Millinfluencer Spotlight: Chris Stoikos of Dollar Beard Club
The Millinfluencer spotlight series will highlight one millennial influencer (get it?) every Thursday and give you just enough information about them to want you to go and learn more and follow their journey!
This week we look at a social media guru, whose viral videos have over 130 million views. However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg as Stoikos is a serial entrepreneur and innovator with 7 businesses under his belt all before the age of 30! Growing up in Toronto Canada, Chris always had the entrepreneurial spirit — selling electronics and gadgets before he actually sold the business and moved out to Hermosa Beach, California. Chris then began uncovering his true passion: building products and teams, and most importantly, creating engaging brands with viral videos.
In 2014/15, Chris came up with Coolbox, an innovative new tool box that combines storage with numerous user features and functions that make projects easier, safer and more enjoyable. The idea and product took off and he went on to ABC’s Shark Tank and cut a licensing deal with investor Kevin Harrington, entered into a worldwide marketing agreement. It wasn’t always this glamorous for Stoikos though. When starting CoolBox, Chris recruited his long-time best friend, a sales and marketing manager and a full-time videographer, and the four lived in the same house in Huntington Beach, Calif., in order to live as frugally as possible.
“That time in our life was really f**king tough, we were sleeping on couches, begging our family for money, skipping meals, and one of the boys was even sleeping in our garage, which we had to turn into a makeshift bedroom.”
In June 2015, Chris and his team launched Dollar Beard Club — a subscription men’s grooming box company. He applied his formula of video creation to build a massive community around his brand and quickly turned their customers into a cult following. Dollar Beard Club is a company that sells beard oil, balm, wax, brushes and apparel. If you are wondering if selling these things to men with beards or men who want to have beard is a viable business — let me answer that for you. In their first year, the company did over $10 million in sales and today claims to have attracted over 150,000 beards to subscribe!
Stoikos did not stop there — and in 2016 he launched Unconscious Content, a collection of the world’s best media and econtent creators that have come together to help entrepreneurs: create content that gets shared virally, tap into the power of their unconscious mind and creativity, and to tap into their customers and unconscious buying needs.
Chris has received all sorts of awards and accolades, including being featured on Forbes, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, INC, Yahoo!, and Entrepreneur Magazine just to name a few. Stoikos has over 142,000 Instgram followers and his YouTube videos have over 2 million views, here is one of the original ads for Dollar Beard Club:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU64GI0Aj3A
If you enjoyed this post, please feel free to share it and explore more about any of the millennial influencers that we highlight every Thursday as part of the Millinfluencer Spotlight series. You can also find my work on my Medium page and my Google+ collections.