Sonic Boom

A profile of Optiva, the number one Inc. 500 company, and the unlikely product -- an electric toothbrush -- that brought it to the top of the 1997 list.

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Number one company

From Star Wars (technology) to star endorsement (Oprah): How a toothbrush made Optiva into the mouth that roared

It was supposed to be the home dental-care appliance of the future--not to mention the device on which he was contemplating staking his career and savings. But David Giuliani was having trouble imagining this thing in his bathroom: a taped handle and a single tuft of bristles, like a broken-off drill bit glued to a metal protuberance with electrodes leading to a TV-sized box. Turned on, it hummed, the tuft of bristles a ghostly blur. Nervously, he touched it to his gum line. It tickled. From that moment, Giuliani was in the sonic dental-bacteria-removal business.

In the 10 years since, some 2 million other people have become sold on sonic toothbrushes--appliances that use sound waves to vibrate teeth clean. Almost all of those devices have been supplied by Optiva, the company that Giuliani cofounded and agreed to head after trying out that prototype. Last year Optiva sold about 1 million Sonicare toothbrushes, achieving revenues of $72.7 million, up almost $24 million from 1995, capping a five-year growth rate of 31,507%. Or put it this way: Optiva is the fastest-growing private company in America.

At first glance, Optiva's spectacular ride may seem proof of the old chestnut about building a better mousetrap. But if anything, the company's story illustrates that depending on an innovative product can sometimes be the toughest route to success of all. In the five or so years it took the company to develop its product and then build a market for it, Optiva discovered there are 100 ways to bury a good idea.

More than once, technological dead ends, manufacturing errors, marketing gaffes, cash shortages, and competitors all brought the company to what could have been the brink. But thanks to Giuliani's focus on the basics, and the almost obsessive sense of mission he's transmitted to the rest of the company, Optiva managed to make its good idea stick.

First, a few fun facts about your mouth: When you use a conventional toothbrush, you remove at best about 50% of the bacteria that have set up shop on your teeth and gums. The other 50%, which cling to hidden nooks and crannies with the help of hairlike appendages, multiply frantically until they first form a gelatinous brown film (plaque) and then harden into a colony of microscopic barnacles (tartar) that can eventually make your gums peel away from your teeth (pain, expense, dentures).

Giuliani had learned some of this firsthand, thanks to a certain amount of dental neglect in his younger years. But here he was, in 1988, sitting at a table at a Burgermaster in Seattle, listening to David Engel, a professor of periodontics, explain it to him in vivid detail. OK, Giuliani conceded, so there was a big market for a better way to clean teeth at home. Wasn't that why Braun, Bausch & Lomb, and Teledyne had thrown themselves into the electric-toothbrush business? When the other person at the table, bioengineer Roy Martin, explained how sound waves could blast bacteria, Giuliani pricked up his ears.

Engel and Martin, both professors at the University of Washington, wanted to sound Giuliani out on the idea of starting a company to market a prototype sonic toothbrush they'd developed. A colleague of Martin's had come up with the idea while getting his teeth cleaned with a sound-wave-based device common in dental offices. Why not create a home version? Martin had enlisted Engel, and the two of them--bolstered by a $4,000 research grant from the university--designed and then patented a prototype.

A start-up wasn't their first choice; they'd hoped that a large personal-health-care company might bring their technology to market. But Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Sunbeam, Squibb, and some 25 other companies passed, noting that the patent office was littered with the corpses of home sonic toothbrushes. Engel had reviewed all those other designs: not commercially feasible, he assured Giuliani. Their newly proposed device could really blast plaque.

Giuliani, then 42, had been on something of a search himself. A mostly soft-spoken engineer, he spent 12 years at Hewlett-Packard working his way up to section manager before abruptly leaving. "I was on an ocean liner, and I wanted to feel the wind and waves, try my hand at the tiller," he recalls. He took an executive post with a smaller medical-imaging firm and then jumped at the chance to head up a digital radiography business that was its subsidiary. That too proved unsatisfying. Giuliani wanted something purely entrepreneurial. So he quit and dreamed up a product on his own: a handheld ultrasound device that could measure bladder volume.

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