# Spinbrush Strategy: Pricing, Packaging, and Acquisition

**Podcast:** How I Built This with Guy Raz
**Published:** 2026-02-16

## Transcript

Hey, just a quick message.
If you're building a business right now, imagine getting advice from the founder of Tarte Cosmetics or Airbnb or Mark Cuban.
Well, you can get that advice.
Every Thursday, we drop an episode of the How I Built This Advice Line.
It's where I bring back a previous founder we featured on a past episode.
And together we help real entrepreneurs, people selling skincare, dog toys, pottery, food, whatever.
We help them work through the challenges they're facing right now.
And the best part, this kind of advice, world-class battle tested is completely free.
All you have to do is call 1-800-433-1298.
Tell us what you're building in under a minute, and you might be the next guest on the advice line.
So give us a call or send us a voice memo to HIBT at ID.wondery.com and tell us how we can help you.
Defective.
Out.
Was a hard decision, especially for a new company.
And um, we had 400,000 of them in our warehouse.
Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
I'm Guy Roz, and on the show today, how John Osher went from selling spinning lollipops to inventing the world's cheapest electric toothbrush, the spinbrush, and sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Many founders, including ones we've had on this show, consider themselves lucky if they can eventually sell their idea or their business to a larger business and walk away with a nice pile of cash.
My guest today pulled that off not once, not twice, but three times.
He sold his first company to the baby brand Gerber.
His second one, a toy business, was sold to Hasbro.
And the third, he sold to Procter and Gamble.
John Osher isn't just a serial entrepreneur.
He designed or invented several iconic products.
For example, the first Rainbow Mobile.
You lie a baby down on its back, and they can reach up and play with the different toys hanging right over them.
John also came up with a bedroom basketball hoop with a digital scoreboard.
He discovered and then marketed a battery powered lollipop that spun around at the press of a button.
And finally, in 1999, John introduced what's probably his best known invention, an electric toothbrush called Spinbrush.
It's a product that had such an insane meteoric rise, it became a case study at Harvard Business School, and it was inspired by those spinning lollipops he sold years before.
When it came out, sales took off almost immediately.
And two years after launch, John sold Spinbrush to Procter and Gamble for 475 million dollars.
A year after that sale, Spinbrush became the best selling toothbrush in the country.
Now, as I mentioned, prior to that PNG sale, John sold two previous businesses to two other major companies.
And before that, he had even more businesses, even more ideas and inventions.
Too many to get into in this conversation today.
But each step along the way, all the way back to when John was a teenager, each step led to the eventual spectacular success of Spinbrush.
John O'Sher was born in the mid-1940s and grew up in Cincinnati, where his dad was a neurosurgeon and his mom was a writer.
He attended the University of Wisconsin for a few years, but in the mid-1960s, he transferred to the University of Cincinnati and decided, of all things, to go into the earring business.
It started in the probably 63 or 64 with the hippie movement, and they all started getting their ears pierced.
It became very quickly a fad and a hip thing to do.
Wow.
And um my thinking was the hip schools are all doing these, everyone's getting their ears pierced.
It'll come to Cincinnati.
So when I transferred there, I decided to open an earring store.
Now I knew nothing about earrings myself, but I found a little tiny shoe shine parlor on the uh perimeter of the University of Cincinnati.
It was probably 10 feet by 18 feet.
And um I rented it, and um I went to New York with my mother, and uh we went to these uh stores, these distributors like above on the second floors of these uh buildings, and I would buy all these earrings for 19 cents.
So I bought a whole bunch and I took the I went to this store I rented, I put black velvet on the walls, and I hung the earrings up, and it's it's an interesting thing because I charged 499 for my 19 cent earrings.
Wow.
Now, next door to me was a store called Stop and Shop, and they had very much of the same earrings I had.
And they bought them also for 19 cents, but they sold them for 39 cents, you know, doubling their money.
They sold nothing.
Everyone bought my earrings at 499.
First of all, people didn't believe you could get safe wires for 39 cents to put in your ears.
But the the reason I bring it up is it was a great lesson that I used for the rest of my whole business career, and that is that you set your price on what the market uh will pay, what's the optimum price for a market, as opposed to what you paid for it.
Yeah.
So you have this earring store, you're selling earrings for and and you're a student, and it sounds like it's doing pretty well.
Yeah, so I only had the store probably for six months, and then I sold it to a friend of mine.
The excitement of it wore off.
But I took the money and I went to Europe for the summer, bought an MGB at the factory, bought a bunch of bell bottom pants.
This was the summer.
Do you remember what year that was?
It's probably 67, I'm guessing.
Nice.
So you took the money from selling that shop and you go to Europe for the summer.
And I maybe I made maybe I I had $6,000, but that was a ton of money for a 19 or uh or 20-year-old.
So one of the things I tried to do with every business was to become rich within the context of my life.
So $6,000 as a college student at that point in my life, I was that was wealthy and that I was able to do things I wanted to do that I couldn't do otherwise.
I I read that you actually did not you kind of dropped out of the University of Cincinnati early and that when you were taking that trip.
So you did not graduate.
Um, but you did eventually somehow, and a year later, I guess 1969, end up in Boston, and you continued your studies at Boston University.
Right.
And while you're in Boston, you open another business.
You'd an earring business, of course, in Cincinnati.
This is actually amazing to me that you opened a second another business, another store that you could actually do that.
Like I'm thinking about, because I want to ask you about the store in a moment, but I'm thinking about today.
If you're a student at Boston University and you're just a middle class kid, there's no way in hell you could oh you could get a lease in Boston to open a shop.
You need to like sign a lease 10-year term.
It would the rent costs would be astronomical.
Like nobody, no mortal could afford to do that.
But this was realistically possible, clearly.
In 1969, you you opened a secondhand clues shop in Boston.
How did you do that?
Yeah.
You know, this was before the everything became so expensive in life.
It almost would seem as if uh I'm a courageous person because I'm so willing to open businesses and this and that.
And it it really does come back to the value of starting my first business at five years old and having businesses successful all through high school, and it became natural for one.
And two is that by doing things little things successfully, I had confidence.
I I never thought about how can I do this, as opposed to somebody who's got a wife and family and has been working at Procter and Gamble at a big company and they see some opportunity and they get mortgages they gotta worry about and all of this.
It was really natural.
I'd go to flea markets and I go all over New England and I'd find these things for nothing and be able to sell them for quite a bit.
This store uh, and yeah, so you're selling vintage clothing, the second hand clothing, and uh you run this shop, I think for again, like not that long, maybe a year or so.
Maybe a year, I can't remember something like that.
And you graduate, you s you sort of close the shop up, and and now this is where sort of the very eccentric part of your life begins.
You from what I read, and I'd l I really want to dive into this, for roughly six years you've moved to a commune in upstate New York.
And tell me this story.
How did what was it?
How did that happen?
What's going on?
Well, since I was younger in the hippie days from the LSD and and that type of uh lifestyle, it started to develop a an interest in something greater, more than meets the eye.
And um I got involved with the teachings of a uh a spiritual philosopher named Gurdjief.
This is George Ivanovich Gurdjieff.
What what what did he teach?
The the basic concept was that we as humans are asleep.
We're basically given a name, we're trained.
I mean, I became a uh a Democrat or a liberal because my parents voted for Adelaide Stevenson.
Right.
The neighbors across the street voted for Ike and they became Republicans.
You know, that we were we become basically trained and we live our lives and we wake up and we go do things, and and his philosophy was more about waking up, about waking up to a deeper truth about ourselves.
Okay.
So you you joined this group and you're you're part of this group for six or five or six years.
And what were you doing for for work for a living?
Well, so that that became interesting and an important part of my life, and that is that when I grew up as a doctor's son, and you know, that's you know, for the light bulb breaks, you hire somebody to screw it in.
And so I grew up with virtually no skills or thoughts of uh that I would have uh any aptitude for things like this.
But the the group there had to make a living.
So a lot of the people came in were PhD, you know, all different walks of life uh joined this community.
And uh to what to make a living, we either got in generally got involved with some form of construction, or we got into the arts and pottery and uh and the likes.
So I did a lot of the trades.
I I mean I forget I think the first thing I started off with was a record pair replayer man.
That's when they had record players.
And then I became a landscaper.
Uh I got a job for a builder as a carpenter's helper, and eventually the group's construction company needed a plumber.
So I went to become the the new plumber.
It turned out I was good at this stuff.
All right.
So you're this is like a a pretty long period of your life, five or six years.
Uh and you had spent a bunch of years learning how to do plumbing and carpentry, and which is super, which would prove to be very handy and useful, but you were not settled in what you were going to do with the rest of your life at this point.
Absolutely not.
And I never ever was.
Yeah.
To this day.
Yeah.
I think a lot of young people get really stressed out about not, you know, having achieved something of w notable by the time they're 30, and that's nonsense.
And it and it was just never the case.
Even when I was a plumber in this Gurjef group, I was rich.
You know, within the context of my life.
Right.
I, you know, I had a house and a car and a wife, and I made much more money than everyone else in the group because I was in a business that you could charge a lot of money for.
I never took a second to fear what am I going to do next or how am I going to make a living?
And say I can look back at it and say, well, why didn't I?
I should have been afraid, but I just didn't.
Yeah.
Okay.
So you were you were part of this group, uh, and then you wind up moving back to Cincinnati, I think right around uh 1978, uh, which is also around the time of of the energy crisis in the U.S.
And I guess you had this obviously you had this background in plumbing and construction.
Uh so you actually started a business that made, I guess, like like what energy-saving devices, like for for homes?
Yeah, so I remember staying up all night one night, and this was my beginning of a career as a semi-inventor and inventing products.
And uh coming up with a list of products, a hot water heater insulation jacket was one.
We made special fans.
A lot of people were getting kerosene heaters and heating up one room to 120 while the rest of the house was cold.
So I made these fans that would hang in a doorway to bring the the heat from one room to the other, things like that.
And it showed me that I could be an inventor.
It, you know, it's hard to believe you can do that until you actually do it successfully and sell a product.
I I guess, you know, by the early 80s, this is now the Reagan era, energy prices start to drop significantly.
And I imagine it's having an impact on your business because it's designed to to save people money.
And I read that this around this time you start to think about pivoting into a new category, which is nothing to do with these energy conservation products.
Right.
I saw that the energy prices were dropping, which were not ever expected.
We thought it was gonna forever grow.
And I saw that the products were slowing down.
And um, at the same time, I was in this apartment uh and I had a six-month-old son who would crawl around in the kitchen and bang his head against the kitchen cabinets and this and that.
And um I came up with an idea uh called crawl Space, which was a little portable corral.
It opened up any eight-sided configuration.
And it was at a time when the scissors, the wooden scissors gates and corrals were being outlawed because of danger.
And so I went back to my partners and I had investors, and I said, I think I want to start this baby product business.
And I remember one of them was really furious.
And uh said, No, we've committed to this energy, and I said no, and I stuck by my guns, and I and so while we still had the energy diminishing energy business, I developed this baby product called Crawl Space.
And this was a just to clarify, this was a play pen, but it was mo it was it was mobile, you could move it around.
No, it was it was portable, wasn't it?
Portable.
It weighed eight pounds, it folded up like a suitcase in two seconds, had ratcheted hinges, no bottom, and you could make it into any eight-sided configuration.
It was an octagon-shaped play pen, but it was uh literally on the ground, right?
So the and a baby, even a crawling baby couldn't push it, it wasn't wasn't even.
It had rubber feet on the bottom, so it made it a very hard slide.
And it wouldn't be necessarily an octagon, it might be many angles.
You could angle it and it would the ratchet would hold it in whatever shape you configuration.
It was a cool idea, but the name was really helped a lot.
Crawl Space was a terrific name for that.
And and where did you you sold the product like Toys R Us?
Where where were they sold?
Oh, we sold it, uh yeah, Toys R Us, Child World.
And that product, I think, led to another thing that you created called the uh the Rainbow Toy Bar?
It was called Rainbow Toy Bars.
Now that's one of there's two products in my life that were a difference maker in the world.
Yeah.
The first one was uh the rainbow toy bars.
Back then, when my uh baby was uh I forget it was the same baby, it's probably the same baby.
Uh between zero and six months old, we put him in your little uh seat that he'd sit on the floor, or we put on a blanket on the floor.
And in five minutes he'd start to cry.
And if I gave him a rattle, he'd play with it for a few seconds, but then he would drop it because he was too young to hold on to it.
So I came up with the idea, I said, why don't I create a little swing that I could hang the toys down to the baby over his blanket, and he could have visual stimulation and he could play with them when he lets go, they're still there.
And I bought a bunch of white PVC Toubi, and we actually made special fittings that would fit the angle, and we and we made it so you'd push it together, and uh, and it came with little plastic uh rings and hang rattles and toys like that.
So this is the first thing of its kind?
I mean, this is a very common toy.
You put a baby on the blanket.
Every baby in the world uses some form of this now, but back then it did not exist.
And it's it's like an a uh an arch that sits over the baby with toys that hang, and the baby can just, you know, grab 'em.
How did the crawl space and and the rainbow toy bar do?
Well, they both sold well, really well.
Yeah, and I read that like pretty soon after you introduced those.
You got on the radar of Gerber, the the the baby company, uh and they like came to you with an acquisition offer, I think, of like two million bucks.
Right.
Uh and you sold it, the company.
And I guess you worked there for a little while, but but then pretty soon after you left uh to start a new company.
Uh and this time it was going to be toys for uh older kids.
Uh it was called Cap Toys.
Tell me about about that company and what what you were gonna gonna make.
So most of the toy industry back then was toys came from inventors, toy inventors.
So I went to look at a bunch of toy inventions, and I found two inventions from a guy named uh Howard Wexler in New York, and he was famous for inventing Connect 4.
And uh I developed a what's called a blooming dolls, which was a doll that would was a flower pot and it would turn into a puppet and then into a full doll.
And it was really cute, and uh, and a ball called Crunch Balls, which had little foam pellets in a that tent material, and it was really it was in between a a a balloon and a ball.
So I just trying to picture the blooming doll was a doll that that was growing like a plant from a pot.
It started off, it starts off as a plant with leaves and flowers.
It's all fabric.
You put your hand in it and the head pops up and has arms and it works as a puppet.
And um what happened was that um our our first year we were Toys for Us was buying it and they bought a night ordered a nice amount.
And before we shipped it, before I could ship it, they canceled the order because they were overstocked that year.
Because this item wasn't selling, right?
This just wasn't taking off.
Nobody was buying the it didn't really have time to.
It was the season was just starting.
Right.
And any pre-sales were okay.
They were not terrible, but um basically he put it we were gonna be put out of business.
Um I had all this inventory, and they canceled and did the same with the crunch balls.
And I I really had no preparation for this type of thing.
And I went through the toughest few months of my life.
So what do you do?
Well, first thing I want to do, and this is uh it's called entrepreneurial terror.
And I think most successful ones included have gone through this at some point because the buck completely stops with you.
There's no there's no group or committee or uh uh meeting to get together with others, it's all on your head.
And and I've I remember I spent two or three days, I just wanted to hide under the bed.
I mean, I I didn't want to get out of bed.
And uh, I was getting divorced at the time, and I was living in a city, Cleveland, that uh where I moved with the uh uh baby company where I didn't really know many people, so I didn't have a big support network.
My investors, by the way, all quit investing.
The bank dropped me.
Everything happened all at once.
And after three days of this, I just got up and said, I better do something.
And I got up and I put down on a piece of paper.
What I have to do?
Gotta get a new bank, I gotta get more money in the company, I have to deal with Toys R Us.
And um I once I started that and I got over the fear, I went to work.
And I went got my rep, my sales rep in New York, and we got a point with Toy with the boss in Toys R Us, with my buyer's boss.
And I said, You're basically putting us out of business.
And I wanted to find out if there's anything you can do to help me.
And he looked at me and he says, you know, this was when Toys R Us was in their heyday.
I mean, they were really powerful.
And uh he said, you know, we need new toy companies, and we don't want you to fail.
And he said, 'Let's see if we can make an arrangement, a deal, you know, where I'll give them some kind something, and we'll buy your inventory.
For the rest of my life, all through the toy industry, every time I see him, I practically break into tears because it was so kind of him.
And uh I saw I got a second chance.
And and then I went back to my investors and I said I got Toys R Us to take these.
I had already developed a product for the next year, too.
And the new toy I had was called arcade basketball.
And it was when Papa Shot was real popular where you pay 50 cents at the carnivals and bars and everywhere to see how many baskets.
And I made a home version of it that hung on a door with a net.
I I've seen it, I remember it actually, because I was a kid at the time.
It had you it was a home, yeah, a little backdoor uh door basketball hoop, but it had a uh an electronic scoreboard, and I guess every time you got the you know the ball went into the hoop, it would click the sensor or something, and then you would get a point.
It would show up on the scoreboard.
Right.
Well, and it had it scored it, and it even could have two people playing against each other.
By the way, this was in the early 90s.
Were these being made in China at the time or not not yet?
Yes, yes.
So our our budget uh next year we got this chance, and everyone bought RK basketball.
We did six million dollars and made a million and a half dollar profit.
And we were on our way.
So and you were able to do that because you got this order on those the flower pot dolls.
Because he took the deal.
But I was also able to because as a result of that order, my investors agreed to stay in the business, and as a result of that, we were able to get a new bank.
So that product, the the arcade basketball hoop really saved the company, saved the save um saved you guys.
And um it all started with me getting out of bed.
Yeah.
When I didn't want to.
When we come back in just a moment, John gets into the battery-powered candy business, followed by its opposite, the battery-powered toothbrush business.
Stay with us.
I'm Guy Roz, and you're listening to How I built This.
Hey, welcome back to How I Built This.
I'm Guy Roz.
So it's 1993, and John's business Cap Toys is back on its feet, and he's looking around for another good idea, which actually turns out to be a lollipop.
I got into somebody went to a a inventor show in Pittsburgh and found a lollipop that lit up.
And shortly after this light, they had come up with another idea, which was a it looked like a right angle drill where you press a button and a lollipop would spin.
And um I looked at that and I said, Now that's an idea, because I always spun a lollipop with my fingers in my mouth.
I said, But this right angle thing's crazy.
I just want to come straight up.
So let's just back up a little bit.
You know, you in the early 90s, you had a representative from your toy company at a trade show, and there was from the story I read was there's this uh the these two couples from Virginia.
Well, they we they basically had a light at lollipop.
It was a spear.
And and and my guy calls me and tells me about it, and I said, That's great.
I'm looking for a category, and this, and so I said, I want to fly them in.
I want them here tomorrow.
I flew them in from Pittsburgh, and I bought the rights to it.
And the one person of the four was the inventor, and he had started inventing a whole lot of other candy items.
Right.
And one I was interested in was this one that spun, which was maybe six months later.
And I bought this thing thinking that if I'm ever gonna sell this company, I'm gonna need a category that Hasbro or Mattel or one of these companies need because they buy categories.
That's what they they don't need a product unless it's a lifelong product.
They need a category.
So I decided to get into this category of interactive candy.
And so, like candy that was uh had like a battery operated feature.
Right.
So you acquire the rights to these spin candies, and and I mean you presumably you knew that they could be made pretty cheaply in because you'd already been making products in China.
Yes, I I I knew we could make make this very inexpensively, and I knew a lollipop, you know, we went to all the lollipop factories, dum-dums and all that, and that we could buy lollipops very inexpensively.
All right, these were released in in 1993, and they were a massive hit.
They would go on to sell a hundred million in the first three years.
That's incredible.
How how did that happen?
Was it that you have a huge marketing campaign?
No, it's just sometimes you get an item like a popular song that's an instant, everyone recognizes an instant hit.
You know, when you have something on a s on the shelf in a store where you have many products that'll sell one piece a week per store, and you sell eight a day or something, it becomes a hit so quickly that um everybody wants to buy it.
And the spin pop became one of the largest.
We sold millions of them um in all over the world.
I told millions in Japan.
And we were probably in the interactive candy back then, we're probably doing 40-50 million dollars of the candy.
That's that's crazy.
50 million dollars.
Yeah.
All right, so these spin pop take off, obviously.
And once again, you get onto the radar of a bigger company, uh, and this time it's Hasbro, which I think is is one of the biggest toy companies in the world.
Uh, and basically in 1997, CapToys, your company, is sold to Hasbro for like over 160 million dollars.
So obviously a very nice exit.
Yeah, so I I negotiated a good deal and I retired.
I was about 50, and I was retired I retired and uh moved to Florida for a year or something or so.
But that didn't that that didn't suit you?
Well, it didn't suit me.
I took up golf and uh I did that for a year or two, and once I got bad at golf, I had to go do something else.
Did you what you mean once you got bad?
Did you start good and then get bad?
I at golf, yeah.
Nobody very few people get good at golf.
But yeah, um after after being so-called retired for a year, maybe two, I don't remember, I I had an uh idea.
So I got together with guys that had done design work for me in Cleveland and uh who had done a lot of uh great designs for products, and I had a list of a hundred ideas, the first one being the spin battery operated toothbrush.
I I knew we had made millions of these spinning lollipops, and that uh we became experts in small batteries, motors and gears in China.
And I I said, Well, I wonder if it's possible that I can make an electric toothbrush that would sell at Walmart for five dollars.
Just to put this in context, it makes sense because you had experience with a spinning lollipop.
For this is nineteen ninety-eight, and I l from what I understand you ha I mean like electric toothbrushes existed, Oral B and they had sonic cares, whatever.
They were around.
You could but they were very expensive.
How did you start to think about a toothbrush?
I mean, because you knew you wanted to start a new business.
Tell me what you did to get the idea for toothbrush.
Did you like go to grocery stores?
Did you look at what was on the aisles?
What did you do to get an idea for what you wanted to make?
Well, first of all, I always went to stores and looked on aisles all the time.
It's just part of a product idea process.
But um the joke is that everyone says you sold all these lollipops and ruined all these kids' teeth, and then you felt guilty and invented a toothbrush.
But that wasn't really the story.
No, it wasn't.
I I'm not that uh altruistic, but the reality is is that we ended up buying such large quantities of little motors at batteries and gears, where we're buying in the millions of batteries from Ever Ready Alkaline Batteries, where we're paying 12 cents a battery rather than 78 cents or 39 cents for high volume.
And and same with the motors that cost uh 90 cents and we're paying a eight cents or something because I was buying a million at a time.
And um because of that, I thought that it's possible that we could take what we've learned, and we have factories that have been making these lollipops, that they would be great resources to make an elect a battery operated toothbrush if we could actually achieve it.
And um we wanted to sell it for five dollars or less at Walmart.
And you saw the opportunity there.
Basically, there was the super high-end electric toothbrushes.
This was a growing segment of the the toothbrush market, and you saw an opportunity to make a really low-cost version for people who maybe wanted to try electric but didn't want to spend 80 bucks.
Well, it it we really never considered or worried or about or competed with the high-end, which was some of them were fifty bucks.
And we basically saw the manual market, that's where the numbers were.
So you would your your competition was just the standard manual, like Oral B toothbrush that was selling for three bucks, and you figured, hey, if we can make an electric version, like a battery powdered version for five bucks or six bucks, people would see that and say, wait a minute, I get more for just a couple bucks more.
Yes.
But the best thing about it was everything I've ever been involved with up to that point from energy products, it was still limited to a certain size.
The toys, even toys you're dealing with boys that are three to eight.
That's really a small market.
But I love the idea that toothbrushes was everybody.
Everybody in the world, man, woman, kid, age, it made no difference.
There was never a bigger market to go after.
All right.
So now the if these existing models were selling for $50 or $80, I know that wasn't your competition.
You were trying to make a toothbrush for five or six dollars.
There's it it couldn't have the same features as the eighty dollar brush, right?
So what was the difference that you were creating that would make it possible to create these for two or three dollars in China?
First of all, they copy and work off themselves.
So the the most expensive electric toothbrush was the 110, uh owned by Phillips.
And um, you know, they practically use a Volkswagen motor in the thing, you know.
And we had been used to motors that are much smaller and and that if they would work, we didn't need to have what they had.
They were also had to have a quality for the price they were selling at.
You couldn't have it just break because everyone would take them back.
Yeah.
Uh we didn't need that.
We actually went out and said this lasts the last six months.
So you so by you by using a less powerful motor, you you were able to you knew that you could probably make a cheaper or less expensive, much less expensive version.
I didn't know.
I knew that we were gonna that it was if we could, it would be so big.
I did not know if we could achieve it.
And after six months, I almost quit because we just couldn't get it the way I wanted it.
What was the challenge?
Because I mean, what were some of the challenges I've seen the design um schemes of blueprints?
What were the challenges you you guys had in trying to create this thing?
Well, I I was it had to include batteries.
I didn't want anyone to buy this and have to go buy batteries.
Well, I had to give them good batteries because if I gave them cheap non-alco alkaline batteries, they would die in a month.
And if they're gonna have to buy batteries every month, that's not ultimately a good deal.
So I had defined it that the batteries had to last three months.
So we had to design the product and it had to actually work using two minutes of brushing, I think twice a day.
And we ran all kinds of tests, not quite like PNG would, but we ran all kinds of tests to make sure that we got the battery life we needed.
Then even more important is we needed the torque.
Then when you brush your teeth, it's really working and it's working great.
So it had to satisfy that.
And it took us a year before we got a product that I thought was well beyond the threshold of a far better product than any manual brush.
And at first we actually came up with a rounded head and it worked very well.
The problem was after two weeks it was splayed and real ugly.
And uh I said, you can't do that.
It's an ugly, you know, nobody wants this after two weeks, it's too ugly.
And so we decided to make it oscillate rather than rotate.
So the name Spin Brush actually came when it was still spinning.
Uh we never changed the name because it was a good name.
But um then I I realized that I I like to brush my teeth in the morning.
I don't like to do what Oral B does where you walk around your mouth differently and have to learn a new method.
So I said, Well, why don't we take the oscillating round part and put fit bristles below it and make it look like a regular brush so you can brush your teeth normally and get the oscillation at the same time.
And that no not only gave us a major advantage, but it opened the door to our great patent because we say, okay, we're gonna make a toothbrush that moves, part of it moves and part of it's fixed.
Well, nobody ever thought of doing that because there's no reason to think that.
In the year few years that followed, we made even much better ones than that.
But at the time, that's what we need to we needed to get to a point that we were offering a product that was much better than they could get manually.
One of the things that is is interesting to me about this is as you're working on it, you're you because you had come from the toy business and you had some experience with candy, you want to focus on the packaging of this, right?
Because it if it was packaged right, then it would pop out of the shelves.
And one of the things that you I guess was critical, even before you had the first product done, was that it had a try-me button.
Like it was packaged in such a way where on the shelves you could push the button in the s in the in the group in the store and see the sp the bristles oscillate.
That it was critical to what we're doing uh for a few reasons.
One, we'd sold them just like we did spin pops in a 12-pack, them sticking in a in a case, and that uh had a button that you could press and you could.
You sold a 12-pack to the to the retailer, not to the consumer.
To the retailer, yes.
Yeah.
But what was um so important is that when you're selling a toothbrush, electric toothbrush for $4.95 or $4.89, whatever Walmart price was, it it's almost not credible.
So if a consumer looks at it, is it a toy?
I don't believe this.
So having the try me where you could press the button and it does feel like you're running a Volkswagen motor.
I mean, it it really looked great when you press the button on the shelf.
So we took that from our toy experience and we made them in 12 packs that everything we did to start this business was to get them on end caps at a retailer.
That means at the end of the aisle.
If I had just stuck two of these on the on the uh long wall that had 80 manual brushes, we would have sold some, but it would have been much more difficult.
But our products sold so well so quickly, we were able to get on the end of the aisle at Walmart where they put in 140 of them rather than six.
But um the try me was a very important thing that we learned that was never in the health and beauty department.
It was a new thing for that department.
But we learned it from the toy industry how how useful it is.
And people love to press buttons.
Yeah.
So all right, so you finally, after a year of working on this, you get and you patent this, right?
You you you file for patent protection, which makes sense because you're two patents.
Two patents, okay.
Um, and you get the prototypes in 1999.
And I read that you attend a a trade show or and and um you because of your track record and your connections, I'm sure you already had some interest in.
I think you initially had deals with Myers, uh, which is mainly in the upper uh, you know, Michigan area and Albertsons.
Well, you know, with these sort of trial runs, how how how are you able to measure how well they were doing?
Well, with Myers, I happened to be from my other businesses friends with one of the owners of one of the Myers.
And um, so he was he agreed, because we were so new and nobody knew we were, and it was hard to get appointments and and didn't know this, but um he agreed to uh do a test, 24-pack test for us in a bunch of stores.
And we were five of us at the time working for the company, and we all, and they didn't have anyer stores in Cleveland.
So we all left, went one direct I went to Detroit, somebody went to Toledo, Columbus, setting them up, putting them out on that as the test was supposed to be, and then going back each day.
And that's when we found out that we'd put them out and we were selling seven a day per store, which was just in a different realm of any other toothbrush in the world.
You knew they were selling the store how?
We back then we counted them.
We'd we'd each of us went to there, and we go to the stores and we count them.
Then they we became friends with each of the store managers, and he'd look it up on his computer to make sure that they were actually sold and not stolen.
And once we knew that, that's when I called my factory and quadrupled the tooling, even though we still had trouble getting appointments anywhere.
So you could see right away that the I mean Oral B was still the the big the manual toothbrush was still the big seller, but you could see that these spin brush brushes, at least at, you know, these individual Meyer stores you were going to were actually selling quite a few per day.
They're selling Oral B was selling the best-selling toothbrush in the world at the time was their cross section, which was $395 expensive toothbrush manual, and they were selling 12 a week per store.
12 toothbrushes a week per store.
And we were sound like that much.
We were selling seven per day.
And the buyers, uh everyone involved knew right away what this was.
Um but um we did have though our first our first hundred thousand pieces were defective that we shipped.
Were defective.
Defective.
That was another great lesson.
And so what you did to throw them away?
So what happened was the first hundred thousand pieces, we we had the water when you brush your teeth, the water would run right through the toothbrush and out the bottom, which we thought would be fine.
But what happened was over a month, uh using it for about a month, it would uh electrolysis or whatever would cause uh it build up at the connections and it would stop working.
It would break in a month.
And we had 400,000 of them in our warehouse.
And I had to make a decision.
This is a consumable product, and this is potentially so big, and if I continue to sell this, it will die.
And I went back to my partners uh in it, my investors, and I said, I'm gonna scrap these 400,000.
We're all gonna put in another half a million dollars or something.
Um, and we're gonna redesign it, which we did working day and night with the factory online on the phone, and in a week or two, we redesigned it so the water had it was all handled different, became waterproof.
But the decision to throw those out was a hard decision, especially for a new company.
And um, if I didn't do it, it would have failed.
Well, we come back in just a moment.
John Approach is one of the biggest companies in the world to orchestrate a buyout, and it starts with a major bluff.
Stay with us.
I'm Guy Roz, and you're listening to How I Built This.
I'm Guy Roz.
So it's the year 2000, and Spinbrush is rolling out in selected stores like Albertson's and Walmart.
And already the numbers are looking really good, like almost surprisingly good.
And in the first year, we did 44 million with a 21 million dollar profit.
$40 million dollars in sales.
Yeah, it wasn't even a full year.
It was probably deserted eight months.
And and as say we made a $21 million dollar profit, but we did that on purpose.
We really wanted to make the profit that was so important because I wanted from day one, we wanted to sell the company to Procter and Gamble.
Procter and Gamble was your target from the beginning, you thought, but you had no idea that they were whether or not they were working on their own electric toothbrush.
We didn't, but I've known that they're a chemical company.
Yeah.
They were not particularly a strong company in China, and they were not good particularly strong in mechanical.
You know, they had Swiffer, but for the most part, they were a food and chemical company.
They were the company that needed this product.
Uh they didn't have an electric toothbrush.
Their toothbrush business was way down.
So they were and their stock was down.
Their whole company was in a down mode.
So they were our target when we started the company.
This is an interesting time for Procter and Gamble because as you say, Crest had had lost market share and PNG stock price had had fallen by 50%.
There's something else.
There's a totally different story, but but what would turn it around?
Well, spin brush is part of it, but eventually we'll get there.
But what were crest white strips, which they had invented internally, right?
That turned into a massive multi-million hundred sort of dollars worth of business within a year or two.
So and that would also turn the company around.
But this was it's interesting.
They were Procter and Gamble was not on the ropes, but they were they were definitely, you know, taking their lumps at this time.
And you you thought that they might be an acquirer of this product that you guys had had put out.
Well, I I knew that they needed us.
It didn't mean that I would meet somebody who recognized that.
How did you how did you approach them?
I mean, did you go to Procter and Gamble and say, hey, we're we're for sale?
Never.
Because anytime you try to sell something, you get about one-tenth of what you get when they want to buy you.
If you go to them and you say, hey, we want to we want to sell, you're saying the price would have been lower.
In fact, they might have even been interested.
What I did instead, and this was all part of the plan.
I went to their licensing department with this crazy idea, which I didn't think in a million years they'd agreed to, to license the Crest name for our product.
Well, even when I went there, they never heard of us.
You want to slap Crest onto the spin brush.
That was the one.
Yeah, we wanted to license their thing, which I really didn't want to do.
I didn't want to do, but I I just wanted to show them who we were.
And I wanted to use that as a door.
So anyway, I gave I passed out toothbrushes to everyone in the office, and they um agreed to uh do a test.
So you pitch them basically you you show them the product, you pitch them the product without really pitching it.
Just it's this it's a ruse.
Yeah, we wanted to sell the company to them, but I had to find a door, and I I wanted them to want to buy it, then send it the other way.
So they brought the the brand people in from Crafts and everybody, and they um um they agreed to test it.
So they we sent them a bunch of pieces and they tested it.
A month goes by.
Two months goes by, three months, not a word.
So, you know, that's usually not a good sign.
Yeah.
So I got to finally got to why I said, Well, I might as well call them because I got nothing to lose at this time.
And you guys were selling tons of toothbrushes.
Yeah, we're yeah, we're doing great.
We're doing great.
You're gonna do 44 million dollars in that first year.
And the next year we probably would have done 80 to 100 with a great profit.
But so I finally called uh the guy and I said, Well, I never heard from you guys.
He says, Heard from us.
I thought you guys were gonna call us back.
I don't know where and it turned out, and we didn't know this till later, that it was the highest testing product they ever did in the history of Procter Gamble with consumers.
But I didn't know that till actually a few years later.
But um, so they came back and they said, you know, we decided we'll license you the name.
Yeah, I don't want their name.
He said, We'll license you the crest name.
Oh, I said that's so exciting, but but I I just want you to know that we can't pay more than three percent.
You know, most companies like that with that brand want 12 or 15 percent.
Yeah.
I said, we have to keep this has to stay at this price point at retail, and we can't do that.
And so he says, Well, let me check.
He calls me back a couple days later and says, Yeah, that's okay.
Three percent's okay.
We'll do it.
And and I said, Well, I'm so honored, I don't know what to say.
This is such a great thing.
I have to bring this to my board, you know.
You know, and back in those days, you always claimed to have a board.
Right.
And um uh I gotta bring it to my board, and then I I call them back a few days later and I said, I hate to say this, but uh I said the board were so and enamored with this that you all made this offer, but they said if we if we do this licensing, the the board investors all did this to eventually sell, and they said that they would never be able to sell it to anybody but but Procter and Damble and Crest, and you would have all the leverage because we couldn't do anything else.
So that despite that with this is such an opportunity we're gonna have to pass.
And um he says, Well, why don't we buy the company?
And I said, Shit, what a that what an idea.
That's God, that's a that's yeah, that's something we'd think about, you know.
And then it went from there.
And you know, usually things don't work that that well as this.
This this was one of these things where Murphy did not come into the business.
Everything worked to clockwork, but I needed them to want to buy the company.
And I say this because as I say when I do speak at different schools, um as on entrepreneurship, it's uh it's such a difference when you're trying to sell something and when somebody wants to buy it.
And um, anytime you can get in a situation where they want to buy it, you'll get way more money.
So they start you start to hold talks on an acquisition, and I think in January of 2001, they formally offered to buy it, and that it was gonna be 165 million dollars up front and then earn out over three years.
Right.
And you would get a percentage of that earnout.
And you would you would join Proctor and Gamble.
You would basically continue to run spin brush.
Okay, so you guys agreed to this, and now you're a proctor, which is amazing, right?
One year in, you get 165 million plus an earnout.
So you could get you can make more.
Tell me what like now that it's a Procter and Gamble brand, I imagine they could supercharge this thing.
They could get it, it can make it even bigger.
But more likely what they would do would have done was screw it up.
That's more more often than not what happens.
But the president of the company, he met with me and he says, you know, we have bought three companies like yours in the last four years, and we've ruined them all.
And we want you guys to you have a three-year deal.
We want you to run it, and we'll give you the people, we'll give all this stuff, and we'll even let you override some of our rules.
Um and so we did that.
And and we got on the phone, we started doing the first thing the the lawyers want to do was have us stop selling the product.
And I said, Why?
And he said, Because we have a rule in our company that you have to have enough goods in all our warehouses before you can sell the product, and you're selling as fast as you can make it, and we need to build the warehouses up.
Stop what you're doing.
And I went back to the president and I told me, he says, No, you've got the right to override it.
You you keep doing what you're doing.
So we and they were hoping to open it up to two different two or three different comp countries that that same year and expand this the production.
And we ran it and we got our production up from 88,000 to uh 400 and something thousand a day manufacturing.
We were buying close to a million uh batteries from uh Everady a day.
We were second only to Walmart in battery purchase at the time, and um and we got it into something like 40 countries.
I flew around, I did presentations in Japan.
I mean, they were all good stories.
Um but after a year, so they had told their board that they thought they could do as much as 110 or 120 million dollars with this product.
And I think after a year they were doing over 300 wow uh million with the product, and but what they didn't pay attention to was when they made the earnout arrangement, they did it based on it being a maximum of 120 million dollars.
They had no concept of it going to three or four hundred million dollars or five hundred.
And the the head of the department, I forget who he was, maybe it was the vice president of the company, I don't remember.
He called me and says, We're gonna have to uh stop advertising, we're gonna have to pull the product for a while and give it, let it cool off.
And I said, Why?
He says, The earnout's gonna kill us.
We just can't they because of the earnout, they would have to pay you much more than they anticipated.
They'd have to pay us probably five or six times that I mean it would have been unmanageable.
So I said, you know, you're right.
I said you guys didn't expect it to be this big.
I did, but you didn't.
Because I said for you guys to stop this, it's insane.
Because when they also came out with our product, they came out almost simultaneously with the uh white strips.
Right.
And so the addition of the spin brush and the white strips.
Just supercharged Proctor and Gamble.
Yeah.
Crestw toothpaste became number one again.
Their stock went up.
So I said, you know, somewhere between zero and infinite, there's a number that we can both live with.
And we went back and forth, really mostly on the phone for a period of maybe a week or two, I don't remember, and came up with uh uh a settlement number.
It was supposed to be a three-year earnout, but they they basically I think you negotiated an agreement twenty-one months early, and they ended up paying three hundred and ten million dollars.
So the total total amount of money they spent on the spin brush would be four hundred and seventy-five million dollars.
This is amazing.
I mean, you get this just a few years after you released this product, and it became I mean, they they managed to turn it to also turn into the big biggest selling toothbrush in the United States.
I think I think even outsold the It was the biggest selling in the world for a period of time for for a window.
Uh it was it was a wonderful uh grand slam experience that everything went right and uh only at once in a lifetime.
But you know they ended up having to sell it three years later.
Right.
They sold it to Church and Wright or something.
I think who is who Church and Dwight, yeah.
But they and they had they sold it.
Do you know why they sold it?
Well, what happened is they three years into it, they were trying to buy Gillette.
And Gillette owned Oral B and Braun.
And um the deal was being held up because the tooth trunk the Oral B and uh the spin brush were a monopoly.
It was well over 50% of all the uh toothbrushes.
And so they they decided they have to sell the spin brush off.
So he they called me and asked if I was interested in buying it back.
And I said I would, but I'm not willing to pay much money.
I'll give you $10 million for it, the whole thing.
But I'll close next week.
Um, everything else was they were already s waiting six months, you know, and then there would be due diligence.
I said, I'll close next week.
But they took they went back to Church and Dwight, who they had been negotiating with, and they said OSHA's made a big offer, and you guys and they forced them into closing the deal, you know, uh for about $75 million plus inventory, but you know, it was a wow.
They had bought it for $475 million.
They sold it for $75 million.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What happened?
Were the sales just tanking, or did they just need to get rid of it quickly?
No, they had to get rid of it, and they um and and and they had the crest name, so they had to make a deal somehow.
And well, Proctor Gamble did eventually acquire Gillette, which which I'm, you know, made them.
Right.
So they yeah, they once they got rid of the spin, they closed the deal.
Fifty-five billion dollar deal.
And um they transitioned for three years with Church and Dwight to use the Crest name, and then it had to be just a spin spin brush.
Right.
Um, but Church and Dwight did a has done and did and has still done a terrible job.
They didn't really do anything with it, and everyone else is in it.
So when you go to the store, there's 15 different variations of spin brush on the shelves now.
Like like knockoffs.
Yeah, including their own.
Oral B's got tremendous.
They're probably the leader in it.
And w when did you decide to I don't know, I mean, to kind of retire, so to speak.
Well, uh in a way I retired after each venture.
Yeah.
Because the venture was was was the project was over.
If I never and I lived in a mode of looking for ideas.
That was my that's my my mode.
I'm not so much anymore as I'm older and retired.
I still get ideas, but when I was in that mode, I would attract ideas, whether they came in my own head, or people walked in the door with them, or I get calls, or the universities that I would uh speak at, people had ideas.
So after I sell a company or a project, I I was open to do something else.
Financially I didn't need to, but I love the creative challenge.
To this day I do.
I don't want to do it at this age, but I I get just as excited over a new idea.
What when you think about the the journey you took, right?
And and you know, I mean you spent six years and this this group was studying the philosophy of this Armenian monk, and you know, and then you went and started the conservation products business and got into toys, and it led to the next thing and the next thing, and eventually, you know, some of these huge products.
How much of where you got to and and how much of of this journey do you do you attribute to the work and the hard work you put in, and how much do you think had to do with with luck and timing and good fortune?
Well, first of all, uh luck is enters into everybody's success.
And I and I don't think I had a business that didn't have a crossroad point, could have gone either way.
And they all went my way.
I I live in a really much more of a state of gratitude than pride, because uh so many things could have gone the other way.
On the other hand, Gary Plair says the reason he puts so well and that he gets so lucky when he putts is that he practices six hours a day.
And he says somehow he gets luckier that way.
And I do think that, you know, the more businesses, the fact that I had had a lot of businesses, a lot of experience, failures within the successes, that you do get luckier.
Yeah.
But there were many cases when I I'd run into problems that were beyond my experience and intelligence, both.
And don't know what to do.
And as an entrepreneur, you're really on your own.
You might find people who work for you who are very good, you can get their input, but you're really on your own.
And um, I learned to basically sit, I had a always had a couch in my office, and I sit on the couch, and I would just ask the universe.
And this isn't it's not about asking God, asking self and Buddhism, asking higher part of my brain.
I had no idea.
I would just say, What do I do?
And then I'd be quiet.
And a hundred percent of the time, I always got the answer.
A hundred percent I got the answer and was right, to the point that I started calling it the magic.
And when we'd have a serious problem, people work for me, tell me to go in my office and ask the magic.
And um, what's wonderful about it is that anybody can do the same.
That serial entrepreneur John Osher, creator of the spin brush.
By the way, over the years, John has had a pretty interesting side hustle backing Broadway musicals.
He's actually been listed as a producer on some pretty big hits, including at least two Tony winners for Best Musical, Jersey Boys and Hairspray.
Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week.
Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of this show.
And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, sign up for my newsletter at guyRoz.com or on Substack.
This episode was produced by Catherine Cypher with music composed by Ramteen Arablui.
It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Romel Wood.
Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Quasey Lee.
Our production staff also includes Casey Herman, Chris Massini, John Isabella, Sam Paulson, Alex Chung, Carrie Thompson, Nora Gill, and Elaine Coates.
I'm Guy Roz, and you've been listening to How I Built This