How SURI Cracked High-Consideration Consumer Marketing

0:00This show is brought to you by the Global Talent Co, a marketing leader's best friend in these times of budget cuts and efficient growth. We help marketing leaders find, hire, vet and manage amazing marketing talent for 50 to 70 percent less than their U.S. and European counterparts. To book a free consultation, visit globaltalent.co. Hi, everyone, and thanks for listening to the Future of Consumer Marketing Podcast. Today with Mark Rushmore, co-founder of Suri Mark. It's a pleasure to have you. It's a pleasure to be here. I realized I should probably look onto this camera that way. Yeah. Thank you very much for having me.

0:36I'm excited to be on. So tell us, what is Suri actually doing and how did you come up with that? Sure. So Suri is short for sustainable rituals. And what happened was my co-founder and I, we used to work at Porter & Gamble. I was in sales and strategy roles. He was in finance and marketing roles. And we met at an industry event and started discussing how much waste there is in the packaging. You know, just when you're selling millions and billions of units of different consumer goods products, we just kind of saw like this incredible amount of like plastic waste. And when we looked at one category in particular, we looked into oral care and we discovered every year that billions of brushes are thrown away every year and end up in landfill and ocean.

1:15And virtually every brush you probably ever use since you were a child still exists somewhere. We realized, wow, that's an enormous problem. So then we decided to do lots of thousands of interviews with consumers to see, you know, what do they love about their toothbrush? And actually what we found was that, you know, we said, I mean, actually it's a good question. What toothbrush do you use, Roman? I have actually an Oral-B. An Oral-B. And do you use the Bluetooth function every day? You connect to your phone when you brush your teeth? I don't think so. No, I'm not connected. Of course you don't.

1:44And how often do you charge it? Wow, that's a good question. Probably once a week. probably once a week that's good a lot of people say it's only a few days but once a week and do you always take it when you travel actually no because it's charging issues and the package charging issues packaging is too clunky so here we are you're a perfect example people told us okay i'm not using these gimmicks you already solved you know i have to charge my battery all the time do you ever have that like that gunky crust that forms on the bottom you know like this horrible yeah disgusting and so so we have a sustainability issue and then people said that they don't love using the product.

2:19In fact, when we asked, a lot of people couldn't even name the brand. And so we thought, what if we can make a brush that's both more sustainable and more enjoyable to use with better features? And so we created Suri, which as I said, stands for Sustainable Rituals. And in doing so, we've got a slim but powerful brush using plant-based materials in the head with pre-recycling, aluminium in the body. It's quiet, but it's a very strong clinically proven clean. We have a UV cleaning case, which deals 99 % antibacterial and the bristles and our battery lasts 40 days on a single charge so you know it's perfect for traveling it's perfect for giving a great clean and when you look at it from a category perspective a lot of people brush their teeth and i mean it doesn't matter which country you're in it doesn't matter whether you're five years old or whether you're 95 years old you're cleaning your teeth and the electric toothbrush or power toothbrushes are the fastest growing segment within the wider category and so you have this absolutely enormous market but two players who've got an 80 % market share with a product which are, you know, not serving customer needs.

3:21And so that was the sort of genesis of the idea. Amazing. And one key bit to kind of branding that you decided to go for this, one fact that we talked about while, while I was at Freddy was on a child, actually, I'm sure, and we talked about how they didn't want to position the company and brand in a too sustainable way, because people should buy because it's a cool, you know, design type of product and not because of the aspect. How did she go about creating the brand? How did you think about customer segments, think about, you know, positioning the company? Absolutely. So I think when we looked at the category, traditionally it's been very clinical, very stale, and it's been like that for a long, long time.

4:04Whereas the brands that we resonated with most had more of an aspirational lifestyle aesthetic. and so we thought well why can't we have that in this you know this product that we use twice a day every day and so I think that kind of like set a bit of a tone for directionally where we wanted to take it from an aesthetic perspective and then we've kind of kept to that whether it's this sort of more minimalist but you know more lifestyle beautiful product and because we don't think you have to compromise you know and actually coming to your point around sustainability You know, I think maybe in the early days of people being more sustainable, it always came with a compromise, you know, like, oh, you can use this washing powder, but you're clean, your clothes might not feel as clean, or you can have this fabric, but it's not going to feel as soft.

4:49whereas we don't really believe in compromise at all. And my co-founder, he's extremely stubborn and will not compromise on a lot of stuff, which has been a real superpower because, you know, we didn't want our product just because it was give a great performance and was sustainable, didn't have a really great design that, you know, you enjoyed to look at and to use. Okay. Okay, cool. And what we've got to your ideal customer, like, did you have a specific ideal customer in mind? And how has that also changed all the time? Oh, so I used to joke, you know, our ideal customer is anyone who brushes their teeth.

5:23So you didn't believe in going me, she wants to market right away. Well, but as you know, better to have sort of a target and then you build towards that. And then actually you have like then shadows, which I'm around the side of it. So, you know, the majority of customers and people who purchase are women. And it's because we've launched our brushes, like at the more premium end in the price range of electric toothbrushes so that naturally skews to a slightly older consumer with disposable income so you know women with high disposable income which means they're slightly older than say you know the early 20s is our kind of core target but actually then you know the way we position it and the way we talk about it i think it appeals to a broader range okay well and what we did through kind of your marketing initiative initially what were some of the pieces that you had how did that change over time and also asking because you know in toothbrushes and kind of generally you have so many recommendations to go to kind of your dentist and he has a lot of ideas about what to do then it's a very high research type of product versions right and how does that actually match the social media world where you have four seconds of attention so how did you try to solve that so i think you're spot on with your assessment there is like a high consideration purchase and And so people will want to do research and have a think about it before they make a decision.

6:51And so those two things early on, you know, we ran ads rather than do like a Kickstarter or something like that. We just ran ads of a big launch page and our ads just really explain, you know, our hypothesis, like, you know, so many brushes get thrown away and end up in landfills and oceans. They're not made to last. And, you know, people hate the short battery. They hate the gunk of the bottom. They hate, you know, the big clunky loud noises. And so we just said, look, we think there's a better way to do this and sort of explain that. But that was only one part of the puzzle. And something else that we identified early on was the role of SEO, essentially.

7:27So people will type in best electric toothbrush, toothbrush recommendations, best electric toothbrush 2020, 22, 23, 24, 25, etc. And certainly in the UK and the US, the top 20 results on Google will invariably be roundups from more well-known news publications. So we were very intentional about getting in front of those and journalists getting onto those lists and sort of getting them to test our product versus competitors. Because we knew in the consumer journey that someone would see our ad, but they'd want to see proof points, they'd want to see reviews. And I'm pleased to say that we, you know, I think we appear on, I think virtually all of, you know, 90 % or all of the top searches and actually quite early on, I think we were like, we were the number one top search and then the number one recommended brush of the 10.

8:18And so it just added this like, you know, legitimacy. And I think a challenge, as you know, like when you start any business is, you know, that element of trust. And so, you know, it was hard when we had no reviews to persuade people to part with their money for this new electric toothbrush brand. But now we have over 12 ,000 reviews and a 4.7 rating on Trustpilot. You know, that puts us, you know, significantly far ahead of if not all of our competitors on Trustpilot. Yeah. It's always a chicken and egg problem, right? In terms of relative importance, I mean, you mentioned already a few things.

8:50You mentioned actually, there's a good product. There's product design, there's the branding, there's the marketing. In terms of relative importance, what would you say, how's the relatively more important to find out where you are today versus less of the development of those. Based on what, like, I don't have any statistical way of measuring this. This is just my own opinion. But I really do believe it just stems from having a great product. I mean, you know, I think it's like 18 to 20 % of our sales are excuse upon word of mouth. So people buy a toothbrush and then they love it. And we created a custom GPT by downloading all of our Trustpilot reviews, and then you can interpret it and so on.

9:32But, you know, I said, you know, what are the most commonly used words across these 12 ,000 reviews? And the number one most used word is love. Like, I love my story toothbrush. I love brushing my teeth now. I never thought I'd say that. I can't believe I love my toothbrush. And I think that's really our secret weapon is how much people love the product, how much they love the unboxing, how much they didn't realize that brushing your teeth doesn't have to be a chore. It can be something that you look forward to, that you enjoy, that is a joy. And I think I would attribute a lot of the success from what we've done to the quality and performance and the sustainability of the product.

10:08It really is something that people wanted and we've provided it. Then beyond that, I think our ability to communicate our proposition to advertising has been crucial. But then also, like, you know, we really engage with our community, with dental professionals, and you can see, you know, we got high satisfaction on our customer service. And so I would say we're very, very, we're really obsessed with the customer, you know, like what's her problem with the current toothbrush? What's our solution? How can we help her choose the right product? How can we, you know, answer any questions she has really quickly and efficiently?

10:43And how can we provide the best possible service. And I think by doing that, all the decisions we make around product, marketing, customer service, kind of fall back into making the customer happy, which is why our word of mouth is so strong. And I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but from the outset, it seems like compared to other consumer businesses, you have rather less, you know, purchase frequencies, right? So buy a toothbrush, that's probably the majority of the revenue that you'll generate for a two years and maybe i'll just get some toothpaste and some accessories but so is that a correct assumption and then how does that kind of make sense with your strategy while still investing a lot into cren and customer satisfaction even if there's not so much revenue coming from that particular customer down the line so i mean obviously every category's got different dynamics but i think one of the great things obviously with i don't know if you've ever tried to use your oral B without the head on the top and just with the metal bit, it is very bad at brushing your teeth if you just use the metal.

11:44So you have to buy the head, right? And I don't know, like how long have you been brushing your teeth for, Roman? I guess I should say since I was a child. Yeah. I'm guessing you don't just buy the toothbrush, you buy head as well, do you? Yeah. But in terms of the percentage, it's good to go out. So it depends, again, over what time period. I mean, if you calculate your LTV over the last five years, 10 years, I think there's certain brands where maybe you buy their makeup or you buy that drink for maybe one year, two years, a phase in your life. Sometimes it's longer, but I suspect you've been buying your Oral-B toothbrush heads and brushes now for 10 years, 20 years.

12:26Yeah, probably. I just recently moved because of my dentist foundation inspection. than electric. Ah, okay. But that's very interesting that we have, it's somewhere between 25 to 40 % of people make their purchase to buy an electric brush based on the recommendation of their dentist. And so, yeah, but you are right, you know, like the big initial sort of revenue piece will come from the purchase of the handle, but over 30 % of our revenue is from repeat custom. Okay, that's amazing. Yeah, that's amazing. And how has your marketing actually changed for the client? You said initially you focused a lot on generating trust, getting those press clickings.

13:04Is that still the case? Or has your marketing evolved all the time and your books and different channels and algorithms people use? It's definitely evolved over time, you know, as we sort of change in scale and look at different opportunities. So I think a good example is we saw the success of people at Wild and Yopoda and Scaling Influencer as an acquisition channel. And so that's something that we're building sort of more and more now. We're looking into other channels beyond paid ads. Yeah. And then we also look at retailers, like a marketing channel, as well as a sales channel. And so we've just gone into 500 boot stores.

13:44We're close to launching in a national retailer in the US. Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah. One of the few graphical distributions, we started out in the UK. I was going to roll up then afterwards. When did you decide to kind of go international? Why? Which markets? So from day one, actually, as an experiment, we ran ads in US, Germany, and UK to see our effectiveness. And what was interesting is all three markets responded really well, which was a surprise to us, especially given that we were advertising in English in Germany. But for some reason that still worked. And I think we got picked up by German newspapers.

14:22So we had a lot of orders coming in initially. But then we very quickly realized, you know, this was, I think, very early days. And we didn't have much funding that trying to do three markets simultaneously would probably not be the wisest use of our time. And so we decided to postpone launching in Germany for a while and focus just on the US and the UK. And yeah, those are our two markets. Obviously, we will ship anywhere. So we have a lot of orders from a few different countries. And every week we get a different retailer from a different market reaching out to us. But for now, we've been very much focused on the US and UK.

14:54Okay, cool. And then is there any differences between the US and the UK market in terms of your positioning, in terms of communication, in terms of marketing channels? I wouldn't say like statistically significant differences at the moment. I think we have an opportunity to probably do more differentiation and to localize in a more comprehensive way, probably with each market, whereas we have probably less sophisticated way of doing that. Okay. Is there any marketing campaign that kind of big standout success for you that you didn't expect to be as successful or where you said this was kind of our make or break marketing campaign that really moved the needle?

15:33Is there something that you share there? Yeah, there's a couple of things that stand out. I think the first one was we were invited, we go on podcasts and had a lot of press coverage, but we were invited to go onto a radio show in the UK on Radio 4. And it was like a mid afternoon show, like on a Wednesday or something. So, you know, we were sort of like, you know, we treated it like anything else. But it was, I don't know, I think it must have been millions of people were listening to it that day for some reason. and we have a post checkout survey. And to this day, people still say, oh, I'm buying this because I heard it on that interview or they've re-listened to the interview, you know, it's on the BBC website.

16:14And it's just so interesting to see the power of funnel awareness, you know, and the power of storytelling. So it was a great, you know, show for half an hour, really getting into like, you know, why we have done what we've done and how we've done it. I think that was really unexpected, it, but has delivered really well for us. And, you know, I think a lot of our ads, this was more mid and lower funnel. And so actually getting that top of funnel awareness, then people then seeing the ads is a pretty great combination. So hoping to do some more. Yeah. I mean, I think there's two big takeaways there.

16:49One is kind of how important upper funnel is, even if it's kind of sometimes hard to measure, right? The other thing that you mentioned is kind of the art of story. Yeah. a lot of entrepreneurs struggle a lot of times. Like, was that kind of natural for you? How did you learn how to help you get a good storyteller? What kind of advice would you have for people who are not as good at it? So I think we were lucky in a way that Neve and I have done hundreds, maybe more, maybe thousands of meetings with investors, with press, with, you know, all sorts of, et cetera. And we have done the same pitch, you know, or variations of the same pitch for like two years before or maybe one and a half years before we were on this radio program.

17:33And so our storytelling has evolved to the point where I know when he says this, I'm going to say that. And we've sort of tweaked things and measured things. And so I guess my point would say just repetition, you know, I think repetition of the stories and then seeing what works, what lands, what doesn't, and then refining it has really helped us to sort of tell our story. I think that's one thing. I think the other thing is whenever we've been more vulnerable and honest, I think that's when people connect more. It's not always through the success or selling. It's more about just really giving the honest version of the story.

18:11It seems like certain people resonate with that. No, yeah. of sudden mobility is a strong plan, right? And showing that you go and move down just as much as a duck can be powerful, well, makes you invading. So good. Amazing insights. Let's quickly talk about your team setup, because, you know, do you feel that you hire differently because you're on a sustainability mission? And does that also attract different type of talent with your company? And how is your marketing team generally you set up you know our mission is like a core part of obviously you know our proposition and like our philosophy and so it definitely does attract people who are acting more purpose-driven generally some more than others i think at the same time like we are all very performance driven and want to work in like a high performance culture and so it's purpose plus performance is not purpose over performance if that makes sense and that's very similar to our brush you know like we want to be a sustainable brush but we also want to have the best possible clean and there's not one compromising the other.

19:12And then in terms of structure, you know, purely on, we have growth and brands sort of separately and then also creative. But obviously the three are very intermingled. So, you know, we have, not our team's changing all the time, but we have director of growth, head of brand, head of creative. And then each of them have people within their team, someone who does say influencer or CRM, we have a head of growth. Yeah. Okay. And is the type of individuals that you're hiring now different than let's say five years ago? Like does a good market here need to bring different things to the table? We've only been going for three years.

19:49So we set up in May 22. And definitely like, I think because we're larger now, like we probably get people who are more specialized in their role. Whereas at first it was sort of more general. I think something that we do is like, we always strive as a company to do more with less. It's one of our values. And so we're looking for people who, no matter what, will like get results and like just get their stuff and make things happen. And because we're smaller than our competitors, we have to be more effective and more efficient. So that's something that we like really look for when we're hiring.

20:22But broadly, you know, we also have a passion for results. So we get very competitive people. One of our people, she used to play basketball for Portugal. Another one on my team is a professional football referee. Like, you know, so he's working on Surrey, but then he was refereeing, you know, a few weeks ago. And so we found that like, often those individuals are very driven, very self starting. And yeah, like, you know, bring that same level of competitiveness to our company. Where do you see Surrey in the next five years? I mean, where are you now in terms of the members revenues, you know, and where do you see the company also in terms of product evolution and, right?

21:05Yeah, sure. So, you know, in our first six months, we did about 2 million revenue, then in 23, about eight, and then last year we did 23 and a half and then this year, quite a bit higher again. Yeah. I mean, it's good early growth, but like we're scratching the surface of something much, much bigger. I mean, you know, we have a tiny, tiny share in the UK and the US and, you know, people brush their teeth in every country, right? It's this enormous range. We only have one product at one price point. Whereas, you know, you can see that other oral care providers have a range of products for a range of ages.

21:46And so I think as we look to the future, I think, you know, in five years time, we have the potential to, you know, really significantly address a much bigger market and scale the company, you know, and 20x what we are right now. Okay. Is there anything that you want to give as a feedback or as a big learning to founders that you wish you knew years ago when it got started? That's a great question. I had a company before this, and one of the books I read at the time was called The E-Myth. And it's about basically how to put in place systems and processes in order to achieve repeatable scale. And I think one of the lessons I'm probably learning now is like, it's easy to say sort of with hindsight, but I think I know I was speaking to one of the guys from True Classic who made t-shirts in America.

22:35I think they've scaled to 300 million bootstrapped. And I'm pretty sure they use like the entrepreneurial operating system, the EOS system as a way just to like, you know, this is processes and this is where we run meetings and this is where we do all this kind of stuff. Because I think we've spent a lot of time like developing our own and iterating on them and developing them, which is part of the process. But I mean, it would be great if you had a system that you're happy with from the beginning. And then, you know, you kind of like adopted that even maybe before you needed to, because as you get bigger, it becomes more important, I think, to have those systems in place.

23:13And I sort of wish now that in some ways we had sort of a simple system in place, which we are so aligned on. But I mean, maybe that's part of everyone's journey. No, it definitely is. and amazing growth, amazing stories, amazing takeaways. So thanks Anton for coming on to the show and best of luck. And hopefully we can beat that BBC ready to say. Thank you.