The Untold Truth Of The Dr Squatch Commercial Guy, James Schrader
Men's grooming company Dr. Squatch was founded in San Diego in 2013, offering organic soaps and shampoos with a rugged, outdoorsy bent. Part of a trend of direct-to-consumer online businesses that popped up in the 2010s like Warby Parker and Harry's, Dr. Squatch took a few years to find its footing in an industry dominated by giant conglomerates. But its fortunes changed for the better in 2018, when the company partnered with San Diego-based advertising agency Raindrop for a series of comedic YouTube commercials, offering Dr. Squatch as the soap of choice for "real men" — the kind who open pickle jars and let their daughter braid their hair. Thanks in part to the viral success of these videos, Dr. Squatch went from $3 million in sales to over $100 million in the space of three years. In 2021, the company took a giant leap forward by buying ad time during the Super Bowl and introducing themselves to a brand-new audience.
At the heart of Dr. Squatch's campaign is San Diego-based comedian James Schrader, who has served as its pitchman from the very beginning. With his shaggy beard, blonde mane, and intense blue eyes, he very much gives the impression of someone Dr. Squatch actually found in the California woods and just started filming. But in real life, Schrader is a seasoned standup with over a decade of experience on the road. He's also a writer, outdoorsman, father, and even former cheerleader. Let's learn a bit more about the face that snagged 100 million views.
Growing up in the Florida Keys gave him a taste for adventure
Born in Miami, James Schrader grew up in Islamorada, a small resort town in the Florida Keys. According to his website, he spent his youth engaged in sports and adventure activities of all kinds, including camping, scuba diving, snorkeling, and flying radio control airplanes with his brothers and father. As an adult, he and his brothers kept up many of these pursuits and added a few more, including sailing and flying. His Instagram page has nearly as many posts about his adventures on the sea in recent years as it does advertisements for his standup gigs or work with Dr. Squatch. "Sailing has been a part of my life since I was 5 years old," he wrote in a December 2022 post. "For me it is the challenge of harnessing Mother Nature and being humbled by her indifference to you."
As much as Schrader has been on the sea for nearly his entire life, he has been in the air for arguably longer — when, according to a June 2023 Instagram post, his father took off in a Blanik L13 glider plane with little baby James strapped inside. He started flying solo in gliders at age 14, and later got his pilot's license, and it's clear that he still has a lot of passion for gliders and model planes. A section of his website, simply titled "Cool Stuff," links to organizations like Soaring Society of America and Academy of Model Aeronautics.
But I'm a cheerleader
James Schrader was an avid athlete in high school and played a number of different sports, including junior varsity football his freshman year. But after that year, he took a surprising position on the sidelines. Convinced by one of his teammates who cheered in middle school, Schrader spent three years on the cheer squad of his small Florida school, much to the chagrin of the football coach. "I remember one time, I'm standing on the sidelines during a football game my junior year while I was cheering," he said on a 2019 episode of the Campfire Sht Show podcast. "The football coach just walked over, and he just stopped in front of me and just looked at me, just like, 'What the f*** are you doing?'"
But the occasional regret didn't stop Schrader from cheering, either for the rest of high school or in college at University of Central Florida. In 2001 his small coed team placed second at the Universal Cheerleading Association National Championships. And while it might currently seem at odds with his rugged yet goofy persona, Schrader sees his time as a cheerleader as another aspect of his love of performance alongside his many other athletic pursuits, his time as a young actor in local productions, and eventually, his career as a standup.
Performing in his underwear
James Schrader's love of comedy came early, performing Bill Cosby and Whoopi Goldberg bits for his parents as a child and holing up in his room as a teen to watch Comedy Central specials. But the road to telling jokes professionally was, as the song goes, long and winding. His college years at University of Central Florida were filled with performances of one kind or another, from the cheer team to local theater productions. But during that time, Schrader suffered a major depressive episode and sought out therapy. His therapist, after learning his unexplored desire to be a comedian, offered him a challenge: Get a notebook, start writing jokes, and in three months' time, book a set at a local comedy club.
Schrader took the therapist's challenge to heart. Three months later, he booked five minutes at an Orlando comedy club's open mic night. Dressed in button-down shirt and nice slacks — perhaps in unconscious imitation of all the standups he saw on those 1990s specials — he waited for his set to begin. Growing more nervous and uncomfortable in his clothes, he decided at the last minute to ditch his stage costume and perform the set in his undershirt and boxers. His performance was well-received by the crowd — so well-received, according to his appearance on the Campfire Sht Show podcast, that the anxiety of following it up kept him offstage for an entire decade.
Studying comedy across the country
By the time he dipped his toes back into the comedy world in 2012, James Schrader had moved to Tampa, become a husband and stepfather to two young girls, bought a house, and had been working full-time for a small construction firm for years. His reintroduction to comedy came via local improv troupe The Third Thought. After taking classes with the ensemble members for a few weeks, he was invited to perform with them at their weekly shows, and eventually traveled to New York to perform at a festival held by the legendary sketch comedy group Upright Citizens Brigade.
The exhilaration of writing and performing on a regular basis launched a massive upheaval in Schrader's life. Before long he left Florida behind — along with his day job and his marriage — and settled in San Diego, where his brother lived. Along the way he hit up comedy clubs across the East Coast and Midwest to hone his craft, including a summer intensive at the Chicago sketch comedy theater and school ImprovOlympic (or iO). After years of domesticity and a good-paying job, he was now living out of his truck and couch surfing across the country — but he wouldn't have had it any other way. In 2019, he told the Campfire Sht Show podcast, "I lived more life in those five-and-a-half months than I'd lived in five years."
The funniest man in San Diego
After a few years working local clubs and going on the road, James Schrader's first major break came in 2017 when he won the San Diego's Funniest Person contest. The annual event, hosted by Mad House Comedy Club, pits local SoCal comics against each other in a series of elimination rounds until only one remains. Fellow winners include comics Jesse Egan, Ryan Hicks, Jeff Bilodeau, and Zoltan Kaszas. A year later, Schrader's comedy star rose even further when he placed second in the World Series of Comedy, a Las Vegas-based standup festival with satellite competitions across the country. He lost the top spot to Toronto-based comedian Trixx.
But while winning those competitions remains a feather in Schrader's cap and still has a prominent space on his resume, it didn't change the fact that standup comedy at the local level simply didn't pay the bills. "[Winning San Diego's Funniest Person] is success, and it's wonderful, but from a career standpoint, it's like, there is no money," he told the Campfire Sht Show podcast in 2019. "I think the best comedy year I had, after I think it was year six, I made $8,000? Well, you can't live off $8,000." Asked what he did during those lean years, Schrader replied, simply, "struggle."
Opener extraordinaire
Like any seasoned standup comic, James Schrader has spent much of his career on the road. In recent years he has been able to headline his own gigs outside of California, hitting up clubs in Louisville, Tulsa, and Austin in November 2023 alone. But Schrader has also proven to be a popular and in-demand opener for more established comics. His website features a collection of selfies, chronicling his adventures opening for the likes of Fortune Feimster, former "The Daily Show" correspondent Al Madrigal, and actor and 9/11 fraudster Steve Rannazzisi.
But of all the famous faces he's had the opportunity to open for and learn from, one of his favorite, most formative experiences came from an unexpected source: standup and character actor Joey "CoCo" Diaz, who Schrader opened for at the American Comedy Co. in San Diego for a weekend. "[Diaz] was incredibly kind, very funny," he told the podcast Pond's Press in 2019. "I was very fortunate to be booked on that show ... and just see the powerhouse he is as a comedian and as a human on this planet." When speaking of his fellow comics, Schrader sounds grateful for the opportunity to learn and that his kindness and professionalism has been reciprocated. "I have yet to meet a comic, or work with a comedian who wasn't just a decent person to me. So I think I've been really lucky in that sense."
Dr. Squatch isn't his only commercial work
James Schrader isn't just the face and voice of the Dr. Squatch ad campaign, but an integral part of the production team, working on each script so that it meets the requirements of the commercial while also reflecting his own tone and sensibilities. He has also done contract work for other Raindrop agency clients such as Worx power tools and Soapy Joe's car wash. On camera, he is also the face of William Painter, a direct-to-consumer company that sells men's sunglasses and jewelry. There's a shared sensibility between Schrader's work for both companies. His William Painter YouTube ads feel very much modeled after the Dr. Squatch campaign, and it's easy to imagine that a prospective Dr. Squatch customer might be interested in some titanium-framed shades to go along with his woodsy soap scent.
Schrader has also done acclaimed work for Raindrop at the local level. In 2020, Schrader starred with comedian Nicole Aimée Schreiber in an Emmy-winning spot for the San Diego Symphony. Titled "Old You, Meet New You," the ad features Schreiber and Schrader extolling the virtues of the symphony's millennial-friendly programming, like screenings of "Jurassic Park" and "Love Actually" with a live score, and frames classical music as something you might not initially think you'll like — kind of like sushi or yoga — but soon can't live without. The campaign was a hit for both the Symphony and for Raindrop.
2022 Comic Con
Living in San Diego has afforded James Schrader a lot of unique opportunities. It's unlikely that his viral Dr. Squatch gig would have happened if he had not been a working comedian in the same city that both the soap company and Raindrop Agency were headquartered in at the time. And on a 2019 episode of the podcast Pond's Press, he credited the city's proximity to Los Angeles and its supportive comedy scene for the opportunity to open for such big names as Al Madrigal or Bryan Callen ("MadTV," "The Hangover").
In 2022, Schrader took advantage of another local institution: San Diego Comic Con. That year, Dr. Squatch partnered with Disney and Lucasfilm for an officially licensed "Star Wars"-themed booth at the massive comic book and entertainment convention. The booth boasted specialty soaps branded after characters like Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Maul, as well as stormtrooper helmets wearing shower caps with the company's rubber ducky mascot, and even a digital video of a stormtrooper in an Imperial shower, presumably soaping up with a Dr. Squatch product. For Schrader, it was a surreal moment, considering where he and the company started off. "Five years ago, we were just in a backyard, filming a commercial," he marvels in an Instagram post, circling the camera around the crowded convention floor. "Now we're at Comic Con with 'Star Wars.'"
A candid interview subject
As a working standup, James Schrader is almost always promoting something, whether that's the literal commercial work he does for Dr. Squatch, or himself and his brand on podcasts and social media. Over the years he has proven more than willing to go in depth about the ins and outs of his career, as well as his personal life as a twice-divorced single dad. On a January 2023 episode of the Fatherhood Field Notes podcast, Schrader spoke extensively about his pre-comedy life as a stepfather to two girls, his amicable split with his first wife, as well as the struggle to be a single father today with a 5-year-old daughter. He works hard to create a work schedule so that "When I have [my daughter], for the most part all I have to do is be a dad. I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I know that most dads do not get that."
Fatherhood is clearly an important subject to Schrader, and the legacy of his own father weighs heavily on his decisions. In an October 2022 Instagram post he notes that his father died young at age 59 after years of not taking good care of himself, and how that made him unconsciously accept that age as a symbolic (or literal) end of the road. Now, however, he is now determined to improve himself as he gets closer to age 59 himself. "I'm making better choices, moving my body, and asking for help when I need it."
Isla Monstro
For a standup comic, James Schrader seems remarkably at peace with himself and his life as a writer, performer, soap icon, and single dad. But that doesn't mean that he has achieved all of his ambitions, or that there are no more worlds to conquer for him. In 2022 he and San Diego-based indie director Steven Shea announced a new film project: "Isla Monstro," an adult animated sci-fi comedy. Schrader (who co-wrote the script with Shea) stars as the voice of Duke, a screw-up who finds himself on a deserted island filled with monsters created, and then abandoned, by the U.S. military. Always on the lookout for a get-rich-quick scheme, Duke decides to open a tropical resort on the island ... with the monsters as his staff.
The film co-stars Juliana Harkavy ("Arrow"), scream queen Sarah French, and former child actor Andre Gower, who, in 1987's "The Monster Squad" gave us the immortal line "Wolfman's got nards!" Schrader and Shea originally announced a 2023 release date for the film, though as the year draws to a close that deadline appears to have been blown. Still, the "Isla Monstro" Instagram page is being regularly updated with animations stills and behind the scenes footage, indicating that though production may have been delayed, it is still very much ongoing, and that Schrader fans can expect to see his feature film debut in the future.