SURI

0:00Gyve Safavi:Welcome to the Emerging Brands podcast. Sharing the stories behind brands you'll want to shop next. I'm your host, Kelly Bennett. I am a New York City-based brand strategist for CPG Food and Beverage Brands. In each episode, I'll take you behind the scenes of founders that are building better-for-you products and bringing them to market. it. Also, I talk to brand builders, retailers, industry experts, and tastemakers who help bring those cool products to your shopping cart. You will hear stories of real-life founders, their launch strategies, and practical advice you could use to grow your own brand or simply discover what's next on shelf.

0:42Gyve Safavi:And the best part is you could shop all the brands featured on the show. This podcast is brought to you by Glimpse. Glimpse is an AI powered deduction management tool that disputes and recovers invalid deductions, winning brands, thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours back to founders so that they can focus on what really matters most. If you're a brand selling and retail, go to tryglimpse.com backslash trial for 30 days free and let them know I sent you. Now let's dive into the new episode. Hi everyone. Welcome back to a new episode of Emerging Brands Podcast with Kelly Bennett. Today is the first time I've had a toothbrush founder on the podcast.

1:33Gyve Safavi:And I was saying before I hit record that I genuinely am obsessed with this product. I've been using it prior to the show for months now. My whole family has requested this toothbrush after seeing mine. So the whole family is now obsessed. And Giv Safavi, he is the co-founder of Suri. And Giv, I'm so happy to have you on the show. Thank you so much for having me, Kelly. And thank you for the kind words. Honored to be here. I really mean it because myself and my family, I get sent so many products. And so when a product really catches their eye and they all start requesting it, I'm like, oh, I have to really now double down and pay attention.

2:17Gyve Safavi:So I've been watching your brand and, like I said, using the product myself. And what you're bringing to the toothbrush space is very cool and exciting to me. And just it's a an upgrade to something you're doing at least twice a day. And it just to me feels like such a nice moment and ritual and has such an ease to it. And I love when products can integrate so easily in your lifestyle and be a upgrade and just make you feel a little bit more set in your day. And I just love that about your products. Well, thank you so much. I mean, when we started, as you say, like brushing your teeth, it's almost a forgotten ritual.

3:00We do it twice a day, every day. We never think about it, you know, two minutes, hopefully. Right. And we're often thinking about something else. But it's like, why does it have to be that way? You know, we wanted to create a product that people would exactly as you're saying, just like say that they enjoy using it. And it sounds odd, right? Like who enjoys brushing their teeth? Who says they love brushing their teeth? But here we are, you know, we've launched four years ago and we've managed to hit that point where people are telling us that, you know, I love brushing my teeth with your product.

3:31How odd is that? You know, but really our goal was to create a product that was enjoyable to use. And for me, like I had my own biased views. I wanted to create a product that wasn't too loud, that felt good in the hands. Like we've got a slim aluminum body and that took a lot of time to get the design right. But the first thing we did was we did consumer surveys. We didn't have very much money to start. And so we used platforms like SurveyMonkey. We put a hundred bucks on it, got 200 responses. And what got me really excited was that when we started doing interviews with people and and also qualitative interviews, the first thing I'd usually ask was, you know, you know, do you use an electric toothbrush?

4:20Yes, I do. Okay, great. How much did you pay for it? I paid over a hundred dollars for it. Okay. And how, how often do you use it? Oh, I use it every day, except when I travel, it's too clunky. Okay. So it needs to not always be clunky and I want to be able to travel with it. And so as we spoke to people, we got insights away from it, but the one that really got me excited was I would say, okay, so you use this product twice a day, you over a hundred bucks what's the name of the brand and people go uh you know it's the one that does that with the head it turns like this and i was like no i don't know that brand can you tell me more and they're like i don't know and finally after prompting a few brands they'd be like oh yeah that's the one and that told me that wow so these there's sort of in our category also because i was looking at share data there's sort of two large brands that hold over 75 share in almost every developed market and i and this was very common that i'd say it's almost like six out of 10 people couldn't name the brands that they were using.

5:11And so to me, that said that here you've got dominant players that really just have like a high share through familiarity rather than brand love. Like it isn't real loyalty. And so that's where we said, like, if we could create a brand that people actually loved using and remember the name, then we would have a room for differentiation that people would want to come and buy our product. And, you know, excuse the pun, word of mouth that others in the family would see and be like, hey, I want that too. Totally.

5:38Gyve Safavi:And it happened here. But how did you originally land on wanting to develop a toothbrush brand? Like what was that light bulb moment for you? So I guess it would start with I always wanted to do a product startup. My co-founder, too, but we both know nothing about products. I mean, sorry, we don't know anything about hardware. We both started at FMCG companies, fast moving consumer goods. And so we knew general brand marketing. um and i guess like it usually starts with something that upsets you usually for most founder-led businesses right and my wife bought one of them i'm not going to name the competitor said competitor this product has paid 150 bucks for it online came home this was 2020 uh we launched officially in may 2022 but she unpacked this huge box with tons of plastic turned it on and sounded like a tractor and i was like what do you think and i could barely have a conference She's like, what?

6:35I'm like, I don't know. Is it good? And I was like, here we are in 2020 and this product experience is terrible. And you've paid 150 bucks, a generation of which appreciates good design. You know, the iPhones and tablets that have come afterwards since are just a key testament to that. And products in this category are still being made that way. And so that kind of was the spark. But early on, both my co-founder and I, we had daughters with our separate wives. but um although series o is our third child together um and i think something as cliches as it sounds happens when you have a kid early on um and you realize that what you're creating is not really for your own success or your own material wealth i mean there's definitely a factor there in that um but it's really about what you pass on to the next generation whether it's your own family or generations to come of other families and that's where we dug deeper into the category and realized toothbrushes aren't recyclable you know they're made from petroleum based plastics that um we threw out over six billion a year enough to circle the planet 15 times roughly six billion a year yeah national geographic quoted that um so quite meaningful wow uh nobody talks about it it's like a close second or third to plastic straws or whatever else and and that kind of got me thinking like if we're going to launch a new product let's like at least try to be a little bit more sustainable uh you know a lot of sustainable businesses sometimes they just want to be purely sustainably focused and i knew we would never be that way we're electric toothbrush right but for us it was about delivering a product that would deliver an amazing design experience that people would enjoy uh performance because that is that is table stakes in our category right if it doesn't clean your teeth why are we making it right and then how do we push the boundaries and that this is what i meant by like around the time our daughters were born to make a company that was future focused right and it was something we considered at every stage rather than sort of like oh maybe we could change this afterwards and that's why we have plant-based heads made out of cornstarch and castor oil bristles now as people are sort of more and more against plastic they're like oh wow that's great that you've alternative materials that are plant-based that you use but also we recycle them for free so everybody when they buy it online they get a prepaid recycling mailer that we take back we've started turning we've collected over two tons heads across the US and also the UK and we've now started turning them into other products so like behind me your listeners won't hear that see this but we have soap dishes that we've made 100 % out of our heads so fully recycled from our toothbrush head.

9:2018 heads go into this. And we're on a journey to make more products. So stay tuned, we'll be launching competitions. But that is kind of our thinking, like, why can't we make things more circular as part of our business model that can go into other things?

9:36Gyve Safavi:That is really cool. So you mentioned that you came from consumer yourself. But what What did it look like learning about the dental industry, the toothbrush industry? Because it sounded like also starting with a scrappy budget to get the wheels going. So what did that look like strategy-wise as far as, okay, we come from consumer, but we're going in a new space. What did those steps look like of bringing this product to market? So I'm an extremely detailed person, which is good and bad. at the same time right he's much more top level which is like he's always kind of pulling me out and being like hey as you know as the co-founder at scale you can't be doing that get out of there yeah um I mean in the beginning it wasn't that way but certainly like now as we're approaching 50 people but I what I would say is um you you really need to to obviously build a plan that you want to do it's going to change a million times but the most important thing is that you You start to get comfortable with the fact that you don't have everything solved.

10:45I like to think of it. It's almost like building a raft while you're swimming in the ocean and you have to get comfortable with the fact that you need to put together something while it's massively incomplete and accept that you don't know enough about stuff, but you also have to be like insanely curious and love learning. Right. So, and I think really successful companies have founders that, that champion those values. And so I went really deep on trying to learn more about dental efficacy and what that meant. I reached out to dental advisory experts that I heard on the radio shows. Some of them, like a British Dental Association scientific advisor, became our early advisor and helped us determine how we need to shape our bristles to give an effective clean.

11:33Also was one of the founding authors of like the most seminal research paper on electric toothbrushes. I'm not going to bore you with that.

11:38Gyve Safavi:But anyway, like I want to pretty, yeah, you have to, because like, I think for us, really successful companies also deliver value. And that's not just a design. But that is like the ultimate value of the toothbrushes that cleans your teeth, right? And like, is it like you were saying that you enjoy using our product, but if it wasn't cleaning your teeth, you'd probably be like, this looks good, but it's terrible. Totally. And also to the point of more natural and sustainable products. I've done the bamboo toothbrushes in the past and you know going down that rabbit hole they just didn't work.

12:13Gyve Safavi:So I would go back to like quote unquote conventional brands and so when I landed on yours I'm like this is awesome because it it has that same quality and even more so but with the sustainability almost as like a added value to the actual quality of the product. Yeah. And that was a big part of our ethos because early on, you know, when we were doing our surveys, people would tell us like, I don't want a sustainable product if it sucks. And you kind of really, immediately you realize the sort of like tensions that you're trying to build. And for us, it was all about like our dentists were telling us electric toothbrushes and we were using bamboo toothbrushes also.

12:51And I was like, they weren't really good. They hurt my gums. And so I was like, how do we create a product that delivers on the core benefit without compromising on some of the sustainable aspects. We're not perfect. And we always, we say that on our site, we're like, we're far from perfect, but we're trying to push boundaries without compromise.

13:08Gyve Safavi:I love that. And something also that you've done really well is getting onto the radar of the right people in the sense of I've seen people share about your products where I don't know if I've ever really noticed people talking about their toothbrush before. And I know that you're on Goop online, Target, you're in Air One, which is really cool. Obviously, D2C, Amazon. So what did that look like of creating buzz around this product of getting that excitement and getting it on the right retailers radars, but also consumers to really drive demand for the product. I love that buzz, no pun intended.

13:54But early on, we were in love with the product, obviously, right? And I was just genuinely, I was like, every retailer needs to take this. Why are we moving so slow? My co-founder manages all of our retail relationships and he's like, Rome wasn't built in a day. Let's take it break by break. And the reality, that's what we did so we started dtc first as that is that has the lowest barriers right like you start dtc first you're able to um to get some momentum validation get feedback from customers uh without you know if you go into a retailer and you haven't gotten that early stage feedback you risk that relationship right where like if something was not perfect and you need to change it they'll be like you know what don't come back because like we don't they can't risk their reputation on an early staged company and so we as much as we really wanted to go and we were like convinced our product was ready which you know we did do iterations and you constantly do smaller iterations as a hardware company um it was the right thing for us to go online ddc and then at one point we went on to amazon and obviously as a ddc company we're like is there going to be cannibalization a huge debate in our company you know um right and it's not as much of a discovery

15:10Gyve Safavi:platform right people are usually typing in what they know correct already so how did that work on amazon so um the interesting thing is that like we we barely did any ads on amazon and the sales were happening exactly you said we we didn't rank anywhere on um on sonic toothbrushes we're now the number one rank in the uk and i think a position in the us or or moving up but um so we didn't we We didn't rank organically, although now we are. And so people are searching through and paying for us. But that's okay because people shop where they want to shop. And that's something that we recognized early on.

15:47We're like, if somebody wants to shop on Amazon, and it also helps for credibility when you enter a market, you know, they might not know you from your website or seen you around a lot, but they can go onto Amazon. There's more trust maybe they have with Amazon. The delivery is faster possibly. And so a lot more people will convert higher. and that often we found that offset the cannibalization if there was any right because you don't know but that there is definitely a higher conversion on being on multiple channels because you just captured people who had a preference for a different retailer um and similar to and then once we got decent sales on amazon and our own site that's a perfect time to go to a retailer and say hey i've got these the sales traction like take it take a test on us because that's what they're doing they're they're taking tests on you and they're they're going to put you in a few stores my best advice to that and credit to my co-founder who is a retail genius is try to set the bar low you know like there's often a goal to get like mass you know national distribution that's really hard to maintain you need to have a decent amount of advertising which maybe your ddc as advertising hasn't like like spilled over enough to support that right he will definitely create some awareness and that's what it's not isolation and by starting with smaller stores less distribution and just being like look give us two facings we're going to knock these out of the park and then let's discuss more then you build that trust and credibility we and and that it's like you you start with like a lower sort of something that you can manage and then kind of you know build it up and that's that's how you build trust and relationships in my mind um and especially of retailers that's what it's all about is building trust and relationships so that they are willing to take a risk and give you a bigger display or some more space and is that how you strategize approaching target yes and so we've we've gone into target now uh and successfully for like a few months now in 500 stores uh without giving our retail strategy away we are definitely like we're taking it one step at a time right because that's not that makes sense right like Because nobody wants to give somebody whatever tons of space if you're unproven, right?

17:57Gyve Safavi:And you have to prove not only, yes, you deserve to be on shelf, but that you could get off shelf. And that's something that is always talked about here as far as one step is to get on the shelves. But then you really have the biggest thing is getting off the shelves. So something that you touched upon early on was doing SurveyMonkey and being really scrappy, using$200 to talk to consumers. Can you go into a little bit more of how that worked? Because I thought that was a really good piece of advice for an emerging brand founder who's starting off really early. And I think also speaks to your strategy overall.

18:39Gyve Safavi:And what I keep hearing of talking to consumers and listening to their needs and really building a brand around what were those gaps, which I really appreciate. So could you talk more about the SurveyMonkey of how you first initially got that feedback? We didn't think that would be our six, like a success story for us. But looking back, that was definitely like the essence of it. you know a lot of our innovation that came out like our battery lasts over a month we have a stainless steel plate that is easy to wipe off because people were complaining about the gunk that builds up a mere amount neatly holds your brush so a lot of the innovation that we were that are the pain points we were hearing we built into innovation and i would say that the beauty of like when you're starting out the easiest is to ask friends and family what they think and i highly advise against that because like i mean obviously you need support as support network And it wouldn't be possible, hands up, without my amazing wife, Amy, and Mark's amazing wife, Caroline, because they supported us through times when we were making nothing.

19:42And without their genuine support, we wouldn't be able to do it. But when you're testing a product, you want to talk to people who don't know you. We're going to give you the raw feedback. And rather than say, I think it's great, go for it. They're going to say, I don't like this. This sounds silly. Why would you do that? And that's what you get with a randomized survey that you don't know anybody. They'll leave in the comment box, this looks clunky. and sometimes you know that might be upsetting but what you need to do is work through what they don't think it looks clunky or what is it and then you can revise those and that's a great way to save money time and energy and just sort of address those pain points so you know as we even now we still use SurveyMonkey and others other sites because I'm like let's just throw up a concept and test it you can get I mean with AI we didn't have AI back then but you can take a photo of whatever your actual product is and ask ai to sort of like make it a sketch you know so it's not so transparent as to what you're saying often the best right put a sketch up write a few sentences on like what it is like i don't know my new uh probiotic soda it does this this and this and um you know it whitens your teeth just making it up right right uh what do you guys think of this concept like and then people will tell you like i think it's a terrible idea this is why or Or, you know, you could also start by filtering people being like, do you drink probiotic sodas?

21:00Yes or no? You know, how many times a day do you drink soda? Yes. You know, and then you get some stats on those people. And then price is like such a great question to ask because people are like, what do I price it at? This is a probiotic soda. Sorry, I'm going off on this probiotic soda.

21:12Gyve Safavi:No, no, no. This is good. This is great. But this probiotic soda, you know, it's got a lot of stuff in it. It can't be sold at$1.99. This has got to be a, you know, a$12.99 soda. And so you can validate that, right? like is you can there's obviously you can demonstrate zero in who you think your customer is like oh they make this much money they do this and they shop here with the questions is like pre-questions try not to have more than 30 to start but then you can sort of zero in on sort of the four key pricing questions which is one at what price do you think the soda would be so expensive you wouldn't consider it okay there's my high anchor what price do you think it'd be so cheap you wouldn't consider it oh like 20 cents i'm not buying that that could be junk you know So and then what price do you think?

21:54Not too expensive, but I need to do a little bit of research to see is this really worth it? You know, and then the next one is what price do you think this would be a bargain? And so you get sort of four pricing points. And then if you get like 200 people giving you those four pricing points, you can get really beautiful curves of like, there's my sweet spot between, I don't know,$9.99 and$12.99. And that gives you a little bit more reassurance that like you're not going to totally mess up that price point when you start out. And obviously pricing can change when it's DTC alone, but, and Amazon, but that's some of the ways that you can get really good assumptions.

22:28Gyve Safavi:Does the SurveyMonkey help you, did SurveyMonkey help you find people who use electric toothbrushes? Like, did they do that scouting? So there's a lot of, like, there's a lot of consumer research panels and they, and like, there are some that can definitely do that and they cost more. I'm using SurveyMonkey because it's quite broad. they don't but because it's such a broad like everybody brushes their teeth right so right you and actually in the u.s i think it's like 51 of consumers use electric toothbrushes and it's growing so you have probably a 50 chance if not higher that they will use an electric toothbrush and so you might have to like widen your net and get more responses to get exactly those but we found a lot of people also traded in for manual brushing as you mentioned you know bamboo toothbrush wasn't giving the right clean so we also looked at those answers like if you're not in the category why are you not in it and so you can take them on down a different trail right so if it's like you're selling probiotic sodas you want to talk to people who buy probiotic sodas you can also say if they say no be like why have you not considered one what would make you change your mind you know what are brands that you already know that you've not considered you know some other questions you can ask that's a great piece of advice thank you that's the first time Survey Monkey has gotten so many shout outs in one episode.

23:44Gyve Safavi:I know people should sponsor me. I mean, yeah, they really should. I see a collab here. I would love to hear just broad strokes of where you would love to see Suri go in the future. Oh, yeah. So Suri is short for sustainable rituals. And, you know, for us, we really want to become a household brand. And as we grow across the US, Like we really just want, we want to delight people with amazing oral care products, starting first with our S2 Pro Brush, which is not a cheap product. It's a more premium product, but we think it really has an opportunity to delight people as it's something, as you mentioned, like it's quite an experience that you're like, why are other products not made this way?

24:32Why have I ignored toothbrushes for so long? Or why has nobody invested in that experience? And then we think that in general, there's a room for a lot of products to be made with more design consideration, more performance or performance on par. And then also with an element of sustainability. So we recently launched a toothpaste that is an aluminum tube and has a cap that we recycle and is plant based also. But we're looking at other categories in the oral care space that generally have been forgotten. we do have our own product team now so that help us develop and design everything and that's more so that we can achieve what we want to on design point of view whereas there's a lot of standard things off the shelf but I think that that plays to our strategy of how do we become a brand that people truly love and design is part of that element but it looks different and it actually feels great and I don't know why it was never done this way before so cool and I love the inspo behind the name yeah it took a while the name came from because i'm such a brand name nerd

25:41Gyve Safavi:and so that it wasn't named after tom cruise's daughter i can tell you well i would love for you to just give a shout out one more time where people can shop surrey oh yeah so you can find us in on target online uh on in in over 500 stores uh across the country and you can find those stores on our site. Erewhon in LA, Goop online and a few stores, I believe. And more soon. So really soon. So more. And also trisory.com, which is us and amazon.com. Amazing. Well, congratulations on all the success. You've been doing an incredible job, especially four years in, what you all have accomplished is really impressive.

26:28Gyve Safavi:And I just genuinely love your product. So thank you for creating a really good toothbrush. Thank you so much, Kelly. I really, really appreciate it. Of course. Thank you everyone for listening and I'll see you on the next episode. Bye. This episode was brought to you by Glimpse. As we know, building a brand is not as sexy and glamorous as it looks on social media at times. A lot of those unsexy problems come into play when brands start to scale in retail distribution. Founders are always incredibly excited to see their products on shelves at major retail chains, but they don't realize all the hard work that starts to begin.

27:12Gyve Safavi:Retailers and distributors are known for their processes of deducting amounts from invoices. Most of the time, those are totally valid. Promos, slotting fees, free fills, and all the things that brands agree to to be part of the retail experience. But sometimes those deductions are invalid, costing brands thousands to millions in fees. Actually finding those needles in the haystack, though, and fighting to win back lost revenue, it's a costly, manual, and time-consuming issue. And that's where Glimpse comes in. Glimpse is an AI-powered deduction management tool that disputes and recovers invalid deductions, winning brands thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours back to founders so that they can focus on what really matters most, scaling their businesses.

28:11Gyve Safavi:With a team of in-house deduction experts who come from some of the most successful and profitable CPG companies and custom built AI with 100 % accuracy and precision. You'll recover money that you never should have had leaked in the first place. If you're a brand selling in retail, go to tryglimpse.com backslash trial for 30 days free and let them know I sent you. Thank you again for listening to this episode of the Emerging Brands Podcast. It really means so much to me that you listen to this show, share it with your friends and support it. If you are a CPG food and beverage founder and you're ready to launch a brand, people want to shop, head to withkellybennett.com for the details.

29:04Gyve Safavi:And as always, thank you so much for listening, shopping the brands featured on the show and following brands I'm working with. It means so much. See you on the next episode.