How Dr. Squatch Built a $1.5 Billion Soap Brand

In 2018, an ad agency called the Harmon Brothers quoted Jack Haldrup $250,000 to shoot a comedic video for his small soap company, plus another $250,000 to push it out on Facebook and YouTube. Haldrup didn't have that kind of money. So he and a local agency called Raindrop tried to copy the format themselves for $15,000 (57:15). The result, a three-minute spot in which a bearded man showers outdoors and tells viewers their soap "sucks," has since drawn 120 million views (56:53). It became the single biggest push behind turning a company once stored on a closet shelf into Dr. Squatch, a brand Unilever bought in 2025 for $1.5 billion (04:46).

Haldrup grew up middle-class in Carmel, Indiana, studied business at Indiana University, and took a consulting job in Chicago after graduating. He hated it. "I didn't like being a consultant, and a lot of consulting is kind of positioning yourself as an expert and telling other people what to do, even though you're not necessarily in their business," he says (05:35). Around the same time, in his mid-twenties, he developed psoriasis, a skin condition that causes patches of inflamed, scaly skin. Wary of conventional treatment, he started reading about diet and natural products, and on a whim bought a bar of soap at a farmers market. It changed how his skin felt after a shower, and it sent him down a research hole into something called cold process soap: a slower, small-batch method that uses lye, water, and oils, and that fell out of fashion in the early 1900s because it is harder to produce at scale than the heat-extruded bars sold in most stores (12:50, 13:19).

Haldrup gave himself a 90-day deadline to launch a business around it. He found a Chicago manufacturer, bought a website template, filed the paperwork, and ordered 400 to 500 bars that he stored on a shelf in his closet. Total cost: about $1,500 (18:14). He named it Sasquatch Soap, after a character his sister drew, and sold it only online, never at farmers markets himself. Early sales were modest: $12,000 in the first partial year, climbing to $80,000 by 2013 (26:58). His mother took over shipping out of his childhood bedroom, boxing orders into old cigar boxes she haggled down to a dollar apiece, until his father called to say he needed to find a fulfillment center so he could "have his wife back." A childhood friend, AJ Fountain, joined first as a door-to-door soap salesman working for a dollar a bar, then as a formal business partner. Subscription boxes like Birchbox and Bespoke Post gave the brand an early marketing boost, paying at or above cost for product samples, before those arrangements shifted toward fees and wholesale terms that made the channel far less valuable over time.

From Search to Scroll

The real inflection point came in 2014, after Haldrup's employer collapsed and he enrolled in a digital marketing class at General Assembly, a training program, spending $3,500 of roughly $5,000 left in savings. The instructor, who ran paid media for another clothing brand, showed him that Google ads were the wrong tool. "Ultimately, nobody was searching Google for men's soap or natural soap," Haldrup says. Even when the company ranked for its target keyword, it generated only about five sales a month (35:50). Facebook was different.

"Nobody was actively looking on the internet to buy natural soap, or very few people were. But if it came across their feed in a way that was kind of interesting and entertaining, then they would be like, 'Oh, okay, I'll try this out.'" — Jack Haldrup [36:13]

Shifting spend to Facebook produced close to a 3x jump in revenue within a month (35:09). It also reframed how Haldrup thought about the product: not something people searched for, but something they discovered mid-scroll and bought on impulse.

Just as that shift was paying off, the brand's name became a liability. Another company held a common-law trademark on "Sasquatch Soap," and a third party tried to register it first, surfacing the conflict. Haldrup and Fountain had weeks to find a replacement, cycling through rejected names like Kingsley's and Sudsworth's before landing on Dr. Squatch, which Haldrup felt gave the mascot a more elevated, character-driven identity (37:01, 41:22). The rebrand cleared trademark review and, in hindsight, improved the brand. But it arrived alongside a harder problem: Fountain wanted the business to fund a modest, outdoors-centered life, while Haldrup wanted to swing for something much bigger. The partners negotiated a buyout, paid out over time from the company's own cash flow, that left Haldrup carrying both debt and operating risk. The following six to nine months were among the toughest of his tenure, as new hires and higher overhead drained profitability. His fix was blunt. "I literally printed out, you know, three months' worth of bank statements and was circling every line item or crossing things out just to cut expenses as much as possible," he says, describing the point when he had to let two employees go and strip the company back to essentials (54:03).

That discipline set up the 2018 video. Because the ad was so efficient at turning viewers into paying customers, cheaply and profitably, Haldrup treated its budget less like a marketing line item and more like a machine. At one point the company was acquiring customers for roughly three to four dollars each (59:01), while making about $25 in profit per order. "I would spend as much as I possibly could, as long as I have the supply chain to fulfill it," he says. "I wouldn't even think about that as a marketing budget, right? I would think of that as a sales machine" (59:23). Sales for 2018 came in a little over $5 million, with the video driving 30 to 50 percent of that (60:12, 60:36).

What followed was rapid, outside-funded scaling. In 2019, Haldrup raised $1.3 million from Guild Capital at a post-money valuation of $5.7 million, the company's first outside capital after years of bootstrapping (62:04, 63:43). Revenue reportedly reached $113 million by the end of 2020 (65:33), helped by a pandemic-driven surge in hygiene spending and by product-line expansion that pushed up average order size. In 2021 a private equity firm bought a majority stake. By then Dr. Squatch had also built its own manufacturing facility, because scaling a handmade, small-batch soap process to millions of units a month required engineering the company had to invent from scratch (75:03). Retail, almost nonexistent in 2021, grew into a segment worth more than $300 million on its own (76:24), a shift Haldrup says simply would not have been possible without years of proof of concept built online first (78:00).

By 2023, with roughly 300 employees, Haldrup stepped down as CEO. "I'm just not well-equipped to be the CEO of a large company," he says, adding that most founders are not built to run at that scale indefinitely (69:46). He stayed on the board until Unilever's 2025 acquisition closed, after which his involvement ended entirely. Asked how much of the outcome he attributes to skill versus timing, Haldrup doesn't claim full credit. "It's close to 50/50," he says (77:35), crediting Facebook's early advertising tools, a hygiene-obsessed pandemic, and simple chance alongside the discipline of starting, surviving, and executing. The honesty is itself instructive: a founder who built a billion-dollar brand out of a farmers-market soap bar is also the first to say that the wind was, for a few crucial years, blowing in exactly the right direction.