Consulting with various engineers, Giuliani came up with a new design: a sort of tuning fork driven by a vibrating electromagnetic field would provide power to the brush head. To work out the details without blowing his shoestring budget, he leased specialized computer-aided design software for a couple of months, in order to design the basic components. He also decided to embed all the moving mechanical parts in the disposable toothbrush head so the far-more-costly handle could be sealed against water leakage--the greatest cause of electric-toothbrush failure.
Engel and Martin spent hours in the lab staring at the way the vibrating brush head churned up a mixture of toothpaste and saliva washing over artificial teeth. Sure enough, when the vibrations were tuned to 520 strokes per second (or middle C on the musical scale), the churned-up fluid would start to erode plaque--even when the brush itself wasn't making contact with the tooth. That meant the plaque-cleaning action could, in theory, be transmitted between teeth and under the gum line, where other toothbrushes fell short. This product could be hot. Now the group needed real money. Giuliani left Abbott and started hitting up every wealthy acquaintance he'd made during his years in high-tech circles. He amassed nearly $500,000 from some 25 different investors. None was a venture capitalist or professional angel; he didn't want to risk losing control of the company down the line.
It took more than a year from that point to perfect the toothbrush and come up with a manufacturable design. Calling its product Sonicare, Optiva set up its first assembly line in August 1992. Production couldn't have been more low-tech: a high school student hired for the summer cut the brush-head bristles with a tiny scissors. The company eventually started turning out about 20 units a day.
Now the question was: how to sell the thing? The good news was that there was a huge, untapped market. Three-quarters of all Americans get periodontal disease at some point, but only about 12% have electric toothbrushes. The bad news was that the then $125-million-a-year electric-toothbrush market was dominated by some very well-heeled and firmly established companies, including Braun, Bausch & Lomb, and Teledyne. Trying to muscle those companies aside by way of mass marketing would be a quixotic endeavor at best, given Optiva's limited resources. Plus, Optiva's product was costly to build and would have to sell for substantially more than the $50 to $70 other companies were getting for the Oral-B Plaque Remover, Interplak, and Water Pik, their respective devices.
Forget about mass marketing for the time being, urged Engel; let's go after dentists and get them to push our product. Engel was convinced that with the company's clinical data it could blow the market away. To head up marketing and sales, Optiva hired Eric Meyer, who'd helped Johnson & Johnson build the sales of a home blood-glucose meter to a billion dollars a year.
Armed with a study that showed use of the Sonicare toothbrush could lead to a significant reduction in harmful bacteria below the gum line, the Optiva crew headed off to Orlando to man a tiny booth at a dental convention. Unlike competitors, they didn't give the product away to dentists but charged them for it, though only a fraction of the $129 retail price. "I thought the dentist should feel invested in the product," says Giuliani. "Plus it gave us a little money." Sonicare was a modest hit at the show; the company sold roughly 70 units and received encouraging feedback.
Optiva started to advertise in dental journals and began to marshal a small sales force to call on dental practices. A poll showed that 98% of dentists who tried Sonicare would recommend it to their patients; some were even signing on to sell the units to patients. Optiva was on track.
Now that they were establishing some push and raking in a little cash, the company set out to whip up a little pull by trying its hand at consumer marketing. One of its first efforts was to buy insert ads in millions of credit-card-bill mailings, resulting in a grand total of 11 sales. The real lesson: Sonicare's edge can't be convincingly explained in a quickie ad. Instead the company tried infomercials and sponsorship of the Paul Harvey radio show, on which Harvey himself hawks sponsors' products at length. Both scored big for Optiva.
Then, in August 1993, Optiva got a return call from the Sharper Image: the upscale retailer liked Sonicare's high-tech angle enough to want to try the product out in the company's catalog, backed by an order for 4,000 units. Sonicare became one of the top-selling products of all time for the Sharper Image, leading to a second order a few months later for an additional 16,000 units. "We didn't know how we'd get an order that big on the truck because we didn't own a forklift or pallets," recalls John Tubbs, Optiva's vice-president of operations, who is in charge of running the company's manufacturing facilities. Then Oprah raved about the device on her TV talk show. Sonicare was achieving buzz.
All that confirmed the sense of mission the founders had felt early on. "This product had a destiny," Giuliani says. "Whenever we were faced with a decision, the question we'd always ask ourselves was, What would be in the product's best interest? We were stewards for Sonicare."
If there was a shadow hanging over Optiva, it was the fear that a competitor would develop a similar product and outmarket the company. Optiva had applied in early 1992 for a broad patent that sought to sew up the key functions of Sonicare technology--namely, the way the vibrating head churned up fluid into a plaque-eroding froth. But the patent hadn't been awarded as of the summer of 1994. That's when Teledyne introduced its SenSonic electric toothbrush, with similar bristle-vibration characteristics.
Six months later, Optiva received patent number 5,378,153 for a "high-performance acoustical cleaning apparatus for teeth." It immediately sued Teledyne for patent infringement, and Engel and others started putting in 18-hour days to prepare research that would support Optiva's case. "It was like preparing for a battle," says Engel.
It would be nearly two years before the suit was settled.
In the meantime, optiva wasn't going to stand still for however long it would take to resolve the lawsuit. Sales had begun triple-digit growth, and the company needed an infrastructure to support it.
Its immediate problem was manufacturing. The second Sharper Image order alone was for four times as many units as the first. Tubbs got to work transforming the manufacturing process. By redesigning some components, and by automating some of the assembly and farming some of it out, he eventually reduced the manufacturing cost by 60%. What's more, a series of rigorous quality checks he instituted hammered annual failure rates from 8% down to 0.5%.
