Dollar Shave Club uses AI to bring 90% of ads fully in-house

Dollar Shave Club has turned AI into a competitive weapon for speed and cost, using generative tools to produce campaigns that would have previously required external agency support.

Laura Higgins, the brand's chief brand and innovation officer, told Digiday that Dollar Shave Club already handles 90% of its advertising internally. With AI now embedded in her team's workflow, she expects that figure to climb higher — not because agencies are obsolete, but because AI removes the capacity constraints that once forced work outside.

From brief to launch in one month

Higgins pointed to the brand's recent 4th of July campaign as proof of concept. She wrote the brief herself, drawing a parallel between American colonists' revolt and Dollar Shave Club's 2012 founding as a challenger brand. Her small in-house team — copywriters, comedians, and marketers — used Claude and the AI video tool Higgsfield to turn that concept into finished ads featuring an eagle chasing a hot dog and a cartoonish George Washington crossing the Delaware.

The timeline: two to three days from brief to first draft, about a week to a finished 30-second cut, and the full campaign live within a month across multiple asset sizes. "There's no way in the old world we would be able to go from idea to launch in a month," Higgins said, according to Digiday.

When to use AI — and when not to

Higgins doesn't apply AI uniformly. An upcoming campaign honoring military service members, "Shavers That Never Waver," uses only real footage of real people. "That's something I would never have AI do," she said.

By contrast, a product launch for Ball Spray in mid-July will be "100% AI" — featuring men driving trucks with testicle-shaped ornaments hanging off the back, a real cultural phenomenon no actual person volunteered to star in. The logic: AI stays out of campaigns where authenticity is the message, but handles work where sincerity was never the point.

"[AI] isn't the strategy, it's an execution device," Higgins explained. "You need to have your really competent people in order to come up with the right concept to make sure it's funny, to make sure it has a synergy with whatever that event is, or that product, and then AI is what helps bring it to life."

Scrappy process, tight guardrails

Dollar Shave Club's approval process is informal by design. Higgins writes the brief, walks the team through it, and reviews final work when creatives "walk into my office and saying, what do you think of this." No elongated corporate checkpoints — just two touchpoints with Higgins plus a final gut check.

She's also learned cost discipline the hard way, admitting she "overused" AI tools in her first month and has no idea what that bill looked like. Now she matches tool to task, reserving expensive models for complex work.

Higgins is transparent about AI's downsides: marketer anxiety, viewer suspicion, and cost overruns. Her answer is disclosure over denial. Dollar Shave Club leans into obviously synthetic imagery rather than hiding it, a stance reinforced by New York's new AI disclosure law. "We want to make sure not to lie to our consumers," she said.

Why it matters

Dollar Shave Club's approach reveals a structural shift in who can move fastest. AI doesn't just speed up production — it removes the capacity ceiling that once forced small teams to outsource. That inverts the traditional advantage large agencies held through scale and resources. If more challenger brands follow this model, agencies may find their value increasingly tied to strategic ideas rather than execution, the part AI is already quietly commoditizing.

Matt Owens, chief design and innovation officer at brand studio Athletics, told Digiday the key is avoiding "AI slop" while maintaining speed: "It is only the teams that have strong command over AI tools to create work that is on brand, high fidelity, and seamlessly integrated into the real world that win."

These details were first reported by Digiday.