Feb 16, 2026 · 1h 0m · how-i-built-this
Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of 'How I Built This,' serial inventor and entrepreneur John Osher shares how he built and sold multiple multi-million-dollar companies, culminating in the creation and $475 million sale of the disruptive Spinbrush to Procter & Gamble.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Guy holds 35.4% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Guy as informed peer 3.1 Guest teaching 3.3 Guest disagreement 1.3 Guy pushing back 0.7
speaking balance: gold is Guy, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 31:14 Dismissing high-end electric competition premise
Osher firmly rejects Guy's premise that SpinBrush was designed to compete with high-end electric devices, asserting that the target market was purely manual toothbrushes.
Hardest push from Guy ▶ 16:02 Clarifying product design featuresGuy presses Osher on the exact form factor and mobility of the Crawl Space playpen, prompting Osher to clarify that it was portable rather than wheeled.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 5:46 Optimal market pricing vs cost-plus pricingOsher educates Guy on perceived value pricing, explaining why his 19-cent earrings sold rapidly at $4.99 while the store next door failed to sell the same items at 39 cents.
Guy holds their own ▶ 44:31 Citing P&G corporate context and Crest WhitestripsGuy demonstrates deep background research by contextualizing P&G's financial troubles in 2000, noting their 50% stock dip and internal development of Crest Whitestrips.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Guy as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Guy pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| First Venture: The Cincinnati Earring Shop | 2 | 4 | 1 | 0 | Guy Raz sets up Osher's early days and listens as Osher explains his first retail experiment selling earrings. Osher shares a foundational business lesson on pricing products based on perceived market value rather than unit markup. | |
| Secondhand Shop in Boston and Formative Confidence | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Guy contextualizes how impossible opening a retail shop on a student budget would be today compared to 1969. Osher reflects on how early entrepreneurial confidence removed the fear of failure. | |
| Commune Life and Learning Practical Trades | 2 | 3 | 1 | 0 | Guy asks about Osher's six years living in an upstate New York commune following Gurdjieff's teachings. Osher explains how learning practical trades like plumbing provided him with a comfortable living and self-reliance without career anxiety. | |
| Energy Inventions, Baby Products, and Gerber Exit | 4 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Guy traces Osher's shift from energy crisis inventions to baby products like Crawl Space and the Rainbow Toy Bar. When Guy assumes the playpen was mobile and octagonal, Osher corrects him on its portable design and ratcheting mechanism before detailing the $2M Gerber sale. | |
| Cap Toys Crisis, Resilience, and Arcade Basketball | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Guy prompts Osher on the near-collapse of Cap Toys when Toys 'R' Us canceled major doll orders. Osher candidly describes entrepreneurial terror, securing a reprieve from a retail executive, and saving the firm with Arcade Basketball. | |
| The Spin Pop Craze and $160M Hasbro Sale | 3 | 3 | 1 | 0 | Guy inquires about the interactive candy craze that generated tens of millions in revenue. Osher explains his strategic vision of building a defensible product category specifically to attract acquirers like Hasbro. | |
| Engineering the Affordable SpinBrush Toothbrush | 3 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Guy assumes SpinBrush was intended to challenge expensive $80 electric toothbrushes. Osher clarifies that his real competition was standard manual toothbrushes, breaking down the engineering and pricing compromises required to hit a $5 retail target. | |
| Store Pilots and Scrapping 400,000 Defective Brushes | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Osher outlines the retail importance of 'Try Me' packaging and endcap placement learned from the toy sector. He details discovering a fatal leakage defect in their first production run and the costly decision to scrap 400,000 units. | |
| Negotiating the Procter & Gamble Acquisition | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Guy listens as Osher explains his calculated bluff to approach Procter & Gamble for a brand license solely to trigger an acquisition interest. Osher details manipulating the negotiation so P&G initiated the buyout conversation. | |
| Massive Global Expansion and $475M P&G Payout | 3 | 3 | 1 | 0 | Guy and Osher discuss scaling SpinBrush globally within P&G, scaling manufacturing past 400,000 units a day. Osher explains how explosive growth broke P&G's initial earn-out model, prompting an early settlement totaling $475M. | |
| Antitrust Divestiture and Church & Dwight Sale | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | Guy mentions the subsequent divestiture to 'Church and Wright', which Osher immediately corrects to 'Church & Dwight'. Osher explains the antitrust issues caused by P&G acquiring Gillette and how Church & Dwight mismanaged the brand. | |
| Entrepreneurial Philosophy, 'The Magic,' and Broadway | 3 | 3 | 1 | 0 | Guy asks Osher how much of his serial success stems from hard work versus luck. Osher credits practical resilience, humility, and his intuitive problem-solving habit he calls 'the magic', concluding with Guy noting his Broadway producing credits. |
Statements from this episode (23)
Osher: Set prices by market willingness to pay, not wholesale cost
“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 will pay, what's the optimum price for a market, as opposed to what you paid for it.”
Osher: Entrepreneurial confidence comes from small early wins
“It almost would seem as if I'm a courageous person because I'm so willing to open businesses and this and that, and 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,…”
Osher: Plumbers outearned other trades in his Gurdjieff commune
“Even when I was a plumber in this Gurdjieff group, I was rich, you know, within the context of my life. 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 charg…”
Osher: Overhead baby toy arches didn't exist before his Rainbow Toy Bar
“Every, every baby in the world uses some form of this now, but back then it did not exist.”
Osher: Most successful founders experience 'entrepreneurial terror'
“And this is 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.”
Osher: Arcade Basketball drove $6M in sales and $1.5M profit
“So our budget, our next year, we got this chance, and everyone bought arcade basketball, we did six million dollars, and made a million and a half dollar profit.”
Osher: Major toy acquirers buy entire product categories, not single products
“If I'm ever going to sell this company, I'm going to need a category that Hasbro or Mattel or one of these companies need because they buy categories. That's what they don't need a product unless it's a lifelong product. They need a category.”
Osher: Cap Toys generated $40M to $50M from interactive candy
“And we were probably in the interactive candy back then, we're probably doing 40, fifty million dollars of the candy.”
Osher: Scale reduced novelty battery costs to 12 cents per unit
“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 EverReady alkaline batteries, where we're paying 12 cents a battery rather than 78 cents or 39 cents f…”
Osher: Spinbrush targeted the manual toothbrush market, not high-end electrics
“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.”
Osher: Spinbrush kept its name after switching to an oscillating mechanism
“The name Spin Brush actually came when it was still spinning. We never changed the name because it was a good name.”
Osher: Spinbrush sold seven units per store daily during Meijer pilot
“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.”
Osher: Oral-B's top manual toothbrush sold just 12 units per store weekly
“Oral-B was selling the best-selling toothbrush in the world at the time was their cross-section, which was three 95 expensive toothbrush manual, and they were selling 12 a week per store.”
Osher: Spinbrush scrapped 400K defective units and raised $500K for redesign
“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…”
Osher: Spinbrush drove $21M profit on $44M revenue in first 8 months
“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.”
Osher: Initiating a company sale yields one-tenth of buyer-initiated prices
“Because anytime you try to sell something, you get about one-tenth of what you get when they want to buy you.”
Osher: Spinbrush was the highest-testing consumer product in P&G history
“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.”
Osher: Spinbrush bought 1M batteries daily, trailing only Walmart
“We were buying close to a million batteries from EverReady. A day. We were second only to Walmart and battery purchases at the time.”
Osher: P&G forecasted $120M in Spinbrush sales but cleared $300M
“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”
Osher: P&G divested Spinbrush to clear Gillette antitrust hurdles
“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…”
Osher: Offered $10M to buy back Spinbrush; P&G leveraged for $75M
“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…”
Osher: Church & Dwight did a 'terrible job' managing Spinbrush
“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.”
Raz: Osher produced Tony-winning musicals Jersey Boys and Hairspray
“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.”