“$100M dollar brands are being built for boring products” - Harley Finkelstein of Shopify

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
This is serious podcasting over here.

**Harley Finkelstein** (0:02)
Shaan, the last time I did this, actually, I literally pulled up the data that it was in 2020 I think you were in like a wife beater, and then you went to the bathroom and I heard you flush the toilet.
I'm serious, dude. That's how far we've come here.

**Sam Parr** (0:18)
Hey, we haven't come that far. These things, that still might happen today. I have a Shopify crazy business story for you guys. Go to your internet browser real quick and go to touchland.com. Harley, you might know Touchland.

**Harley Finkelstein** (0:40)
Oh, yeah, of course. In fact, I've given out them at events.

**Shaan Puri** (0:45)
But their headline doesn't make sense. It's sensory essentials that bring delight to everyday moments of care.

**Harley Finkelstein** (0:51)
It's hand sanitizer.

**Shaan Puri** (0:52)
Perfumed?

**Sam Parr** (0:52)
Yeah, it's hand sanitizer.
So check this out. This story is pretty crazy. This person starts out. She's distributing hand sanitizer in Africa, where sanitation is super important. People get really sick because they don't have clean water to be doing blah, blah, blah. And she gets this idea, like, what if I made hand sanitizer sexy? Because at the time, Purell...

**Harley Finkelstein** (1:17)
It was all like Purell.

**Sam Parr** (1:19)
Exactly. And if you think about Purell, Sam, what is it? What does it smell like?

**Shaan Puri** (1:24)
Alcohol. It's like something you get at the hospital or from a teacher.

**Sam Parr** (1:27)
Exactly. Horrible smell. It smells like tequila. The form factor is nothing to brag about, nothing to show off. It was a very pure utility product. And what she did was she just reimagined it basically as a luxury product. So she took hand sanitizer. She was like, I'm going to make it smell good. I'm going to make it look good. I don't know if you've seen the cases of it. It's basically like clear.

**Harley Finkelstein** (1:48)
Yeah, it's beautiful. It's like this almost Johnny Ive designed case.

**Sam Parr** (1:54)
Exactly. Exactly. If Apple decided to go into the hand sanitizer market.

**Harley Finkelstein** (1:58)
And she also did collaborations, right? Like Hello Kitty, Disney. I mean, this is a whole different level of vision around hand sanitizer.

**Sam Parr** (2:07)
So she comes up with this idea. She goes on Kickstarter and she raises $67,000. She's like, OK, great, $67,000. I could do a first run. First year, I think she does like a million dollars in sales. COVID happens. And obviously people care about hand sanitizer way more during COVID. Business just explodes. Recently, this is now 2025 It was just acquired for $880 million. This hand sanitizer company. And I love this story.

**Shaan Puri** (2:36)
It says it was going to do, this year it's going to do $130 million in revenue and $55 million in EBITDA.

**Sam Parr** (2:43)
Wow. Exactly. And they're on Shopify. There you go, Harley. There's your plug.

**Harley Finkelstein** (2:47)
Well, thank you. Thank you for plugging in Shopify.

**Sam Parr** (2:49)
But dude, isn't this a crazy story? And how cool is this? Basically, this concept of like, how do you take an ugly thing or like just a commodity, utility, utilitarian product, but then apply like high fashion to it, apply luxury to it and create your own category? You know, it sells for more. It's the only hand sanitizer people gift to each other. Like you were saying you gift it, my wife saw it. She's like, oh, I just got that as a gift for like our kid's teacher on their last day of school. You would never like gift Purell to somebody unless you're trying to tell them something.

**Harley Finkelstein** (3:20)
I have a, you know, one of the cool, so we have a few million stores on Shopify. We're about 12% of all like US e-commerce right now. One of the things that I'm seeing a lot of right now are these, what I think would be considered to be fairly, you know, this is going to have a pejorative, but it's not like boring products becoming very sexy. And then, I don't know if you guys saw this, but like literally a week ago, Dyson came out with this thing called the Pencil Vac. Have you guys seen this? Anyways, like Dyson, like the guy, the man, the founder, he actually did it like this press conference. It's on YouTube now. I just checked.

**Shaan Puri** (3:50)
He's amazing.

**Harley Finkelstein** (3:51)
He's totally amazing.

**Sam Parr** (3:52)
Isn't it like a seven minute demo and he just came and dropped the bike on like with like an epic vacuum?