How Jake Paul’s personal care brand W is leveraging its influencer founder

Paul is an online star with over 20 million subscribers on YouTube alone, known for wild publicity stunts. Most recently, Paul has taken up boxing, with an upcoming scheduled match with Mike Tyson later this month. But Paul, like many other creators, is trying to build consumer-facing brands as well.

Hillyard is the CEO of W, Paul’s personal care brand, which currently offers products like body wash, deodorant and shampoo. It launched earlier this year with distribution in Walmart. Hillyard knows a thing or two about growing brands alongside influencers. He’s the former chief revenue officer of Safely, Kris Jenner’s home cleaning startup.

He joined this week’s Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about the launch strategy of W and how it plans to grow in the coming year.

In Hilliard’s estimation, it’s much harder to launch a new brand now than ever before. That’s why he’s so bullish on creator-led businesses. “During the heyday of DTC, when Warby Parker and Harry’s and Casper were scaling, you could acquire customers for a pretty reasonable clip and drive a lot of traffic to your website,” he said. “That arbitrage has gone away now. That new arbitrage, in my mind, is creator, because creators have this massive embedded audience of people who want to associate with them.”

According to Hillyard, W’s launch has been a smashing success. Now, it has plans to go into more stores beyond Walmart. For now, that’s probably online platforms like Amazon and GoPuff, but more physical stores are likely on the horizon as well.

But, for now, the brand is dependent on the figurehead behind it. Hillyard said W plans to expand beyond Paul’s shadow. But for now, he believes that Paul — despite his headline-worthy shenanigans — is the right person to launch a brand like W.

“There’s always a risk there,” he said. “But I think the thing about Jake is he’s one of the smartest business minds I’ve ever worked with.”

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

W’s target demographic: young men
“When I think about this demographic, I don’t really think they have a brand they’re loyal to. There really isn’t a brand that speaks to that younger generation, which is what we saw the opportunity around. I think Axe and Old Spice are great brands that have been around for a long time. But when we looked at the landscape today, those are incumbent brands and they target a very different demographic than the Gen Z/Gen A/Gen Y consumer today. So that’s really where we are. We’re focused on that younger consumer that really resonates with Jake because there just wasn’t a brand that represented them.”

How Paul helped the brand launch in Walmart
“Having Jake is what allowed us to get such large distribution in Walmart, because… they really saw the vision of the brand. W is a better-for-you men’s personal care brand that stands for winning and inspiring confidence in young men. And that’s really a pretty interesting gap when it comes to the psychographic behind these brands that sit in the men’s personal care space. No one was filling that void. And then they also saw they needed a brand that could drive the younger consumer to stores. So that’s really where we came in. And the way we were able to do that so successfully is because of Jake. So I had launched a brand in Walmart before, we had relationships there — we knew the power of Walmart from a distribution standpoint. I think what really got us confident in taking such a big bet from day one and got Walmart confident is [that] we had one of the most valuable marketing assets in the world in Jake Paul and his built-in audience.”

On the risks of being tied to a public figure
“There’s always risk there. That is just the nature of doing a creator brand. I experienced that with my last brand. There’s always a risk there. But I think the thing about Jake is he’s one of the smartest business minds I’ve ever worked with. He knows he can be a provocateur, and he’s one of the best marketing minds in the world. So we talk about it every week — like… he’s going to give us a heads up if he’s doing something that’s going to push the boundaries. But I think he’s a lot more calculated than most people would give him credit for. And a lot of it is just kind of [that] he’s leaning into the persona that he has created for himself on the internet. But he’s very much aligned. He knows that he needs to build this brand. And that if he steps out of line, it has the potential to damage us with retailers. So he’s a lot more aware and a lot more focused on the long-term success of this business and his brand. So there’s always a risk — you’re going to have that with any celebrity you work with. Even the most vanilla celebrity will do something stupid from time to time. But I think Jake, to his credit, is extremely business savvy and understands that more than almost any creator I’ve interacted with.”