Hey there! This is Romy here for another episode of the Bonfires of Social Enterprise! On this episode, we are going to hear from a creative brother and sister team making toothbrushes for some good causes. Fun! And, of course, at the end, we have a great song from a Detroit artist….always one of my favorite parts of the episode.
Let’s check in with Natalie Hazen on our Fun Fuel about toothbrushes….
This is Natalie Hazen, and I am bringing you the Fun Fuel for this episode.
When I think of teeth, my first thoughts go directly to food. That probably is not a good thing, because I really like food, but nonetheless, we need to eat, and teeth help with that process. I think of all the action that goes into eating such as biting and chomping and chewing which is actually a pretty remarkable process.
So how many teeth do we have? According to Authority Dental, We have 32 teeth including wisdom teeth with 16 on top and 10 on the bottom. And a human bite can generate a force of as great as 55 pounds on the incisors or 200 pounds on the molars.
Humans have quite the chompers!
Hope you enjoyed this fun fuel. Now on to the episode.
Thank you, Natalie! She is so hilarious. Okay, let’s listen in to my conversation with Heather and John McDougall
Romy: Alright, so welcome Heather and John McDougal from BOGO Brush to the Podcast Show!

John: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Heather: Hey, good to be here.

Romy: Yeah, so I'm excited to introduce you guys to our listeners. I'm so happy to have you on the show. You've got a different product for us, and we haven't had a brother and sister team on yet, so this is really fun.

So let's tell our listeners about BOGO Brush, what's BOGO Brush about?

Heather:
BOGO Brush, it's a toothbrush! It's the first toothbrush you'll actually care about, is what we like to say about it. It's an eco-friendly toothbrush, made entirely in the United States, and whenever you buy a BOGO Brush, we give a toothbrush to someone in need.

Romy: Oh okay, and who is that typically? What's a typical recipient of a BOGO Brush?

Heather: Yeah, so we partner with low-cost health clinics in the US. So we partner with a clinic, here in Detroit, in Minnesota, and one in North Dakota, and basically, we make donations of toothbrushes to them, and they distribute the brushes to the people who are in need of them. We leave that distribution to the experts, the people who are closest to the folks who don't have access to as much oral care as others.

Romy:
Super smart. So before we get in on the toothbrush, because we've had a chance to get together and look at this toothbrush, it's really amazing. Let's take everyone back of how you guys originally just even decided to do this.

John:
Yeah, it's been quite the journey for us. We always kind of jokingly say that we were subconsciously born to design toothbrushes, so a little disclosure, our dad is actually a dentist. So we grew up floating around a dental office, sort of surrounded by that world. Neither of us thought we would ever do anything remotely close to dentistry.

I went to design school, to study how to design cars, and Heather went off to law school, and toothbrushes were the last thing on our mind. But as we were exploring the world, and sustainability, and what products we thought the world needed, we just kept coming back to this idea of a toothbrush. You know? It's something that, you wake up, you use every morning, and you use every night before you go to bed. It's sort of this moment of consciousness that you have. We thought if we could bring environmental and social awareness into somebody's daily routine, in those moments, it could be a part of a much bigger change in people's lives and in the world.

Romy:
Nice. Okay, so you guys had the idea, and said, "Alright, we're gonna make a toothbrush." How did that all start to happen?

John:
Yeah, so a lot of Google.

Romy: No, right?

John: I think just like any beginner entrepreneur, there's a lot more questions than there are answers. We really started exploring just what was wrong with toothbrushes today, starting that design process with everything from the form, you know if you look at a toothbrush today, there's a lot of different plastics and rubbers, and grips, and motors, and all of that leads to a product that is completely un-recyclable, so we knew we wanted to address that.

On top of that, all those grips are designed so that you hold the brush in one position in your hand, and if you have a toothbrush, you really can't manipulate your wrist, while holding an object in one position. You need to spin it like an artist holds a paintbrush, or even a dentist holds a professional dental tool. So we created this pure cylindrical form, that was really the first in the industry for a toothbrush and really created this minimal silhouette for the product.

From there, we had seen the numbers growing up in the oral health world; we knew there was 80 million people in the US, that didn't have adequate access to oral healthcare. So we knew that was a problem that we wanted to help be a part of a solution for. So for us, that meant the buy one get one model, and a way to start addressing that solution and bring awareness to those problems.

Romy:
So let's keep going about the toothbrush. Let's talk all about the toothbrush, what it's made from, 'cause I was really fascinated by the detail that you guys went into. Let's go there. We of course, for our listeners, we'll have pictures under the cover art on the website. So you guys can get pictures of the actual toothbrush, but for those that might not look it up, let's talk in detail about it.

John:
Yeah, so as we said, we kind of landed on this pure minimalist form. That came through a lot of different studies we had. Wooden dowels, and clay models, and cutting up toothbrushes, and different pins, and...