Sonic Boom

"I'd had surgery once and remembered a burly orderly standing over me with a catheter," he says. "I thought I could save other people that experience." He eventually parlayed that product into a 70-employee division of a company called International Biomedics; the division was eventually acquired by Abbott. He stayed on as an executive but was casting about for his next adventure.

Meanwhile, when Engel and Martin started spreading word that they were looking for a sharp businessperson with a grasp of high-tech medical equipment to build a company around their sonic prototype, Giuliani's name kept surfacing. Giuliani's encounter with the actual prototype back in the lab sealed the deal, and a company was formed. The University of Washington, to which Engel and Martin had assigned the patent rights under their standard employee agreement, granted the new company lifetime rights to the patent in exchange for partial ownership.

Giuliani kept his day job with Abbott but spent most of his free time for the next six months locked in his garage, where he tinkered with the prototype. The results were discouraging. The strip of metal and ceramic that held the lone clump of bristles kept breaking, and it required too much power to produce the needed vibrations. On the verge of giving up, Giuliani took a walk on the beach and watched as the waves washed over the sand, slowly eroding the beach.

It hit him that if it works for beaches, it should work in the mouth--sound waves traveling through fluid should erode plaque away. His enthusiasm reignited, he summoned his two cofounders for a meeting. Their technology was a failure, he reported. But the idea of a sonic toothbrush was still a great one; they just had to abandon the prototype and try a new approach. Reluctantly, Engel and Martin agreed.

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.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4  NEXT