How to Shift Consumer Preferences Quickly and Effectively

0:00We were very cost-conscious, and we looked at things like, how can we make it look the best? How can we be scrappy but not crappy? So that's kind of one thing we say internally in our company. Like, how do we spend the least amount of money and get the most beautiful thing? Hey, I'm Shuang Esther Shan, and welcome to Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and building a business. For the Siri team, they've challenged the status quo with an oral care industry. And they're redesigning how electric toothbrushes are being made. But how do they get customers to change their behavior and give Siri Brushes a try?

0:37Giv Safavi and Mark Rushmore are chatting all about scaling this episode. From zero to$30 million in sales in just two years, to getting featured by Forbes and New York Times, to securing key partnerships with Boots in the UK and Air One in the United States. Mark and Giv, it's so great to have both of you back here. Thank you so much. Can I just say, when you read that out, it feels like a bit of an out-of-body experience because it makes it sound like so much better or something. I don't know. But all those things are true. It's just kind of wild. Well, it's a giant group reflective therapy session.

1:16No, no, you guys did those things. Yeah, I guess we did. We did, yeah. It's kind of wild, yeah. I think step one to scaling is convincing people to go out of their routine and adopt something new. So how did you approach that to get strangers on the internet to take a chance on Siri? I think there's three core steps. The first one, and it's like, it's a big business 101. It's like, ask people what they dislike about their current products or routines and listen to them. So that's what we did. step two was design a product to solve those problems and step three is to like tell people hey do you have that problem our product solves that problem and we sell it for this price and like i know that sounds so basic and like business 101 but it's kind of true and in our category you know everyone brushes their teeth 50 of people use an electric brush but a lot of people don't like you know the batteries that are constantly dying no one uses the bluetooth apps have you ever used a Bluetooth app for brushing your teeth?

2:17Never. Of course not, right? People don't like that gunk that forms on the bottom, or people often don't take their electric brush when they're going traveling because, you know, cases are like really clunky and just full of plastic. And then lastly, you know, we rediscovered people feel not great about all the plastic that's being thrown away that ends up in the landfill in oceans. And so for us, you know, we thought, okay, let's solve these problems in, you know, a variety of different ways. So, you know, we have a 40-day battery life. We have a travel case with UV light. It's USB-C charged.

2:46You don't need like this random charger that only works with your toothbrush. And it's being clunky. And so, you know, it kind of, it sounds so simple, but in a way it kind of is simple. People are like, oh yeah, my battery does always die. Like, oh, don't take it traveling. Oh, I hate that gunk. I can't recycle my toothbrush heads. I can't recycle my toothbrush heads. Oh, look, there's this brand that does it and it looks great. But are they really good? And I think that's where we're really lucky because people then go to the reviews and the early adopters who did take the risk go like, I really love this.

3:19I never thought I'd say I love brushing my teeth, but I'm looking forward to it now. And I think that sort of early momentum then led to more people to try it and the more people that try it, the sort of, you know, the more reviews we got and then the more reviews we got, like then we started getting press and the press started saying they love it. And I think it's kind of snowballed from there. I would just add one thing. I would say that user-driven, user feedback-driven innovation that is sufficiently differentiated, right? So because all these features that Mark's mentioning now, there aren't many other brands on the market that have them, at least all in one package.

3:52And so the differentiation is really key to getting early adopters to try it, to take the risk to try a new brand. And then it's key to getting press to write a story about you, which is free marketing. We didn't pay for anything in the beginning and we started getting articles coming in even during our pre-launch. and so that really helped us gain traction. And I think also there's a big addressable market. How many people do you know that brush their teeth? Hopefully all of my – All of your friends, right? Yeah. And so actually, yes, like we did the business 101 of asking people, like we didn't come up with the problems or even actually, you know, it's like we literally asked people and listened, but we did so in an enormous category, and an enormous category that's growing.

4:42And so I think you've got like those two pillars because we could listen to, you know, people who do some like very niche activity and listen to their problems and come up with a solution. But to a certain extent, your ability to scale that is limited by the total addressable market completely. The other important part is when you launch, you tap into an influential category of individuals. And I think for Siri is the fact that you did get dental professionals involved and get their feedback and also get them kind of act like influencers in a way to spread the word of Siri. So how did you go about finding those professionals and actually building up those relationships?

5:25So actually, I just told my dentist about what we were doing. And she was like, wow, that's incredible. Like, I really resonate with that. And, you know, especially on the sustainability side, like there's so much waste in this category. and I've been saying for years that we should do something and she's been Dr. Alexandra Day. Big shout out, thank you. Huge fan. But it turns out, unbeknown to me, that she's also one of the most influential dentists in the UK and she's on the judge of the Dentist of the Year and actually she's introduced to lots of people. But another bit of game genius. Damien Wellesley.

6:01So scientific researchers at Dental Association for 20 years. I heard him on a podcast. asked, wrote him an email. This is one of the things I love the most about this guy. Like, like your, your ability to just like contact people and get a response is just phenomenal. So, you know, this guy is the former scientific advisor to the British Dental Association. Not only that, he is one of the co-authors of the Cochrane Review, which, Shreng, you probably know is the foremost leading publication, like academic research into the efficacy of electric toothbrushes versus many ones. He is like one of the forefathers of the electric toothbrush.

6:41And he managed to build this relationship with him and get his input. Yeah, early on he gave us so much feedback. I mean, for us, this is a category, you know, your dentist is the biggest influencer. You go and see them and then she will say, you need an electric toothbrush, you're brushing too hard. Or, you know, you need an electric toothbrush, it'll work much harder for you. And it's a category driven by performance. And so for us, we wanted to make a more enjoyable experience, design-led, that was more sustainable, but we didn't want to compromise on performance. So for us, we had three variables when we were designing Surrey, which was experience, performance, and sustainability.

7:20And many companies will do one and be very sustainable, but it's not that great in performance. You know, like the non-sustainable product's better. Or it's great performance, terrible design. and so for us it was like how do we maximize across all these three and so on performance in a category that is driven by performance we knew we had to stack up and so only by speaking to dentists that we would reach out to get their feedback were we able to get real insights like oh so a lighter brush actually is better because people have to strain holding it and actually having a softer mode for people who are just getting started on it will be important or even the insight that you know to get the most effective clean you need to brush for a full two minutes twice a day um the average length that people use a brush for is 40 seconds rather than two minutes and so you know things like having the timer or not having to constantly charge the the brush or just make it more enjoyable to use actually increases people using good habits and in turn like using good habits gives you like a much better quality of clean but we even took it one step further we found out the the clinical research center which is the leading place for clinical research in oral care globally and has worked on every electric toothbrush for the last sort of 20-30 years and we did our clinical trials there because we you know we we knew the standard for performance had to be high to to talk to dental professionals they're not interested in if if it's you know we've got this great idea for us to say no toothbrushes like show me the evidence and so I'm really sort of proud that we did that research at this center and the results were stunning, you know, like comparable to brushes which are multiple more expensive than Surrey.

9:01I think they had, and we left them, we sent them 30 brushes and in the end we were like, what are you going to do with the brushes? And they're like, oh, we'd like to keep, our technical engineers would like to keep them. I was like, what? No, they want to use them. And so it was like, oh wow, the leading clinical center wants to use our brushes for personal use. so that was really cool to pick up on that story also i think what's astounding i'm also amazed same as mark is the fact that you cold pitch someone who is like the forefather of um electric toothbrushes like the ultimate gatekeeper so i have to ask you how do you even comprise an email or like a cold message like that before before we before you answer that question can i say There's someone who he's done it with who's even better.

9:49I don't know if we can mention their name. Who? So may have been influential at a leading Californian company. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, I'll tell you the method, but yeah, you can, yeah. So he also cold emailed this guy who is Sir Johnny Ive. At Apple? The creator himself of the iPhone along with Steve Jobs. Well, I've been a massive fan of all of his work. So that's pretty, but I mean, that's on, and we send them some brushes and we go back. And we got this email back. I'll show it to you, actually. It's like a screenshot of it. So it was like 26 minutes past 10 p.m. at night. I get like a flurry of messages and a phone call.

10:30I'm in bed with my lights off. Like, what is it? Why are you calling me? It's like, check your WhatsApp, check your WhatsApp. So I look and look at my email. And sure enough, we have this incredible email from Johnny Ive being like, I'm incredibly impressed. with this product, like, well done, like, congrats to you guys. Smile in the face. And the adrenaline that shot through my body, we were both, like, giggling in bed, you were in bed, I was in bed, just chatting, I was like, how on earth did you do this? And I'm like, oh, I just, I thought I'd email him. I think, so, I don't know about you, but I get so many emails, like, cold call emails a day, and it's just like, let me help you grow your business, let me do this.

11:08I think there's a quick question, Gif. Like, do you have this one? there's a general lack of authenticity and I think it's refreshing when you see it's an authentic email without like that is not serving a purpose other than it's sort of like can you help me you know and people will respond to that if written very short and just like hey you know I'm a master like Sir Johnny Ives I wrote him I was like I've been your biggest fan you know like we decided to design a toothbrush that is better taking a lot of cues from Apple and like how they made things more minimalist but served a great function love to send you one see what you think and got a response back but Damien, Professor Damien Wamsley similar lines like we're on a mission to make better electric toothbrush we want to reduce oral care waste loved hearing you on the podcast would love to talk to you for five minutes if you're out of time no you're really busy, just five minutes just to get insights it's those concise emails I think that's the key and authentic right because if you sound like uh you know we're we'd really love to take you your time for an hour to chat more about this see how you could help us it's kind of not so authentic nobody wants to respond actually i was listening um there's this guy called harry stebbings who's got this very famous podcast in the venture space called 20vc and he talks about this ability of of um founders and also like he himself's very good at it to be fair of cold emailing like people and getting a response and he'll say like I think he famously cold emailed this maybe it was like Reid Hoffman or someone 40 times or Mark Bennehoff or something trying different hooks, trying different things and eventually got through to him and I think I must admit like I really admire Gieb's ability to pretty much get anyone But I think most people will respond, right?

13:05If it is, I respond to most my authentic emails. But even then, sometimes I miss them. I don't know, I've seen your inbox. Yeah. No, it's an important factor for like unlocking those connections that helps you to scale. The other part of scaling I wanted to talk about is also how you perfected the online shopping experience. I know that even though both of you feel like there's still so much to do with the site, to me I feel like it's such an enjoyable experience to be on your site so oh thank you yeah can't wait for you to see it in another six months time like honestly like we just need to keep having this conversation because it's nice to hear that from you working at Shopify because we look at it and we just see the problems every day like not problems but we're like we're like oh that graphic could be nicer we could have done that nicer uh but like I mean hands down like I would say Shopify has been a huge enabler in that from the beginning we did our own custom theme uh build I had previously had the pleasure of helping some companies re-platform to Shopify.

14:06Some stories where I really had to learn quite a lot because the dev was like, day one was like, here are the keys, I quit, you figure it out because it was like a clunky old site that had a terrible SQL database I couldn't understand. But that really got us to learn Shopify really well. And I'd say when we launched, I mean, I'm always reading the blogs, and reading everything. Shopify markets. From day one, we launched on Shopify markets and we were able to be in the US, UK, Germany. We even had on a few other markets and we ship worldwide still today. And that has been such an enabler of being able to act like you're really big and fulfill like you're really big, but still be very small and two people around a kitchen table.

14:50I think there was a really important decision early on as well, where someone proposed to us using, is it a more complex, bespoke version? And we really made the decision to go with actually like an existing. Yeah, I mean, the amount of people want us to do more complex stuff, but like our theme is really beautiful. We need to say their things like better than, I mean, we're always like, we're very, we tag even our packaging, we tag everything, right? Because that's how we should be, like always trying to be better. But we spent a lot of time focusing on simple functionality. Shopify make it very easy to do that.

15:22The checkout is really smooth. It's nice that, like I was saying earlier, there's so many low-hanging fruits, we haven't done anything in the checkout or taken advantage of extensibility and all the features we can add now. But I think sometimes the simplicity of the core function of what a site needs to deliver makes it easy for the user to get through, and that's what I think is enabled by Shopify with us. Totally. That's something that the simplicity of that and the constant optimization, making it a very simple path to just give me my product. Let me use ShopPay and not have to log in. Like people love that feature.

15:58And I think that's actually a feature of a lot of our business decision making is often you can go for a more bespoke, complex, expensive, complicated solution to a problem. Or you can kind of focus on like the core basics and optimize those. And I think that's one of the things that's incredible about Shopify is that we time and time again, And it's so easy to get tempted by this shiny new thing. But actually just kind of like nailing the basics and building on those foundations has meant that we can reallocate time that you could spend on this bespoke customization. But we do want to make things more complex and bespoke.

16:37We are working on it. But it's that tension between the two because I think early days you can get lost. We were very cheap early days, I'd say. Even working with partner selfless design stuff, We brought in a lot of things in-house. We tried to do it ourselves. I tried to design a website, which was terrible. Luckily, I think we launched that one day, and I was like, this is not working. But the nice thing about themes is you can quickly publish a new one. It doesn't look like the hole in your head. But I think because we didn't have very much money, a lot of it had to go into the product, we were very cost-conscious, and we looked at things like, how can we make it look the best?

17:16How can we be scrappy but not crappy? So that's kind of one thing we say internally in our company. Like, how do we spend the least amount of money and get the most beautiful thing? And that's the power of the business. And I think that's something we really want to keep is this like lean approach. You know, like where do we want to spend our time and our money to be as effective as possible? And yeah, I think Shopify is like a great enabler and a great leveler. There's no way we could have built a business to the scale that we have, you know, without that power. And allowed us to trade up as we could afford it.

17:46Yeah. Right. So in the beginning, we couldn't afford, obviously, Shopify Plus. But as we've gotten bigger, it's been possible to trade up to more features and then be able to grow rather than day one try and do everything, you know, pay for stuff that you can't afford before you've had the sales. Yeah. Are there any like other apps, services outside, even though I love hearing about all of the great anecdotes about Shopify, but anything within our ecosystem that you've really enjoyed in the scaling stage? Oh, yeah. What's your favorite? You love the fairing and post-checkout survey. Oh, my goodness.

18:21That's one of my, like, I must check that. Like, big shout out to fairing. Actually, I think I met some of the fairing guys at a conference recently in New York. And I was just like, this poor sales guy was like, no, I'm your biggest fan. Like, what else can I do? I'm already converted. Yeah. And I was like, you know, how can we make this more powerful? And he was like, okay, like, wow, you're a bit of a power user. But that's post-checkout surveys. And so, you know, we started getting feedback from our customers, you know, where do you first hear about Suri? And it's really interesting from an attribution perspective, but also from like the comments that people make and, you know, seeing how that changes over time, seeing our organic sales versus, say, like from Instagram or influencers is rising and just sort of seeing how our mix changes.

19:05So, yeah, I must say. I mean, yeah, it's great because even like, you know, people will put like, I heard you on a podcast and then that comes in there. and so it's really cool to see that. I said gorgeous, I think, previously. That helped us a lot with customer experience. Our email? Email? Klaviyo. Oh, Klaviyo, yeah, email. Some of the fundamental ones that I'm sure many other people have shared. I mean, that's the beautiful thing about some of the really strong, established apps in the app ecosystem. We've got some great AI tools as well, which have been really effective. A couple of things we've used.

19:42We'll use Triple Whale for reporting. We find that when it came out. We were early on it. Can I just say we're not sponsored, but if anyone from any of these companies does want to sponsor us to give them shout-outs, happy to take free stuff. Yeah, just text us down and say it. Cold emailing. One small app, I mean, not small, very big, we used Matrixify for bulk changes. So we worked with a lot of influencers, and we need to overnight quickly change their discounts. Boom, we did it by uploading an Excel sheet. It was really nice. Yeah, we don't use enough AI. probably will start to use more AI.

20:13But we, in general, I would say we're probably not too app-heavy. We use Akendo for reviews. There's quite a few big players in reviews. We're not so app-heavy, but there's quite a few ones that we wouldn't be able to live without. Siri continues to be really captivating and getting people engaged online through all of the teeth brushing content. What's the strategy to make really engaging content to your followers? For sure. I think we've come at it from a slightly different angle aesthetically. Big shout out to our head of creative, Kate Gurell. She's phenomenal and has constantly step-changed how we do things aesthetically.

20:57And also to Dylan, who designed the product. Anna, head of brand, who is on social. We might as well shout out to our whole team. Shout out to the whole team, sorry. but like i think you know just that relentless passion to look at things in a slightly different way you know like there's like a very familiar trope in our category of you know like actors in white coats in a lab you know and we didn't want to do that we wanted highly saturated photos are like blinded like with a big smile uh and so you know we've just got a different take on it which is we feel more relevant to our audience and yeah just kind of like building on that yeah I mean, another build on that would be like, like we want to talk about like, it's a forgotten ritual.

21:42You do it twice a day. It's your first thing you do when you wake up. It's maybe your last thing before you sign off and get into bed. It's two minutes. And we portray it almost like a chore and like a hygiene routine that isn't enjoyable when it can be. You can be, you're starting your day, you're thinking about nice things, mantras like this is going to be a great day. You're signing off at night, you know, you're winding down. like it's more of a well-being category. We'd love it. Well, at least we'd love it to be a well-being category and picture it that way rather than a sort of clinical, sterile environment of like content like brushing your teeth, you know, optimize your oral care regime.

22:19So that's kind of how we've tried to show the content. And if you look at our Instagram, like you'll see really beautiful bathrooms that are inspiring, like people traveling with their toothbrush, which is something that is really hard to do because you often have to take a big charger and the case is even bigger. And so just playing into, I guess, the features that make us differentiated. And in terms of just advice, it's just like trying so many different things. I think that's been really fundamental to just concentrate. We get it wrong a lot. We do. What did we get wrong? Actually, this is probably one of my favorite stories.

22:58But we haven't talked in ages because we're so busy, but our first photo shoot was online. And we found some like online person who would do the photo shoot in the US whilst we were sort of directing it over Zoom. So it was kind of like COVID times. And I think, I don't know how many images we got from the shoot, like 500. And I think maybe one was usable. It's a tough product to shoot because like the smiley with the toothbrush in your mouth isn't the most flattering shot. Yeah. And we just, it sucked so badly. It was pretty awful. And like we have so much content that like looking back now is like really embarrassing and like just really ugly.

23:33true to you know like you know we're constantly learning we're constantly evolving you can click through our instagram all the way to the beginning and you'll see how terrible our brand looked and how we evolved it over time we don't archive that uh because that's true right like everybody starts from somewhere exactly uh and we started from there so like we want to we want people to see it you know and be like oh wow that's how your branding look that's how these things and like we constantly evolved it and we're and i think that's one of the biggest things that we'd share is advice that like, you know, be comfortable with where you are and where you want to go and know that you're going to always evolve.

24:09Like your branding is always going to get better. Like the product will get better. You'll reiterate it. Things will always get better. Just be comfortable with where you are. And if you're not comfortable, then fix it, you know, and then accept that when you get to hire really great talent, that it will make it slightly better and better and better. But truthfully, like we're never satisfied. So it's really nice when you're like, oh, you know, it looks great. And we're like, it's great, but could it be better? Like, oh, actually, maybe we should be doing it like this. And I think that same, I don't know that we'll ever stop doing that.

24:38I think it's always going to constantly be like, you know, how can we take this further? But we enjoy that. Yeah. Exactly. And I think when you're embarrassed with past work where you kind of like cringe a little bit, I feel like that's the true sign of growth. We're like, I am improving. I am growing. The most important part about your scaling story, I think, is the most impressive part is when you did fundraise in this rather tough climate, especially within direct-to-consumer and CPG. Not only that, but you're also able to reach profitability, which is something really hard to achieve in this space.

25:16in this kind of financial side of things, what would you say for founders entering into entrepreneurship, thinking about fundraising, thinking about profitability? So I think there's a lot of stuff now that everyone can see where like gone are the days where you just like have an idea, raise like$10 million and like blow it all and then work out like afterwards, like, oh, how am I going to make money? And so I think, you know, with interest rates and the way things have changed, is that a bad thing? I'm not sure. Like it comes back again to like business 101. It's like, you know, buy a product at this price, sell it at that price, make sure that the profit margin like more than covers your costs and you make a profit, right?

25:58Really understanding your economics. Yeah, it's like unit economics. And so, you know, from the beginning, we sort of knew like, okay, we need our gross margin to be here. We need our operating costs to be there. And that's been like a very central thing from the beginning. It wasn't sort of, you know, oh, it will improve it in the future somehow. It was very much like, you know, we want a business that can be profitable. And so I think, you know, I would just sort of stick to that. You know, like there's lots of categories and there's lots of examples of brands who are doing a really great job.

26:30Like Jolie is one in the U.S., which is, you know, I think it's bootstrapped, you know, true classic. You know, I don't know how many hundreds of millions they're doing. But, like, again, a bootstrap brand, which has been profitable from, like, almost day one. Yeah. Team of three. I did talk to the team at Jolie. So, yeah. Oh, cool. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, what's your advice there? I mean, getting to know your unit economics is really important. Just being spendthrift also in the early days. Like, spending out what really matters and not, you know, splashing it out on things like expensive shoots that you can't afford.

27:06and like we could have done$20 ,000 shoots, but we didn't because we couldn't afford it. Even though we wanted our images to look like the$20 ,000 shoots. So finding ways you can be scrappy as much as possible. And I'd say, you know, raising is hard. It takes time, you know, it takes both of our time quite a lot away from the business, finding time in the day to do it. But as Mark said, you know, you just need to find, you know, a couple or one right investor. I mean, we've been really fortunate to have some really good investors who have backed us from the beginning. I mean, today, Salica Investments came in really early, then Jamjar, then V3 and DMG in our last round, and they've just been helpful all along the way.

27:53And I think that's really important when you're looking for a partner to help you grow, to know that if something's going wrong, they're going to be there to support you. and more often not people think that sometimes like investors are just there to sort of see the return on their money but the reality is like they're there to help you work through the problems too and it's important to keep that in mind that it's a partnership and so finding the right partner is just as important for you more than the cash you know so like if you're really looking for the cash then you can go to a bank too or you can find other friends and family can give you like some of the first or crowdfunding also but i'd also say like raising investment is not success right no like like raising money like it's not like that's not we all think we would look at people who raise tons of money and be like wow and then we're like now what you know like you raise too much money you get stuck in the situation where you're at what rate did you raise it at you know what valuation like what are you then going to go to there's a huge shift that's happened like old school DTC companies would raise too much money and they get stuck in the sense of like the valuation's too high and so we didn't ever raise lots we raised in tranches that were smaller that we felt comfortable with the valuation we're like that is the valuation of our company that feels achievable we can hit that definitely in sales in a couple of years I think it's about it's always about being creative and working at what's best for your business like look you know like candidly like if we'd have got to the point that we've got without raising any money clearly that would be better you know what i mean we'd have more equity in the company uh you know and a bigger outcome for ourselves personally for us it was about finding the right balance of like you know which investors do we think can add a lot of value and you know manufacturing products on scale does have a cost associated with it you know if you could get someone to just loan you the money as your interest then like obviously go for that right um but there's not that many people willing to do it unfortunately yeah especially in this environment, it's a tough feat.