’t actually want.”

Harry’s made its way to more retailers after Target. The brand stuck to its DTC roots though, insisting on launching new products online first to get feedback from loyal customers.

In 2018, Harry’s launched Flamingo, a women’s shaving and body care brand with the same ethos.

Then the legacy giants came knocking.

In 2019, Schick owner Edgewell Personal Care announced it was buying Harry’s for $1.37 billion. Three years earlier, Unilever had bought Dollar Shave Club, another razor disruptor, for $1 billion. (In 2023, Unilever sold the razor brand to a private equity firm.)

Edgewell offered Harry’s the chance to use its expertise in the direct-to-consumer business model and apply it to the company’s brands, according to Raider. But the Federal Trade Commission sued to block the deal on antitrust grounds, which led Edgewell to walk away from the acquisition.

Still, Katz-Mayfield and Raider held onto their vision of helping other brands achieve success.

“The barriers to starting a brand are lower than they’ve ever been,” Katz-Mayfield said. “Our perspective is that really scaling and maintaining these brands is still really hard.”

Harry’s created an incubator lab, launching cat care brand Cat Person and haircare brand Headquarters. It has since sold Cat Person to Weruva and wound down Headquarters, teaching the Harry’s team the value of staying more focused on what it considers core personal care categories.

Harry’s Labs also invested in the seed round of Hims, but has since sold its minority stake.

“Investing is not really part of the strategy,” Katz-Mayfield said. “We did that at the time as we were testing and learning how we’re going to build the platform. It was a great outcome for us, because [Hims] had a lot of success and the investment was worth a lot.”

In 2021, the company bought Lume Deodorant, which sells sticks, tubes and spray that can be used all over the body. The brand is widely credited with establishing the whole-body deodorant segment. Within two years of the deal, Lume’s sales had more than doubled, according to Mammoth.

The Lume acquisition helped Mammoth learn more about selling on Amazon, where the brand had more experience than Harry’s and Flamingo did, according to Katz-Mayfield.

Building off of the Lume acquisition, Harry’s launched Mando deodorants in late 2022, marketing the same concept to men.

In April 2025, Harry’s Labs officially rebranded as Mammoth Brands. And its next acquisition further demonstrated its desire to be the next big CPG company.

In late 2025, Mammoth bought Coterie, a high-end diaper brand founded in 2019 with celebrity investors like Karlie Kloss and Ashley Graham.

The deal was reportedly valued at over $1 billion and involved a mix of cash and stock. Mammoth said in October that Coterie surpassed $200 million in net revenue over the previous 12 months, a nearly 60% jump from the prior-year period.

Coterie’s premium diapers can cost as much as $1 per unit, a steep price for some parents. But the brand has found many consumers are willing to pay more for the product, which promises high absorbency without added fragrance, latex, rubber, parabens, pesticides or chlorine bleaching. Coterie has been “very profitable” over the last three years, according to the brand’s CEO Jess Jacobs.

“Seventy-four percent of parents are willing to pay more for better-for-you products,” she told CNBC. “Parents are looking for better and deserve better, and they’re questioning the status quo, just like we are as a brand and as a company.”

Forty-three percent of the brand’s new customers come from word of mouth alone, according to Coterie.

Under Mammoth, Coterie now has the advantages of being a part of a bigger company; it can learn from e-commerce strategies for Amazon that currently work for Mammoth’s brands. As Coterie broadens its retail exposure beyond higher-end grocers like Whole Foods and Erewhon, Mammoth can introduce it to more retailers. And diapers are complicated to manufacture, so Mammoth can help support that process as Coterie continues to create innovate on its diapers.

For example, Coterie is currently in talks to add more retail partners. And Mammoth sees bigger potential for the brand, too.

“Coterie is a brand that can really extend across baby care,” Katz-Mayfield said. “It’s not just a diaper brand.”

But Coterie’s success has caught the attention of legacy players, who are eager to adapt some of the upstart’s playbook.

For decades, a handful of companies have dominated the household goods and family and personal care categories. Their portfolios are chock-full of iconic brands used every day by Americans, and their histories often stretch back more than a century.

In 1837, soap maker James Gamble and candlemaker William Procter became business partners, creating the company that still carries their names today.

Originally founded as a paper mill company in 1872, Kimberly-Clark now owns a host of brands like Kleenex, Huggies and Cottonelle. It went public nearly a century ago.

In 1930, a merger between a Dutch margarine producer and a British soap maker gave birth to Unilever.

While those massive companies competed with each other, it was nearly impossible for a newcomer to gain a foothold in their well-established categories. For a nascent company, launching a new product was pricey and difficult, as legacy brands held onto their shelf space with a death grip and retailers were reluctant to take a chance.

But over the last decade, these consumer giants have faced a new threat from upstarts.

“We are really seeing competition in CPG has fundamentally intensified, and it’s comin

Continue reading on CNBC.COM

Related Articles