Have you ever manufactured anything? A shitload of technology, engineering, and creative financing at huge risk is required. I'm not going to debate the semantics of what defines a tech company but I'd say their business model disrupting large incumbents and their rapid growth qualifies them enough for airtime here.
Is McDonalds considered a tech company [1]? Toy manufacturers? Supermarkets [2]? Financial services companies?
Pretty much all companies are "tech companies" to some degree...
I'd personally tend toward a narrower definition of "tech company", which would be one in which a new and innovative idea forms the core of the business.
Unfortunately many well known "tech" startups (Uber, AirBNB) wouldn't fit that definition. They are enabled by the widespread adoption of the Internet (in the same way the telephone enabled chat lines), but I don't think I'd consider them tech companies any more than a normal taxi company or hotel...
I'm well aware of manufacturing: I live in perhaps one of the largest heavy and precision machine manufacturing marketplaces on earth (oil and gas represent!). However, manufacturing doesn't scale like software scales, especially when you're just building a new iteration of a product that's been around for a century. Nanojiggers, or robots, or electric cars, or whatever is one thing...this is razors.
I agree that it's fine to mention them here--that doesn't make them a tech company. Lots of businesses that are high-growth and successful aren't tech companies, and that's okay.
It's really annoying dealing with companies that aren't tech companies but think that they are. They seem to have work environments where the tech is driven in the wrong direction, at once both beholden to the business interests and yet still pursued as though it were an end into itself. This is not a good combination.
Well, the question is how they're more a tech company than Gillette, I suppose. I mean, Gillette has disrupted shaving several times over its history.
I'm not precisely sure what Harry's is bringing to the table here (lower costs? online only?), but that's probably due to my old-school unix sysadmin level beard more than anything else.
