On July 1, Dollar Shave Club rolled out “250 Years. No BS. Still Free,” a set of digital ads made in-house with generative AI. The setup: America’s forefathers, rendered in hyper-stylized Revolutionary War imagery, fighting “big razor monopolies.” It is the brand’s pricing grievance, but in a tricorner hat.
The campaign also promotes $2.50 starter kits, which chief brand and innovation officer Laura Higgins described as one of Dollar Shave Club’s largest discounts since the company launched in 2012.
Higgins has only been at Dollar Shave Club for a couple of months, and said the company had “nothing planned” for July 4. The holiday, plus the America 250 anniversary, became a reason to test how quickly the in-house team could get an AI-generated campaign out the door.
The team leaned into making the work obviously AI-generated, using Revolutionary War imagery and famous scenes like Washington crossing the Delaware and the Boston Tea Party. There are also Easter eggs — razors and shave gels tucked into almost every frame, because with AI production, why not?
The campaign went from concept to launch in about three weeks. Higgins said it was created 100% in-house by a small internal team, using Claude and Higgsfield AI for iterations. A copywriter turned the idea into a storyboard “within a couple of days” using Higgsfield. “There is still so much human that’s involved,” she said.
Dollar Shave Club’s stated position is that AI is a tool for execution, not the whole act. Higgins said the brand is not trying to “trick people into thinking something is real,” a distinction that has become more useful as consumers get faster at calling things “AI slop,” correctly or not. She pointed to Quip being accused of using AI on ads it said were not AI-generated.
Dollar Shave Club has been testing AI-generated ads for about six months. Higgins said some were “executed better than others,” including an early self-aware spot that mocked AI campaigns. A June electric-razor ad featured an animatronic Pinocchio declaring he was a “real man” while shaving his wooden body; that one was made with an external agency and received largely positive reactions, according to Higgins. Dollar Shave Club also ran an AI-generated spot for its women’s line in April.
Klaviyo CMO Jamie Domenici framed the broader shift as a change in content economics, with the usual caveat that making more things faster does not automatically mean customers care. “They want to be understood, and they can tell the difference between a brand talking at them and a brand that gets them. AI only earns its keep when it closes that gap,” she said.
Disclosure rules are also starting to catch up. Higgins pointed to a recently passed New York State law requiring advertisers using AI to disclose it. AI disclosure regulation is gaining steam but faces a very complex set of conditions and trade offs – including the balance between keeping consumers safe and over-labeling which then risks label blindness. The 4As released a paper in 2025 covering these and more considerations. Worth a read for additional context.
Full story on Dollar Shave Club’s efforts at Modern Retail.