Athena Club
DTC razor brand that pivoted from tampons, raised $55M, landed in 1,600 Target stores, and holds a 93% customer retention rate.
In 2018, two McKinsey consultants launched an organic tampon subscription. A year later, they scrapped the entire product line, pivoted to razors, and started building what would become one of the fastest-growing private companies in America. Twice.
Athena Club has raised $55 million in venture capital, landed in 1,600 Target stores, expanded into Walmart, and hit the Inc. 500 list two years running. Their customer retention rate is 93%. That number alone tells you more about the business than any revenue figure could.
At a glance:
| Founded | 2018 (New York) |
| Founders | Maria Markina, Allie Griswold, Charles Desmarais |
| Total funding | $55.4M |
| Retail partners | Target (1,600+ stores), Walmart (US + Canada) |
| Business model | DTC subscription + retail wholesale |
| Employees | ~44 |
| Notable metric | 93% second-purchase retention rate |
| Inc. ranking | #82 on Inc. 500 (two consecutive years) |
The Story
Athena Club started as a period care company. Maria Markina and Allie Griswold, both former McKinsey consultants, launched an organic tampon subscription in 2018 priced under $8 a month. The premise was simple: tampons are a necessity, the markup is absurd, and women shouldn’t have to think about buying them. The pitch attracted $3.8 million in seed funding from names that don’t usually show up in a tampon company’s cap table: Henry Kravis (co-founder of KKR, one of the largest private equity firms in the world) and Philippe Laffont (founder of Coatue Management, a $50 billion hedge fund).
Two things about that investor list. First, getting Henry Kravis to write a check for a tampon startup is a story in itself. Maria and Allie have talked about the challenge of pitching period products to rooms full of men who have never experienced menstruation. Second, the caliber of those early investors signaled something: these founders could sell.
The third co-founder, Charles Desmarais, brought a different kind of advantage. Charles is a member of the Desmarais family behind Power Corporation of Canada, one of the country’s largest conglomerates. The Desmarais Group was a seed investor, and the family participated in later rounds. He and Maria married and now serve as co-CEOs.
The pivot that made the company
By 2019, Athena Club made a decision that would define everything that followed: they stopped being a tampon company.
The organic tampon space was getting crowded. Lola, Cora, August, and a half-dozen others were all fighting for the same subscription dollar, selling essentially the same product with the same pitch. Athena Club looked at the landscape and decided they didn’t want to be the fifth-best tampon subscription. They wanted to own something bigger.
They introduced a five-blade Razor Kit and repositioned the entire brand as a “modern digital drugstore” for women’s personal care essentials. Clean ingredients, sustainable packaging, direct-to-consumer pricing. The razor became the hero product, and the product line expanded into shave preps, body wash, lotion, deodorant, wax strips, and pimple patches.
This is the kind of pivot that kills most startups. Abandoning your launch product a year in, with $3.8 million of investor money already deployed, is a move that requires either recklessness or clarity. In Athena Club’s case, it was clarity. The tampon was the door, but the building was bigger.
The pivot worked immediately. In 2020, Athena Club grew revenue by 2,000%.
The Strategy
Pricing as a weapon
Athena Club’s Razor Kit retails for $9. Refill blades are $1.50 each. For comparison, a Venus razor handle costs about the same, but Gillette charges $3-5 per refill cartridge.
That price gap is Athena Club’s entire thesis. Legacy razor brands (Gillette, Schick) built their business model on expensive refills. It’s the classic “razor and blade” strategy, and it made Gillette one of the most profitable consumer brands in history. But it also created a vulnerability: women were paying $15-20 for a pack of four cartridges and resenting every purchase.
Dollar Shave Club proved this model was breakable for men (Unilever acquired them for $1 billion in 2016). Athena Club and Billie applied the same logic to women, who had been paying even more for razors marketed with pink packaging and “specially designed curves.”
Subscription mechanics
The subscription model is where Athena Club’s retention numbers come from. Customers choose their refill quantity (4, 8, or 12 blades) and cadence (monthly, every two months, or every three months). That flexibility matters more than it looks. Most subscription boxes fail because they force a fixed schedule that doesn’t match how people actually use the product. If you shave once a week, a monthly four-pack makes sense. If you shave daily, you need the 12-pack every two months. Athena Club lets the customer decide, which means fewer cancellations from people receiving product they don’t need yet.
The result: a 93% second-purchase rate. Their internal target was 80%. When 93 out of 100 customers come back, your customer acquisition cost math changes completely. You can afford to spend more on the first sale because you know the second, third, and tenth are almost guaranteed.
Marketing without the Facebook trap
One of the defining disasters of the DTC era was over-reliance on Facebook and Instagram ads. Dozens of DTC brands scaled fast on cheap social media ads in 2015-2019, then collapsed when Apple’s iOS 14 privacy update made those ads dramatically less effective overnight. Customer acquisition costs doubled or tripled, and brands that had no other marketing channel suddenly couldn’t afford to grow.
Athena Club deliberately avoided this. They spread acquisition across podcast ads, influencer partnerships, a referral program, direct mail, PR, and eventually television. No single channel accounted for more than a manageable share of new customers. When one channel got expensive, they leaned on the others.
Six percent of their monthly new customers came from referrals alone, from existing customers telling friends. That’s free acquisition, and it compounds. They built a referral platform they could A/B test to optimize conversion, treating word-of-mouth as a channel to engineer rather than a thing to hope for.
The Target play
In March 2023, Athena Club’s hair removal products launched in 1,600 Target stores nationwide. This was the move from DTC brand to real CPG company.
The timing was deliberate. They’d posted 140% revenue growth in the prior 12 months, were projecting 250% growth for 2023, and secured $40 million in combined equity and debt to fund the expansion. You don’t walk into Target without proving you can handle the volume, the margins, and the logistics. The $33.5 million Series B in December 2023, led by repeat investor Cue Ball Capital, was raised specifically to scale retail operations.
By 2025, they’d expanded their Target footprint to include body wash and deodorant, added Walmart US for shaving products, and entered Canada through Walmart, Jean Coutu, and Brunet pharmacies. The trajectory is clear: Athena Club is building toward being a shelf staple, not a niche DTC brand.
The Numbers
| Round | Amount | Year | Lead Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | $3.8M | 2018 | Henry Kravis, Philippe Laffont, Cue Ball Capital |
| Series A | $15M | 2021 | Cue Ball Capital |
| Series B | $33.5M | 2023 | Cue Ball Capital, Desmarais family |
| Later stage | Undisclosed | 2024 | Blank Beauty |
Total raised: ~$55.4 million across four rounds.
Athena Club doesn’t disclose revenue, but the Inc. 500 placement gives us a floor. To make the Inc. 500 (not the 5000, the 500), a company needs to be among the 500 fastest-growing private companies in the US by three-year revenue growth percentage. Making it twice, at #82, with 1,600+ retail locations and a 30% revenue increase in 2024 on top of the prior years, means this is not a small business.
For context on what exits look like in this space: Billie, Athena Club’s closest competitor, was acquired by Edgewell (Schick’s parent company) for $310 million in 2021. Harry’s nearly sold to the same company for $1.37 billion before the FTC blocked the deal. Dollar Shave Club sold to Unilever for $1 billion. The women’s razor DTC space has produced real exits.
The Competition
The women’s razor market went from zero DTC competition to a crowded fight in about three years.
Billie launched around the same time as Athena Club with a nearly identical pitch: affordable razors for women, subscription model, better than the pink tax. Billie was acquired by Edgewell for $310 million in 2021. That exit was good for Billie’s investors, but it means the brand is now owned by the same conglomerate that makes Schick. Athena Club remains independent.
Gillette Venus and Schick Hydro Silk are the legacy players. Gillette’s market share dropped from 70% to under 50% over the past decade as DTC brands chipped away at it. These brands still dominate shelf space, but they’ve lost the narrative. When consumers associate your brand with overpriced refills, every dollar spent on marketing is fighting an uphill battle.
Harry’s proved the model for men and now sits in Target and Walmart. They’re not direct competitors (men’s products), but they paved the road that Athena Club drives on.
Athena Club’s real competitive advantage isn’t the product. Five-blade razors are five-blade razors. The advantage is the combination: a subscription with 93% retention feeding a retail operation in 1,600+ stores, backed by $55 million in funding and a team lean enough at 44 people to move fast. Billie had the brand but sold it. The legacy players have distribution but lost trust. Harry’s has the playbook but not the audience. Athena Club is trying to hold all four.
What You Can Learn
Pivots aren’t failure. Staying stuck is. Athena Club launched as a tampon subscription and abandoned that product within a year. That decision generated 2,000% growth. Most founders treat their launch product as sacred. It’s not. The market tells you what it wants. The founders who listen, and who have the nerve to throw away a year of work when something better appears, are the ones who build real companies.
Retention beats acquisition every time. A 93% second-purchase rate means Athena Club can spend more to acquire a customer than competitors can, because they make it back over a longer relationship. If your business model depends on constantly finding new customers because old ones leave, you don’t have a business model. You have a treadmill. Before you spend another dollar on marketing, figure out why people aren’t coming back.
Don’t let one channel own you. The DTC graveyard is full of brands that were “Facebook brands” or “Instagram brands.” When the platform changed the rules, those brands died. Athena Club’s deliberate diversification across podcasts, referral, direct mail, influencer, PR, and TV meant no single platform could kill their growth. This is harder than dumping money into one channel that’s working. It’s also the difference between a brand that lasts and one that doesn’t.
DTC is a starting line, not a destination. The brands that survived the DTC reckoning of 2022-2023 were the ones that treated online sales as proof of concept for retail. Athena Club used DTC to build demand, prove the unit economics, and demonstrate retention. Then they took those numbers to Target and said: these customers exist, they keep buying, and you want them in your stores. That’s the playbook.
Money follows proof. Henry Kravis and Philippe Laffont didn’t invest in Athena Club because they were passionate about tampons. They invested because the unit economics worked and the founders were credible. By the time the Series B came around, Athena Club had 140% annual revenue growth and a Target deal to point to. Fundraising gets easier when you have numbers that don’t need explaining. Build the proof first.
What’s Next
Athena Club isn’t acting like a company preparing to sell. In 2025, they launched House of Atlas, a men’s personal care brand available DTC and at Target. Same playbook: quality razors, reasonable prices, subscription option, clean positioning. The men’s market is bigger and more proven (Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s already demonstrated billion-dollar exits), and Athena Club’s infrastructure, retail relationships, and subscription platform transfer directly.
The stated goal is to become “the next multigenerational CPG company.” That’s ambitious for a 44-person startup, but the pieces are in place: a women’s brand with strong retention, a men’s brand leveraging existing infrastructure, retail partnerships expanding across two countries, and enough funding to keep scaling without desperation.
Whether that happens or an acquisition offer comes in too big to refuse, Athena Club has already proven the thesis: women were overpaying for personal care products, and the company that noticed first is now in 1,600 stores with a 93% retention rate.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much is Athena Club worth?
Athena Club’s valuation isn’t publicly disclosed. Based on the $55.4 million raised and comparable exits in the space (Billie at $310M, Dollar Shave Club at $1B), the company is likely valued in the hundreds of millions. The Inc. 500 placement and aggressive retail expansion suggest significant revenue growth.
Is Athena Club better than Billie?
Both offer similar products at similar prices ($9-10 for the starter kit). In head-to-head reviews, Athena Club’s handle is heavier and more premium-feeling, and reviewers generally prefer the blade sharpness. The bigger difference: Athena Club offers more subscription flexibility (choose your blade count and cadence), while Billie sends a fixed four-pack. Billie is now owned by Edgewell (Schick’s parent), while Athena Club remains independent and founder-led.
Where can I buy Athena Club?
Online at athenaclub.com (subscription or one-time purchase), Target (1,600+ US stores), Walmart (US), Walmart Canada, Jean Coutu, Brunet, and Amazon.
Is Athena Club cruelty-free?
Athena Club markets its products as clean, vegan, and cruelty-free. They state that no products are tested on animals.
Who owns Athena Club?
Athena Club is privately held. Co-founders Maria Desmarais (formerly Markina) and Charles Desmarais serve as co-CEOs. Key investors include Cue Ball Capital, the Desmarais family, Henry Kravis, and Philippe Laffont. The company has not been acquired.
Who founded Athena Club?
Athena Club was co-founded by Maria Markina, Allie Griswold, and Charles Desmarais. Markina and Griswold are former McKinsey consultants who pitched the original organic tampon subscription, and Desmarais is a member of the Power Corporation of Canada family whose backing helped seed the company. Markina and Desmarais later married and now run the brand as co-CEOs.
When was Athena Club founded?
Athena Club was founded in New York in 2018 as an organic tampon subscription priced under $8 a month. A year later, the founders scrapped the entire product line and pivoted to razors, which is when the company started growing.
Sources:
- AlleyWatch, “This NYC Startup Just Raised $3.8M to Make Tampons Glamorous and Convenient,” 2018. Seed round details, founder backgrounds, early product description.
- BeautyMatter, “Athena Club Raises $15 Million Series A,” 2021. Series A details, growth metrics.
- Entrepreneur, “How Smart Marketing Can Drive 2,000% Growth,” 2021. Marketing strategy, 2,000% growth claim, channel diversification.
- Modern Retail, “How Athena Club Maintains a 93% Customer Retention Rate”. Retention metrics, subscription mechanics, referral strategy.
- Glossy, “Athena Club Becomes Latest DTC Razor Brand to Disrupt Mass Retail with Target Launch,” 2023. Target expansion, revenue growth percentages.
- Beauty Independent, “Athena Club Founders Launch House of Atlas,” 2025. House of Atlas launch, current status, employee count.
- Retail Dive, “Schick Maker Edgewell Acquires Billie for $310M,” 2021. Billie acquisition for competitive context.