Ep 582: How SURI Sold 5,000 Toothbrushes in a Week: DTC Growth in a Boring Category

0:00Loads of people brush their teeth. It doesn't matter like which country you're in. It doesn't matter whether you're five or whether you're 95, whether you're male, female or anything in between. Like you brush your teeth and you do it twice a day. It's one of the highest penetration categories in the world. It's a utility. It's something I have to do. And everyone brushes their teeth. No one currently loves it. When expectations are very, very low, you have an opportunity to create like a distance between expectations and reality. Maybe I should not say this on a podcast. Maybe I'm about to give away the secret sauce to all of our success.

0:39This episode is brought to you by Contentful. Marketers, you know that feeling when your creative clicks, when that social post sends engagement through the roof, when your outside-of-the-box campaign hits ROI positive, when a personalized homepage turns prospects into customers, It's utter marketing bliss. Contentful helps you create tailored omni-channel experiences without working overtime. No stress, no limits, only possibilities. Get the feels at contentful.com. Mark, welcome to the D2C podcast. I have been enjoying your toothbrush. It's quite a... I've been using electric toothbrushes for quite a while.

1:19This one is quite substantial. There's a lot more going on with this toothbrush than a lot of toothbrushes I've had in the past. Welcome to the podcast. Why did you build it? Well, firstly, thank you so much for having me. I'm a big fan. I'm genuinely excited and honored to be here. Why did I build it? It sounds pretty basic, but just loads of people brush their teeth out. And, you know, it doesn't matter, like, which country you're in. It doesn't matter whether you're 5 or whether you're 95, whether you're male, female, or anything in between. like you brush your teeth and you do it twice a day it's one of the highest penetration categories in the world and yet despite that you know when you actually look at the competition you know two companies hold a roughly 80 market share in most developed markets and so you think is that because the brushes are great is that because everyone just absolutely loves everything about them well my co-founder and i were like let's investigate that because we don't love ours and you know we spoke to thousands of different people then professionals consumers and what we discovered was time and time again people are like you know we said oh do you use your bluetooth no why would i use bluetooth on my toothbrush that's crazy you know do you ever have a gunk that horrible crusty weird stuff on the people like oh god i hate that like absolutely disgusting how long does your battery last oh i have to charge it all the time like do you take it traveling no why not it's too bulky it's too loud and so we're like well what if we could create a brush that delivered an unbelievable, you know, parity or better clean with a beautiful design, with features that people want, like a 40-day battery life, like a travel case, and also with more sustainable materials, you know.

2:53We have cornstarch in our head, casserole in our bristles. So that was our hypothesis. And so we launched Surrey, which is short for Sustainable Rituals, in May 22. And it's been a wild ride since then. How long did it take to develop the product? Yeah. And what went into that? Did you work with professional designers? to sort of come up with the sleek look? So first of all, you know, Alibaba is, you know, obviously a great friend of ours. And we reached out to, you know, every factory that we could find to study every brush and to like take them apart and to understand why they made that way.

3:25Then we combined it with, and I say we, my co-founder Gieb is, I think, a product visionary and also one of the most stubborn people I've ever met. Like, he was like, hey, Mark, I've found this research that other companies, it might even be a Canadian company, Peeler, are using plant-based materials and using them injection molding. And I think we could use that in a toothbrush head and, you know, speak to factories who don't want to do necessarily something that's totally new. And they were like, no, it's not possible. So we set about like really researching the category, understanding, you know, the landscape for manufacturing.

3:56Then we combine that with research. And then when it came to the design, this is like one of those like moments of real luck. We found someone, I don't know if it was on Fiverr or on one of those kind of platforms to design the brush. And he was just graduating from an industrial design degree. And he was, you know, it was the summer before he started his job at like one of San Francisco's top design firms. It just so happened he did our project and he's a world class talent. And so then, you know, he helped us with the design and then joined the company. And here we are. It's a very mature category.

4:28People have been brushing their teeth for a long time. A lot of people are using not great products, the products they're not psyched about. But talk to me about how you entered the market and how you knew that you had a viable product market fit. Yeah. So I think we first realized we probably were onto something when a week after we launched, we sold out of our first batch of 5 ,000. So we had done some pre-sale using just like we didn't do Kickstarter. We just ran, you know, good old Facebook ad and said, hey, like, you know, do you love the gunk on the bottom of your brush? You know, does your battery always die?

5:02hey, are you worried about what happens to your brush when it's at its end of life? Here's a solution. And what we were seeing was a great ROAS on those ads, even on pre-sale. And that kind of gave us some early indication. But then the uptake when it was in market, that was the second one. But the third one, and I think the one that's sort of the secret sauce to all of our success, is the reviews. You know, I think yesterday or this week, we just crossed 15 ,000 reviews on Trustpilot. So, you know, it's not like some of the other review platforms where you can just hide the negative ones. It's like good and bad.

5:37They're all on there at a 4.7 rating. That makes us by far the most highly rated electric brush on Trustpilot. And it's really, you know, excuse the pun, but like the word of mouth where, you know, people, I'm sure you use ChatGPT like everyone else. We made one of those custom GPTs by downloading all of our 15 ,000 reviews, putting them into a custom GPT. And then we can interrogate the data, ask questions, et cetera. and we asked, you know, what's the most commonly used word to describe Surrey and the reviews? And, you know, there's lots of great words like, you know, sleek, great clean, dentist feel, all that kind of stuff.

6:12But the number one is love. And people describe like, I never thought I could love brushing my teeth, but I love this brand. I love this product. And I think I've got a hypothesis that if you look on any brand where the consumers and the shoppers are describing it as like, I love this, you will see that like that has like a certain virality and word of mouth like an organic reach because if if someone feels compelled to say i love something on a random review like i love my toothbrush then i think it's human nature to share the things you love with the people you love you know so if something made that much of a emotional impact and like it's been surprising and you love using it you're more likely to say to someone else like oh hey you know i love my mom i'm gonna buy it for her i love my son i love my sister um i might be totally wrong about that and maybe there's another reason but that that does definitely seem to be um something behind our success i feel like love is always a good reason why do you think why do you think people love it so much do you think it's because of just the extra care you took with the design is it the it's it's like a product that a lot of people don't love you know what i mean a lot of people don't you said it in the intro they go through life like not knowing they could love their toothbrush.

7:29What's the reason for the love? Maybe I should not say this on a podcast, right? Like, I'm not sure. Like, maybe I'm about to give away the secret sauce and, you know, spawn a whole bunch of competitors. But I think you just said the secret sauce, which is a lot of people do not currently love this product. People have very low expectations. It's a utility. It's something I have to do. And I think what we've stumbled across is this incredible problem. You know, it's like a problem in plain sight. Everyone brushes their teeth. No one currently loves it. It's a chore. It's like, I have to do it.

8:05I have to buy that brand. It's the only one available. You know, it's just like this thing that has like no positive emotional resonance generally with people. And so expectations are very, very low. And I think when expectations are very, very low, you have an opportunity to create like a distance between expectations and reality. In fact, I don't know. again, I've never really thought about this until you asked it this particular way, but someone once told me like happiness equals expectations minus reality, right? And normally that's like for why you're disappointed or at least the context I've ever heard that phrase in is like, you know, happiness is expectation minus reality.

8:46And so it's like, if you've got really high expectations, reality is not there. You're dissatisfied with your relationship, with your job, whatever. But it's also true the other way around. If your expectations are here and the reality is this, you're also like pretty happy. And so I think part of our success has been people's low expectations. That's not to like take away from Surrey, but like, I think, you know, whether it's, you know, the unboxing, the product, the performance, the customer care, the branding, the purpose, I think we really take care to make sure the experience is positive from pre-production through to aftercare.

9:24And you mentioned in your ads, we talk a lot about ads and growth in this podcast and it sounds like you really started problem aware, right? Understanding the problems people have with their toothbrush, talking about how this solves it, some pretty basic stuff. How have your ads evolved as you've grown? Have you kind of really just doubled down on the same angles and value propositions with bigger and better ads or kind of thing? Talk about how your ads have evolved? I think the very first evolution, which was a funny one, right at the very beginning was when we first set out, you know, we paid an agency, I can't remember how much it was, like maybe$10 ,000 to make three ads.

10:01And then we had some guy placing them. And we ran those ads for, I think, like eight months or something pretty successfully. And we were about to move to another agency and they were just charging an obscene amount of money. And we took a bit of risk and hired someone uh nick uh director of growth and even though you know he was like i don't even know if we're paying ourselves at that point and we gave him like you know what's out to us like an enormous salary he was like hey let me just make some ads for you like okay well we'll have to you know pay someone like maybe twenty thousand dollars and get six ads and you know it's a big outlay for us it was like no no like i got some editing software like watch this and then like four hours and made like 10 ads.

10:42And, you know, some of them were way high performing just from our existing assets. And I think that was quite a pivotal moment just to see how like basic evolution and testing was going to shift things. And then Nick has, you know, clearly built like a better team since then. So I think the ads have evolved in lots of different ways. I think another major step was hiring Kate, who's our head of creative. And she really elevated the creative look and execution of those ads. And that elevated look of the ads matched then also our PDPs. And we saw instant increase in click-through rate conversion because trying to get that balance between brand and performing ads is a difficult one.

11:26And so I think we've kind of looked at different methods. And then obviously, we've done whitelisting. We try lots of different things. And I think Nick really runs a really great iterative process where the team are constantly assessing what's working elsewhere, trying new things. And I think we found even when we find a winning ad, doing iterations of that and as we pour more money into that has been a really effective way to scale those ads. So are ads right now and maybe meta ads, are they the main driver for the company? What does your growth mix look like at this point? Yeah. So CRM email is a really important one for us.

12:04that's like a significant portion of our monthly and annual revenue. We also have invested heavily and really grown behind influencers and creators in the last year. In fact, increasingly, I think people are discovering Suri for the first time through someone who they trust and who they follow already. But the majority of the business is still meta Google ads. But then we also have in-store presence. So, you know, world exclusive, we'll be launching in Target in the U.S. nationwide. You know, we're in Erewhon in L.A. We're in Goop. Maybe we're in Best Buy. So I think people are also, you know, seeing us in store.

12:45Then maybe they see our ads and maybe they see an influencer. And also we work with a lot of dental professionals who love and recommend our product. And so there's this kind of like virtuous cycle building between the channels, like a bit of a flywheel. You mentioned the two big players in the toothbrush space and that's got to be Oral B and Phillips. Is that, are those the two, the two big boys in the toothbrush space? I've heard of both of them. You've heard of both of them. In store, how do you get picked up? Do you get picked because I think they both are these older brands. They both look, I think like electric toothbrush have precious look, have looked like for the past 30 years.

13:20Whereas you guys look more like a, like a home good. You look more, or you look like something that you'd find in a, in a, you know as a decoration even more than than is is that is that maybe how you see yourself positioned against the the two giants like when you're looking at all the products on shelf first off i think i'm going to give you a ton of exclusives on this because we i don't normally talk about stuff like this but why not um the former global ceo of the entirety of philips health and wellness as is on our board and you know like she she's a huge asset to us and she help like their global expansion and then we've recently had another person from who led all of oral oral b's dental strategy across europe join us as well so we have we have like these really great industry people who are like helping us you know both understand the dental industry but also like the international expansion and the omni-channel journey but in terms of differentiation i think you know we have three core pillars like performance so like you know having a really high quality clean.

14:18You know, we're clinically tested in the same places that all the leading brands are. And we have like all the evidence that shows that we give as good or better clean, which is great. And then we have design and sustainability. And so to your point about, you know, why do people pick you off the shelf? I think, you know, from an eye-catching perspective, we do have a differentiation versus the traditional tropes of the category. And I think, you know, it plays more into a consumer who also, you know, maybe invests in having an iPhone or maybe our place pans at home or all these different sort of things, which, you know, people spend money and care about in the rest of their lives.

14:54But then we really win them with like the quality of the clean and like the performance of the brush. And then, you know, there's obviously the sustainability, which, you know, for a lot of people, it's really important. We offer free recycling of our heads. In fact, another little exclusive for you is only just because I saw them, they've just appeared on the desk for the like this is a soap dish made out of 18 of our heads which have been returned to us we grind them up and re-injection mold them into this soap dish uh which is super fun you know and it kind of like demonstrates like what we believe in it also it expands your category and i'm curious is that something that you see do you want to expand into other jobs to be done in the in the bathroom you know if there's somewhere where we can improve the performance the design and the sustainability and really solve a meaningful problem to consumers, that's something that we're interested in.

15:44So you'll see, you know, we launched a toothpaste recently, sold out, relaunched it, sold out, and, you know, we've managed to get it back into supply now. But that's a really exciting, you know, part for us because a lot of people subscribe on First Order. We have, you know, a huge database of subscribers with a very low churn. And one of the more hilarious sort of like things we see in our reviews is like, hey, why don't you sell more products? Like I'm, you know, I'm bought in, like I want to be more involved with Siri, which is, you know, great feedback. How long until we have AI toothbrushes where it's like, it's like Siri and it's like, you didn't brush long enough.

16:20You missed this spot. You know what, Eric, this is, I love this question and I love it because happy to be proven wrong. AI is amazing. AI is going to do loads of stuff, but my hypothesis is it's not going to brush your teeth. You're still going to have to pick up a toothbrush. You're going to have to put it in your mouth and maybe there's some AI component, but like, like, you know, whatever happens in the entire world and, you know, whatever happens, people are going to brush their teeth. And, and I think that's, that's something that's like, you know, it's, it's a base need. In fact, I met someone recently who was there at the early days in Google and she used to report into Larry or one of the, one of the founders, she told me this, but then I've subsequently checked on the internet to make sure it's true that when people are coming to him with new ideas for products, he said it has to pass the toothbrush test, which is, I think, you know, it's something that people have to use like every day, twice a day and something that, you know, they wouldn't want to live without.

17:15And what was quite funny about that is like, we just skipped like making Google maps and instead just made a toothbrush because it passes the toothbrush test. You mentioned reviews. And I think like, like absolutely essential customer proof points. What have you done to, do you just kind of wake up one day and realize you had like a crazy amount of good reviews or how have you, I guess my question, I have a couple of questions. One, how have you maximized reviews for the business? And then how do you leverage the reviews most effectively in the funnel in order to drive conversion? Yeah, so reviews and like our NPS score and our review score is like one of our kind of north star metrics you know because like you know if if customers are happy then then you're doing something right and we have um probably my favorite integration with slack is we have an api between trust pilots and slack and so every single person in the company receives every review positive and negative live and every monday morning meeting when we have our weekly meeting you know we have a look at their score we have a look at like reviews from the week positive scores, negative like scores, like what people are saying.

18:24And we have a customer service team who are constantly looking at reviews and responding to people and having, you know, these conversations trying to maybe solve problems if there's been a shipping issue, or if there's been a really positive review, you know, with a comment, like reaching out to those people to say thank you. And I think that trying to stay close to the customer and to listen to the customer is kind of what sets us on the journey in the first place, you know, and being close to our feedback. I think probably the best example of that is while we have a 4.7 rating and people, you know, generally have, you know, really loved the product, our hardcore customers like, hey, I love the product, but I wish the case, the UV light just worked without having to be plugged in.

19:06Or I really wish it had a pressure sensor. You know, that's something we heard from a lot of dental professionals. And so we, you know, we watch all that feedback and it feeds into our product development. So on our new product, the UV case works, um, just, you know, we've got a battery inside, so it works like that. We have wireless charging on our new brush and we have a pressure sensor. And so that's one of the ways in which it's integral to our product development. And then in terms of like using reviews in the funnel, um, yeah, we, we use them on static ads, you know, as a proof point on PDP, um, we have it throughout our website and then we We have different ones.

19:42We have reviews from dental professionals. We have reviews from consumers, reviews from parents. It really is a very core part of what we do. Let's talk about retention a little bit. You mentioned it being a big pillar for you. And you mentioned subscriptions. So people are subscribing to the brush heads in some cases. That's right. I've had one, I think, for probably 10 years that I've been replacing out the heads on. But I haven't thought of changing the base unit. are you getting people retained actually buying your upgraded model as opposed to just the heads or do you find you're retaining people mainly with the heads it's like so the majority is with the heads what we find though is a lot of people who buy a brush within year will buy a second one for someone else so it's a big gifting category as well like november december is you know like if you look on the search volume on google for electric toothbrush it's a big christmas gift that mom loves to buy for the family so and like i said you know when you love a product you want to give it to someone.

20:37And so, you know, that's a huge part of a repeat. But actually, it's the repeat heads, which is like the bread and butter of the business. And, you know, some people love subscriptions. Some people, it's not for them. But either way, you know, the brush isn't very effective without a head. So, you know, you're kind of bought into the ecosystem through buying the handle. And people criminally overuse the heads, I believe. I find myself like, oh, I guess, because you should change them like once a month or something. So dental professionals recommend once every three months. Every three months, okay.

21:06Some people will be like, oh, hey, I haven't changed my brush head in two years. And you'll see it's like this like splayed thing. And they're just knocking their teeth. I sometimes think about it like, you know, when you wash your sheets and your duvet and you get into like a fresh bed and it just feels so much better. It's like you get this amazing feeling when you change your brush head and you're like, oh, wow, I should have done this a little while ago. like this, like my teeth feel so much cleaner just because the bristles are in the right formation, you know, the right tension, et cetera.

21:39But yeah, no, it's an interesting part of the category, sort of seeing how often people change their heads. Have you expanded into Amazon? Yes. Actually, we were based in Amazon's headquarters in Europe for the first year. We got onto this accelerator. We're meant to be there for two months. And then they said like, hey, you guys want office space for like the first year? Like it's COVID, like post COVID, but no one's coming into the office. And we're like, absolutely. And they were really supportive. And yeah, love Amazon. Actually, for the last, I don't know, like 10 weeks, we've been number one bestseller in Sonic toothbrushes.

22:12Recently, we achieved number three on total electric brushes, which is phenomenal. It's a really exciting place to be. I think lots of shoppers are obviously very familiar with Amazon and with the fast delivery and the convenience and also being able to see all the features. So, yeah, Amazon's like a not insignificant part of our business. Where do you see the biggest growth horizons for Surrey at this point? Is it retail or is it doubling down on digital? If you brush your teeth, we're coming for you. That would be what I would say. So in terms of growth, I think, you know, it's probably the same for many companies.

22:47You know, you have new geographies, you have new products, you have new channels. And I think, you know, obviously you have everything that underlies all of that. But, you know, we have some phenomenal new products coming through, which really push the boundaries of performance design and sustainability. You know, we have some great new retailers, like I mentioned, which are coming online. And then we have people from all around the world, retailers, consumers, journalists reaching out to us saying, hey, like, why is this not available in Germany, in Japan, in Australia, in Sweden, in Mexico? So, you know, it's an exciting time to be a toothbrush sales guy.

23:29Did you launch it in the U.S. or did you launch it in the U.K.? We launched it simultaneously in the U.K. and the U.S. Actually, and we did a little bit of Germany at the start just to see what the cost of acquisition would be and like how it would fare using our same ads across all markets. I think quickly we realized that logistically it would be difficult to run, you know, three markets from the outset with language barriers. And so we've run from the UK and the US from the get-go. What are the differences that you found between those two markets? There's a lot of differences. There's a lot of similarities.

24:03I think the US consumer is more likely to shop on Amazon than the UK consumer, slightly. And, you know, there's cultural nuances around, you know, how you charge your brush. Say in the US, a lot of people have their sockets in the bathroom, whereas that's less popular in the UK. um and so there's like very like tactical like little things but broadly speaking you know everyone is is united in the desire to have a really great clean to have a product that they enjoy using that feels great that looks great that has a long battery life and is more sustainable so i think although there's like you know there's differences in how you like market or position things that the broader you know desire to have a great clean of your teeth is is fairly common Aside from being in the mouths of everyone brushing their teeth, what do you look at as goals for the business?

24:58I'm always interested when you're going into a market that's so saturated by 100-year-old incumbents, is the goal one day to have them be like, this guy's really eating our cheese, we've got to buy him? Or just to slowly take them over and erode their market cap? What's your goal for how big this can be? And what do you want to do with it? Yeah. So first of all, I think we're bringing a lot of new people into the category. People who don't necessarily use an electric brush already. Maybe they're using a manual and, you know, they were like, oh, I don't need Bluetooth. I don't need that stuff. So I think there's like a large number, like the majority of people are using a manual brush.

25:36And so I think there's this like big thing we're doing to help people upgrade. And that's actually much better for your oral health, which is like it's pretty much like undisputed now. And so I think growing the pie is like a big part of what we do. then in terms of like the long-term vision we really do believe in that north star metric of like creating a brand that people love and and like makes them feel great and gives them you know superior oral health as a result of you know you know wanting to brush their teeth for longer more regularly so you know you know a lot of people will say to us like my teeth have never felt so clean like how do you do it and actually for for a lot of people you know just brushing for the full two minutes we have a timer uh which goes off after two minutes and and doing that twice a in and looking forward to brushing your teeth is a big factor in that.

26:19And so I think the vision, like, wouldn't it be amazing to bring that same joy, that same performance, and really to step change the sustainability of how we make and use and dispose of these brushes globally. And, you know, when you think about people who are five, people who are 95, you know, using your products, you know, you really can see how you could continue just like building something for forever to make the world a slightly better place, which I know sounds a little bit lofty, but like it's kind of exciting. I remember when I first switched to an electric toothbrush and I went to the dentist for the first time after and the amount of scrape, because scraping is the worst, the amount of like the time, you know, when you're in the dental chair and they're scraping away at your plaque and tartar and everything, that's absolute worst.

27:03But I remember her being like, have you changed toothbrushes? Your plaque is like a lot, like I got significantly less scraping. I got a compliment from the dentist And I was like, I've made a correct choice. If you can tie that emotion into people's purchase choices, it'll do really well. It'll continue to do really well, obviously. 100%. And actually, it's funny, like even like that anecdote, we should make this into an ad because that's something that we see all the time in the reviews. It's like, oh, I went to my dentist and they like complimented me. Like, because kind of people, you know, you're kind of always a little bit hesitant about that interaction.

27:36But like going and getting like that positive reinforcement, like, hey, what are you doing? And so we're getting a lot of inbound from dental professionals being like, hey, like lots of my patients come in and I love it. Like I want to learn more about it. In the pre-chat, we were talking about some of the gallivanting you're doing. You're coming, you're coming to Seattle. You're coming actually to Victoria randomly, which is amazing. And you were just sort of reflecting on this sort of like this life you've created for yourself. What's your favorite part about being a successful D2C entrepreneur?