“The Apple of Toothbrushes”: How Suri is Disrupting the $10 Billion Oral Health Care Industry

0:00Four years later, we're 43 people, 24 million, 1 million profit. and what's the name of the brand? And they'd go, it's the one that does this. No, it does this. And they would be stuck. And that was not every person, but it was a significant number of people who couldn't name the brand of a product they were using every day and they paid over a hundred pounds for. Early days, reached out to Johnny Ives and sent him a toothbrush. Not for a PR stunt or anything, but it's just because I want to know what one of the best designers in the world thought of our product. He responded.

0:29I'm Eric Fulweiler, and this is Scratch, Bringing you marketing lessons from the leading brands and brains, rewriting the rulebook from scratch for the world of today. Today, I'm joined by Gheve Safavi, co-founder and CEO of Suri, a London-based startup that's taking on a$30 billion oil care industry. Now, if you live in London or in the US, you probably would have seen Suri kind of taking over the shop shelves in Boots or Target and Walmart. And also for me, especially, I've definitely seen them kind of taking over my YouTube algorithm with all of their performance ads, which I'm seeing on the YouTube pre-roll.

1:07And I actually quite enjoy the ads, which is very rare for me to say. Now, Suri actually ended up on the Brands to Watch report that we just released for 2026 here at Rival. So if you haven't seen that yet, please do go and check it out. But on the back of that, we definitely wanted to have them on the podcast to really understand and get into how they've built such an incredible brand in such a short amount of time. Now, Gheeves spent a decade or so inside Procter & Gamble working on brands like Gillette before moving actually into the agency world and working with behemoths like AKQA and WPP.

1:39So with Suri, he's really rethinking the electric toothbrush from the ground up. Very design-led, built fully to push back on all the category conventions that we've kind of grown accustomed to. You know, all the Bluetooth sensors and all that stuff that no one actually uses on an electric toothbrush. They're pushing back against all of that, rethinking everything from the ground up. Now, this really, really reminded me of how important it is actually just to have creative conviction, honestly, when you're building a challenger brand and building something that does disrupt the category and how much value that adds to your marketing and also your brand loyalty as you start to scale.

2:15Now, we really dig into the brand's origin story and how they truly built from customer pain points and also why Johnny Ive, yes, that Johnny Ive, sent Give a late night text message about Suri when he had first launched the brand. We also get into what's coming next for one of the most exciting brands in the space right now. So without further ado, I hope you enjoy this conversation between Giv Safavi and me at Rival. Giv, welcome to Scratch. Good morning. Thanks for having me, Varen. Awesome. Well, no, we're very, very excited to have you on the show. Suri is one of those brands which has just been kind of all over my news feed, all over my YouTube feed for sure recently.

2:56And I've been kind of obsessed with just like the way the product looks, honestly, for the past year or so. Recently, it really came to light, obviously, in the Brands to Watch report that we just dropped. Suri is on that report as like one of the brands that we think is going to do super well in 2026. So I think this conversation is really timely and I'm really, really looking forward to it. Amazing. Thanks so much for having us and the kind words. One of the things I always say is that retargeting is not very expensive. So if you've already seen us, you see us a lot of times that our targeting component doesn't cost very much.

3:27Yeah, definitely. Definitely want to get into more of your performance mentality around the marketing angle of what you guys are doing. But to kick off, give one of the first icebreaker questions that we always, always ask every single guest since the first episode of us doing this is what's one challenger brand or rival brand that you're really passionate about right now? and you can't name your own? I wouldn't name my own, although I'm very obviously passionate about Suri. I guess I would say there's so many out there and I'm going to choose a London-based brand because we're based here in London, although we have a large portion of our business in the US as well.

4:08I would say Yoto probably. I have two young daughters. They're huge fans of Yoto. My wife and I are as well. They've created a really great ecosystem to get kids away from screens. uh it's it's it's such an integral part of my daughter's life you know like it's part of a morning routine when she wakes up a little too early and we want to sleep in uh so yeah i'm massive fans of what ben and the team are building there uh and um and i think they have a a long way ahead of them in terms of growth still yeah we're yeah i'm a big fan of yoto um we've been trying to get them on the show as well i think that they've really like in this generation of like we've all been worried that the next gen are very addicted to screen so they've really figured out something really interesting um them and i think tony's is their sort of main competitor right but both doing really really great stuff both doing really well um yeah both really good brands it's amazing there are i shouldn't say this but there are more brands in the space yeah i think it's an interesting conundrum not to take the conversation in a different way but like marketing something that kids find engaging but you're really marketing to the parents right and like those that subset of products like there was the little suitcases for a little while which you would see you go to the airport and like yeah trunkies they were all the rage for a little while and i thought they did really well to to get that it's such a sweet spot like parents have to like it and so do kids and it's that intersection that's so hard to find yeah it's a really interesting one but yeah definitely trying to get Yota on the show sometime soon.

5:43Cool. So can you give us just a quick overview for what Suri does for those very few people who might not know what you guys do? For sure. So Suri stands for Sustainable Rituals. We launched around almost four years ago with a view first to make an exceptional electric toothbrush that would clean your teeth really well. So Champion, the high performance clean was design led. So it was an enjoyable experience. I know brushing your teeth, enjoying brushing your teeth sounds odd, but that was definitely part of the challenge we wanted to address. And then last but not least, pushed sustainability in terms of how could we be more sustainable as a brand and future focused and really encourage others in the industry to follow us.

6:24We've evolved today and our goal ultimately and our mission as a company is to be a wellness focused brand in oral care, really using those three pillars of design, performance and sustainability to create something that people really enjoy in their house. Yeah, that's definitely one of the things. I think that's a really good segue to the first chapter we've kind of laid out here, like the design-led sustainability. I don't know where this actual moniker came from, but the apple of toothbrushes. I've seen that kind of phrase floated around on different places like Reddit forums and things like that about Suri.

6:58Is that something you guys have intentionally kind of leant into or it's just kind of happened on the back of what you've done? I mean, I'm not going to lie. I mean, that's a massive compliment to us. You know, if we are anything like 1 % like Apple, that's something that we feel really proud of. I mean, I've always been a huge fan of Apple since I was growing up in the 80s, which is the time when they weren't very famous or they weren't doing as well as other companies like Dell. But yeah, I'd say if people are comparing that to us, I probably have, there's a lot of influence we stole from them, right?

7:31I think the generation of the iPhone where, you know, And that was some of the things that we really took to value when we were starting, that the experience in which you open a product and use it has to be as good as a functionality. And I think Apple have definitely led that path for many brands to follow. So if we are seeing the Apple of toothbrush in any way, yeah, we do take that as a massive compliment. I think we have a lot to learn still, but yeah, we'd very much be happy to hear that. We also, early days, as I mentioned, I've always been a huge fan of Apple, reached out to Johnny Ives and sent him a toothbrush.

8:08It was not for a PR stunt or anything. It was just because I want to know what one of the best designers in the world thought of our product. And he responded shortly after saying, absolutely love them. Well done, guys, with a huge smiley face, which is probably one of the most busiest inboxes now, you can imagine. But yeah, my co-founder and I got that email, I think, at 10 o 'clock at night. and we were just like a bunch of little kids sitting in bed like like ecstatic you know because as a brand like if you can get that validation even on a private level it's so rewarding yeah that that is just an amazing story of like early validation right you've making you've made really deliberate choices clearly to go with industrial design and like make sure that the industrial design looks really great on the shelf but in the hand and like you know what people are using so to get that validation from basically the best industrial designer in the world is is awesome early days it must have really doubled down the thinking for for both of you at that point I'm yeah definitely so from day one and maybe we'll get into this a bit like we we did our we designed the product ourselves we own the design registration we re-engineered it because a big thing for me was we were doing we did a lot of research early on um I had this hypothesis that the brushes were big and clunky in an unnecessary way and so i i must have bought for my sins now we recycle all our brushes and everything but i bought 50 brushes and tore them apart trying to understand why were they so big and clunky i'm not an engineer but uh the first thing i realized was they didn't need to be that big and clunky they had this much padding around the motor and now it's kind of like it just feels like it's a traditional shape that people stuck with and never really reconsidered it and then i worked with a industrial designer in california a man named Dylan Feltman who then moved to London to become our third employee and so since early days we've we believe that really owning the design and functionality of our products is paramount to creating a better experience.

10:08Was that insight just completely random like you were just walking looking for a new toothbrush and you thought like this toothbrush that Oral-B does or another brand does doesn't look great or did that come so there was so obviously i i've i mean being a fan of apple my dad's an architect so i grew up loving with a huge appreciation for design you know i couldn't i can't draw for my life i still can barely write you know like if you get a card from me you can't even read what it says uh but i've always been a huge fan of good design and appreciated it and we we were early on i was like this could be made nicer this doesn't feel right And as we started doing our research, there's a few seminal moments that my co-founder and I had.

10:49You know, one of them was that there's a huge sustainability problem in the oral care industry. Toothbrushes aren't recyclable. I mean, there are some places you can send them off to if you are able to find them and get postage and do it. But most people don't. And the kind of thing that stuck with me was every toothbrush I ever owned probably still exists. They're made with multiple composites, polypropylene, silicone, nylon. And those composites, while they are recyclable if individually separated, they can't be separated en masse because it's just too small and too much effort. So the cost completely outweighs the sort of like benefit of recycling that material.

11:27So most municipal recycling facilities just get them and throw them out. And so for me, you know, as we were starting early on, I said, if we're going to create a future focused brand. And actually, I think probably ties in with my first daughter, who is four and a half now being born. I said that we have to create a brand that really champions the next generation, that is looking, is doing something more than what competition is already doing. Going beyond just making products that you sell, really considering the impact of what they have. And we're far from perfect. And we say that on our sustainability page, like we're not perfect.

11:59We know that, but we're evolving. And we consider sustainability as one of our core principles in which we create products. so we're always optimizing for it and we have we track our carbon emissions and we offset them whether you believe that's a good thing or not the reality is because we pay for our carbon emissions just that simple function as a business we want to minimize that so we want to minimize what we our cost expenditure and that make forces us to be better in what we're doing so um yeah that was that was one of the sort of seminal moments where i was like i want to make a better product but the sustainability angle has to be considered as well and then we did a lot of research with um consumers we didn't have a lot of money so the first thing i did was i paid for overpriced share reports that i saw a lot i mean it was probably five to six grand and at the time i was like am i going to pay six grand on a share report but uh i have a background i started at procter and gamble and sort of my co-founder and so i guess we were very share driven in the sense of like who owns who has what and what we discovered was there's two brands in electric toothbrushes dominate with 75 % share in the UK, in the US, in most developed markets.

13:05And so obviously as a startup, you're going, well, hang on, there must be huge barriers to entry here. Do I really want to take this risk? Like there are many other brands that exist on Amazon, but when you look at the real big shares, there's only two opportunities that are controlling the markets. And of course, being sort of hungry for disruption, I was like, yeah, of course we want to do this. but we tried to be as risk-averse as possible in the sense of if you're going to take risks, get the best picture you can in the market. And so we did a lot of consumer surveys. And this is where I asked questions about sustainability angle, design.

13:43And one of the things that I was quite shocked about was the things we got back from what people were saying, oh yeah, my brush battery completely sucks. And I was like, do you use the Bluetooth app? And they're like, absolutely never. I mean, maybe there was one out of 100 that did. And so we realized well let's optimize for battery over a Bluetooth app because it sounds like that's what people want They also said I can never travel with it because the battery sucks But the charge is also this big and funky. It doesn't work with my phone charger And so that was a kind of a no-brainer make it work with what you already have And then there's other things people complained about this gunk that builds up whenever you're brushing your teeth under your head So we added stainless steel plate so it's easy to clean it And then we have this mirror mount which we put on mirrors which just keeps it from like sitting on your counter and building up gunk there or in a cup and subtle things that we thought you know it's business 101 in a way listen to what your customers say they don't like and try to design for it yeah um and so yeah i would say there uh the sorry there's one more point on that that really got us excited which is you know the quote in the quantitative interviews i would ask you know do you use an 110 pounds okay and how often do you use it well i use it every day twice a day except when i travel because too funky to travel with okay and what's the name of the brand and they'd go uh it's the one that does this no it does this and i was i don't know that brand what is it you know because you don't want to prompt and give it away and they and they would be stuck and that was not every person but it was a significant number of people who couldn't name the brand of a product they were using every day and they paid over 100 pounds for which told me that this familiarity or high share was was really more through availability than brand love and if i could disrupt on brand love i would have an angle in and a lot of people told me like i was going to love a toothbrush but nobody's going to talk about a toothbrush it sits in your bathroom in the cup nobody looks at this don't you want to go into something like clothing that people will see and know you know there'll be a lot more word of mouth if i'm intended but uh here we are and uh yeah four years later uh we're 43 people you know you can probably see this on company's house but we did And in 2024, well, what, 24 million, 1 million profit.

15:54Last year, we're still closing our numbers, but we've had significant growth on that. And then this year, we're looking to keep growing very fast as well, which is always easier said than that. Well, no, definitely. You've definitely achieved that goal of making it something which consumers are now talking about, including us, like people who are trying to get you on podcasts to talk about exactly how you've grown such a phenomenal business in such a niche well not even a niche space actually because everyone like you said everyone uses a toothbrush so it's actually a mass market product but just not something that you would have ever thought people are going to talk about regularly um on that point of brand love like i just wanted to to ask a slightly deeper question on that like i've we've noticed definitely from looking at all the different challenger brands that we look at on a day-to-day basis like there seems to be the this real clear divide between like when a brand decides okay we're going to like pursue the sustainability pillar oftentimes like design is kind of left as a secondary thought and that means like they're able to access and create brand love with a very specific group of consumers who are very sustainability driven but not necessarily with the mass market who are just kind of like i just yeah if if i can do good like sustainability wise i'll do it but it needs to be easy kind of thing it feels like you guys have really bridged that divide really well uh so that's a hot topic for sure i mean it's the sustainability compromise like i'm gonna get uh use a i mean i'm gonna say a bamboo toothbrush but it doesn't clean my teeth very well and i was that person when i was using a bamboo toothbrush my dentist told me get an electric toothbrush what are you doing and um and you're kind of stuck because your your heart wants to do what's better for the planet or the better use better materials but then at the same time your health is important.

17:43And I think for our category, that's very true. But if you look also at like other categories, I don't know, sheet soap, sustainable, but it crumples and I can't wash my body with it. You know, so there's a, that was one thing we wanted to tackle. Like, how do we make a product that's more sustainable without compromising on the experience? Your dentist tells you go and get electric toothbrush and you don't want to, although it's better for your teeth and better for your health. And there are numerous studies that show that. So we thought, how do we be more sustainable with what we're doing. You know, we've designed a product that has plant-based heads.

18:18Our heads are made out of cornstarch and castor oil bristles, fully plant-based bristles that we collect from our consumers at our own expense. So they put them into a pouch. We take them back. We grind them up. And we recently did a partnership with Reborn making soap dishes out of the heads. So this takes about 18 heads. It's made 100 % out of our heads. So it's fully recycled. because sometimes when you recycle things, there's a virgin material and something else added. And that was a way that we've always, from the beginning, we said, we're going to collect our heads, we're going to grind them up, and we're going to turn them into new things.

18:51So to create a secondary life for them. At the same time, our brushes, if anybody's brush breaks, we always take it back and recycle it for them. We are in a category where products are used every day. So eventually, they don't have an infinite life. But what I would say for us is it wasn't the pursuit to perfection because if you try that that's impossible and i think sometimes when you say sustainability people either think as you said crap product and so as sometimes when we communicate in the u.s the first thing we say is high performing right because sustainability is a secondary message because mainly that we've had we've all tried a lot of sustainable products that are crap on the performance side and then the other one sort of thing that happens when you say we're trying to be more sustainable as people say i don't believe you greenwashing and they don't want to believe and they just discount anything you say to them and i think that is where we're in a world where brands are trying to be more sustainable and through sort of skepticism they can get negative reaction but also there are sort of new industry standards that are coming out and asa is use of how you can say anything sustainable is getting tighter and i think there's a lobby of larger companies that might be pushing that agenda yeah in the sense of like this is not true it's fake and then as a result we don't have to change anything and i would say like for us the most important thing when we were making a product was it has to be a good product and keeping that in mind how do we then make trade-offs on materiality choice so we have an aluminium handle that can be recycled by us and then and how do we make design choices when we're engineering so we can make this product better and that's how we see sustainability it's one of our core pillars it's not the only pillar and because we have that healthy tension of design experience so i say design experience because like yes it can look beautiful but it actually has to feel good in your hand and achieve the other elements and be practical in its environment and then performance like it has to clean your teeth we're in a health care category if you're not doing that job well then it's kind of like you're you don't really value that the whole category and then the last is and but not least the sustainability and so what we pride ourselves is we value those three principles on on the even setting and i and i would challenge other brands that are looking to to be more sustainable to to do that um i used to work at larger companies where sustainability was an afterthought you have your product now let's make it more sustainable and when you've already gone through the whole development cycle then the only thing you probably change is packaging it just becomes then like a bit of a marketing tagline at the end right yeah yeah i think susan yeah susan from here we flow uh the sort of wellness brand as well they were also on the brands to watch for 2026 and she has this great moniker around like you know we when it comes to sustainability we're dark green inside but light green outside so they don't ever lead with that messaging because they realize kind of very similar to what you're saying that actually that's often not what the consumer the mass consumer cares about they want a product that works really really well first and then if it's sustainable great added added benefit but yeah Yeah.

21:57One thing that I wanted to touch on as well, actually, in that world of like, you guys are definitely a very like sort of brand led marketing function. At least that's how I characterize it from looking at it from the outside. But obviously, naturally, I've noticed that you do a lot of performance marketing, especially the YouTube ads and things like that. How effective have you found that in today's sort of climate? Well, I mean, I would say very effective. so we wouldn't be a brand if we couldn't use the performance channels today because when we started nobody wanted to list our product we're lucky that now we have a great relationship with boots and we've gone into target in the u.s across 500 stores and we're also in curries and best buy and a few other retailers uh planet organic but in the beginning it's there it's quite hard to get listed in a store when nobody knows you like they don't want to take the risk on you especially as as I was saying, in our category where there's two dominant players who've been around for a long time, they would be apprehensive and so would I, right?

23:00So we started on Meta and that was actually the first channel, Meta and Google search. And we actually started with landing pages that talked about our product, but didn't have it for sale and said, if you're interested, sign up to learn more. We collected emails. Now, at that point, you can already do a lot of variation in your marketing. You can test your messaging. You can leave with sustainability. You can do the performance. You can find different hooks. You can change your landing pages. And so already there, you can get really good insights like, hey, guys, the ones that are converting are starting with this messaging.

23:31This is the audience that's actually clicking through. And that helped us shape a lot of our early doors on performance marketing. And then as we've gone on, it's a bit of a science and an art form because at least on meta, there's because the content is scrolled so fast. you need to break it down into the way like the the way you can the hook the middle the closed segment but ultimately like at the basis of our performance marketing is storytelling and we talk about our features but we're trying to paint a story that people resonate with you know like do you have that toothpaste gunk that builds up you know is your brush die after i don't know every couple days like would you like a longer battery do you ever travel with your electric toothbrush so the pain points that we heard from our early customers we were able to put them into ads and then to really see what resonates and evolve it over time.

24:22So performance marketing has been being part of our brand marketing. And where we are now is we're moving actually to above the line marketing. So we did our first London Tube campaign in October last year and then did a Christmas campaign as well. And that performed really well. I'd say the good thing about starting with performance is you can really shape your messaging without spending too much. You can grow awareness. We enlisted, you know, after about a year, we went into Boots. And actually that was because our Meta and Google and YouTube ads had built a level of awareness in the UK that people knew us.

24:59And from there, you know, we were able to grow. Not everybody's able to do that because we have a price point that enabled that. ECGAs can be quite high if you're selling maybe drinks. In a world of conventional marketing, doing what everyone else is doing is the fastest way to become invisible. That's why there's Zag, the fortnightly newsletter from Rival. We don't just report on trends. We dissect the challenger mindset that helps brands like Google, F1, and Monzo win. Every two weeks, we deliver breakthrough ideas and actionable insights straight to your inbox, helping you outmaneuver the giants and drive outsized impact.

25:32Join over 5 ,000 marketing leaders who have stopped following and started leading. Subscribe to Zag at wearerival.com. But I challenge to find ways around that, bigger baskets, etc. etc. And are you guys kind of doing your performance function fully in-house or are you working with agencies? How do you do that? In the beginning we started, so I knew a bit about meta-advertising and setting up a Shopify site, but we started with a freelancer who helped us on our ads. And then we worked briefly with an agency and then we built the team in-house. And I think there are many models that you can take to go to market.

26:09Sometimes brands are very retail we're omnichannel now and we're very aware of that but sometimes brands are very retail focused and meta is something or just performance is something they want to have on top sometimes it's a core engine for us it was a core engine and there was a lot of nuance that we needed to understand so building the team in-house to do the variations and it was a full-time consuming role where things were constantly changing every day that made sense with influencers which we work with. We have part in-house and we work with agencies as well. Awesome. Yeah. You mentioned actually, like you touched on a bit about your sort of background at P &G and like your background has obviously given you that deep subject expertise, but also like just a wider view on like how to market a successful brand as well.

26:54I know you spent a bit of time at AKQA and WPP as well. So like, I'd really like to dive in there and just try and understand a bit more about like, you know what that background has given you in terms of building a new brand like you're already breaking a lot of conventions that you would see in the category with suri but if you were to like rebuild the entire personal care industry from scratch today you know knowing what you know now about supply chains consumer behavior all that type of stuff like is there any specific industry standard that you would immediately just be like get rid of that like that doesn't serve the consumer of today oh oh there's quite a lot to unpack uh i would say uh yeah i mean on the breaking the rules um i i started at procter and gamble like traditional school of marketing i did finance and marketing there uh on gillette i actually sat next to the oral b team and and i was pop over and complain about things to them they didn't like having me over but it's a great school for learning the fundamentals of brand marketing and i'm i'm very grateful i've started there you know there's a lot that I've learned but you know my I mentioned in the beginning that my father's an architect and so I have a huge appreciation for design uh he was a designer and an architect and I one of the things that I guess really he told me early on that really resonated with me throughout my career was that you need to know the rules to break the rules and he's like you look at any great sort of artist or designer and like they started probably in a classical setting to learn the structures and the rules and he's like if you have a building that as a curve, you have to know foundational elements of how to build structure.

28:29And you know that you need four pillars because if you're going to remove one pillar, you need to know the foundations that you can remove and you can't remove. And he's, you know, Picasso started as a portrait artist, very detailed, not the Picasso that everybody knows today. Right. And so you need to know, you need to start with the fundamentals to be able to do things differently. Otherwise you will not know what you're removing and why you're removing it. And you'll, you might get it right, but you won't be consistent. And so I would say that that kind of has been something that I, you know, I did start with classical marketing, then I went to AKQA, which is, I would say, like, forefront of digital ecosystems.

29:06And the whole idea that intentionality of everything you do it with your brand is visible. But also a willingness to accept that you're continual work in progress. When we started our brand. Yeah, I wasn't proud of it. you can see a lot of the early posts like it was i as i said i can't draw i'm not a designer i know what i like and i could only work with the budget i had and tried to beg favors here and there for people and uh our industrial designer luckily i convinced to join but like the best advice i got was i mean i always knew that i wanted to be a work in progress but you don't realize it until you're actually doing it and the best advice i got was from a designer who said a friend also who said hey you might not like your brand now but that's okay the most important thing is that you are living the work in progress you are continually improving with the insights you get from consumers but you know if just just accept that you're working progress but don't forget that you have to still do work and progress and so those are kind of the two things that like i'm okay with where i am now i would say because i know i'm doing more to make it better all the time yeah we discussed and she was like look at airbnb like look at their first logo clouds you know like if you look at a lot of brands when they first started and like the branding it wasn't perfect they just they were very good at making their proposition well-rounded and that way they were able to evolve the branding and get to something much better um look at our early ads they you know slightly clunky you know like but we continue to evolve coming to your question on is there anything i would change in the industry i would like there to be more openness and structure around sustainability we offset our carbon emissions we publish this all in our reports We are very open about that.

30:48I would love for, as an industry, we say we don't compete on sustainability. Like, let's just be transparent. I'll share my formula that's better here. I'll tell you how I get packages at a lower emission for the environment. I'll be very transparent about that. I won't build storytelling sustainability reports that don't really say much and the data is hidden. So let's be transparent. Let's have that initiative maybe pushed by the government. I don't know. But how do we make it so that we don't compete on sustainability? because that's what really supports future generations. You know, we're working on new things in the sustainability like around our materials and some of them will be proprietary, but I'm going to release the formulas against probably like what a lot of people will tell us because like this stuff should be public.

31:29You know, we should make things that are, and also we're not perfect, right? And so we might have something that unlocks value, but I'm pretty sure other competitors will also. And we compete on all the other vectors, but let's not compete on this. that's really not the answer i was expecting but it's such a great answer because it's so it's so unselfish as a brand honestly to like want to do that and like raise the whole industry standard as opposed to just like kind of building your own own brand and business like to be the biggest like goliath in the room essentially which is really cool i mean we still want to be the biggest go we want to be a household name brand but like just we don't need to compete on sustainability yeah no that makes sense it should should truly become like table stakes right like everyone should be a sustainable brand at some point um and was there anything specific from your time at akqa wpp that really taught you a bit more about like the consumer behavior like you mentioned akqa has been on the forefront of like what consumers want and like designing for those consumers for the past like two decades is there anything that you took specific from there Yeah, I mean, definitely like the intentionality of what you're doing, like whether it's like the size of your logo, everything, the way you're looking at it, the way you describe your brand, AKQA was very detailed.

32:46And I got to see a lot of great work, you know, from, and they did very cool ecosystem work, which is something we always wanted. We want to create an ecosystem where people come to us, not because we sell just a toothbrush, but as we launch more products, they'll be like, I love the way you think, the way, the principle you hold. and when you go to create something, what you bring all together in it, that they will want to buy more things from us. And there are very few brands that create that sort of brand love. But I would say that inspiration definitely, there was a huge part at AKQA, at WP, seeing larger brands, how they did things and being able to, because as you grow, everything breaks.

33:23You double in size. We doubled in size last year in people, everything breaks. Structures that were working because you sat next to five people and could ask for things to break and you need to rebuild things. and having worked at obviously larger corporate companies, but when I was at WBP, over 300 ,000 employees, they worked service some of the largest corporate companies on the FTSE. It's just you have a huge opportunity to see how structures are done and things that work and things that don't work, right? And so that's, again, coming back to my whole thinking of, like, you need to know the structure to grow, but you can also break the rules once you know them, particularly around innovation too, the speed of innovation.

34:03yeah do you feel like the speed of innovation piece is like a big big thing for you guys like you're always trying to just like update what you're doing we are and i would say we're like as a founder and nothing's moving fast enough right like every every week feels like a month i had this sort of like i never said this before but ever since i've been at suri that i have this sort of like lack of ability to understand time like i'm like i asked about this like you know like something was like two days ago i'm like oh it's taking forever or and then something that was like six months ago i was like oh that was like yesterday wasn't it you know like time doesn't have structure for me because i don't know maybe i'm doing too many things i have two young kids too but yeah so i i would say one of the things for us is how do we launch you know great product that people love but do it as fast as possible because we want to grow and and uh and maintain momentum but when i was at larger companies that was something that could take five to ten years and i think that's sort of risk of when it takes too long from an insight to a product launch is that the insights that you wrap up with when it comes to launch are no longer relevant take for example bluetooth apps right like maybe a really great idea 10 years ago by the time you brought the product to market nobody wants another app you know this needs to be embedded in the phone like this technology and this idea and this insight is no longer relevant I love that thinking.

35:24That's something that Eric, the CEO of Rival, I'm sure he's going to resonate with that a lot. And me as well, just in terms of the media side of the business that we're building. We always feel like things are not moving fast enough, and I can definitely resonate with that. I think you've characterized it better than anyone I've ever heard characterize it, to be honest. cool now switching gears a little bit like thinking a bit broader like you mentioned and touched upon you know boots target all those types of now retail spaces that you're going into you're now competing on the shelf basically against you know huge incumbents who have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend yeah how do you compete in that environment like what are kind of the core principles that you've gone into that you know specifically retail environments with?

36:13So I think for us, we're very fortunate, particularly in the UK to have really strong retail partnerships. My co-founder leads our commercial efforts, but I would say one of the things that he really invested in early on was relationships. So just before we think consumers and what they see and everything, it's, you know, at the end of the day, retailers are people. They are people who run the business. They have a lot of insights on the category. So you can't rock up and say, hey, we're going to do great. Give us the shelf space. Just put us there. Trust us. Trust is a relationship-built thing.