Spinbrush

“I said, I would, but I'm not willing to pay much money. I'll give you ten million dollars for the whole thing, but I'll close next week. You know, everything else was, they were always waiting six months, you know, and then there would be due diligence. I said…”

“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.”

“And in the first year, we did forty four million with a twenty one million dollar profit. ... It wasn't even a full year. It was probably closer to eight months. And as I said, we made a twenty one million dollar profit.”

“The name Spin Brush actually came when it was still spinning. We never changed the name because it was a good name.”

“Well, what happened is they, three years into it, they were trying to buy Gillette, and Gillette owned Oral-B and Braun. And the deal was being held up because the tooth, the oral B and the spin brush were a monopoly. It was well over 50% of all the toothbrush…”

“So they had told their board that they thought they could do as much as a 110 or a hundred twenty million dollars with this product. And I think after a year, they were doing over 300. A million with the product”

“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.”

“We really never considered, or worried about, or competed with the high end, which was, some of them were 50 bucks, and we basically saw the manual market. That's where the numbers were.”

“We were buying close to a million batteries from EverReady. A day. We were second only to Walmart and battery purchases at the time.”

“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 in it, my investors, and I said, I'm gonna scra…”

“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.”