Rock Idol Lenny Kravitz Is Playing a New Riff: Promoting Healthy Teeth

Even though he’s toured the world, won four Grammys, sold 40 million records, acted in several Hollywood films and, as a child, sat on Duke Ellington’s lap while the jazzman played piano, Lenny Kravitz has one particular memory that’s never left him. And it’s got nothing to do with fame or music. Since 1989, the rock star has kept a home on Eleuthera, a 110-mile sliver of greenery in the Bahamas. (Kravitz’s mother, the actor Roxie Roker, was first-generation Bahamian American.) One day, Kravitz noticed that his property manager was in excruciating pain from a cavity in one of his teeth. Then Kravitz watched in horror as the man fixed up a homespun remedy. Every Brand Should Be Thinking Like a Wellness Brand “I saw [him] putting black pepper into the hole in his tooth,” Kravitz told Adweek. “And he capped it with a matchbook cover that he ripped and rolled up and used as a stopper. And I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘I'm in so much pain [but] the black pepper kind of numbs you a little bit.’” “This is the kind of situation that we were in,” Kravitz added. That situation, of course, is the sorry state of oral health—and not only in the Bahamas. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 26% of Americans walk around with untreated cavities. Less than a third of us has dental insurance. (For populations of color, that incidence falls to around 11%.) And according to the American Dental Hygienists Association, 80% of Americans have gum disease. Most of us have a vague idea of the lousy condition of our mouths. The surprising fact is that, from a societal perspective, Kravitz knows more about the topic than many dentists do. Lenny Kravitz with Twice's Cody and Julian Levine. A celebrity dentist does good Four years ago, Dr. Jonathan B. Levine and his wife Stacey co-founded the Glo Good Foundation, a 501(c)(3) that provides free dental care to disadvantaged people. The ambitious move wasn’t unusual for Levine, who operates a high-end practice on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, holds 27 patents in the field of oral care and has regularly popped up on Dr. Oz as a dental expert. As things turned out, one of Levine’s patients also happened to be Lenny Kravitz. “When Lenny goes to New York, his first stop, I swear, is to the dental office,” said Levine’s son Cody. “His oral health is really important [to him.]” But so was the oral health of others. Remembering the suffering of people like his property manager, Kravitz mobilized his own charity, the Let Love Rule Foundation, to help Glo Good open a free dental clinic on Eleuthera. Prior to the pandemic, the clinic—staffed with some 50 professionals and 100 volunteers—managed to treat over 1,200 patients in a single week. A smile Twice as nice The next step was inevitable. When Levine’s two sons, Cody and Julian, decided to create their own oral care brand, Twice, Kravitz happily signed on as creative director. (The Levine brothers serve as Twice’s chief brand officer and CEO, respectively.) Initially a direct-to-consumer brand of toothpaste, Twice expanded earlier this month to include an entire line of oral care products that are all natural, vegan and cruelty-free. Its canary yellow packaging currently lines the aisles of CVS, Wegmans and Target. “The product platform that we've evolved into—going from a toothpaste company into a system of products—was 100% aligned with what we saw [in the Bahamas],” said Julian Levine, “which is: We want to create better oral health and wellbeing for our communities.” The way Kravitz remembers it, the Twice brand wasn’t created so much as it evolved into being. With the free dental clinic, “it was beautiful—giving people their oral health back, giving people their smiles back,” he said. “It started out as a mission and then, because of it, we thought to make the products.” Not a trace About now, you’re possibly thinking: Great—another name-slapped celebrity product to join the ranks of JLo Beauty and Kylie Cosmetics. But Twice is different. Despite its official connection to Kravitz, Twice bears few obvious links to the rock star. And while the musician promises he’ll be part of the marketing, his overriding influence on the brand, thus far, takes the form of its philosophy. Twice lays claim to being “the first holistic oral health system focused on balancing the mouth microbiome and delivering next generation preventative care.” Put another way: When your mouth is in good shape, so is the rest of you. Creating a Future of Health Equity With Johnson & Johnson That’s true in the literal sense: Untreated gum disease can lead to serious illnesses. But Cody Levine—a BBDO adman in his former life—prefers to stress the emotional interpretation: Twice, he said, will give you “a healthier mouth, a healthier body and a more connected soul.” Twice’s slogan—“Oral wellness connects all of us”—has particular resonance for Kravitz, a humanitarian with a reflective and inclusive take on everyone’s place in the world. “If I meet you in the street and you smile at me—because you're confident that your smile is correct, and you're feeling good, and your mouth is correct—that is the beginning of the dialogue,” Kravitz said. “[When] your oral health is together, you feel more confident to be in people's faces and to interact.” Selling an unusual ethos It’s no small task to get a message about a better world into a category that usually just talks about fluoride. Twice is not only a tiny upstart in a $49 billion category dominated by leviathans like Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive, it’s clamoring for attention amid a longstanding dental-care aesthetic dominated by images of high-tech bristles and swirling blue mouthwashes. Twice’s branding strategy is to cut against the grain. It stresses oral health not as a matter of brushing and flossing, but as a form of social continuity. Its inaugural spot features a kaleidoscope of everyday faces—women of color with nose rings, an interracial gay couple—proudly sporting their smiles, tooth gaps and all. Kravitz dismissed the sleek marketing of most dental brands as “not reality,” adding: “A healthy smile is not just the textbook dental smile.” The packaging’s minimal text and bright yellow hue is also a deliberate decision meant to show what Julian Levine calls a “disruptive proposition—interrupting an aisle that’s predominantly red, blue and white. It shines bright in that aisle.” One notable thing Twice doesn’t do is feature a lot of Kravitz. Backstage pass Kravitz’s name and face are nowhere on the packaging or, thus far, in the marketing. With one notable exception: an April 5 Instagram post by Kravitz. It shows him standing below a Target logo, holding up a box of Twice toothpaste. He refers to Twice only as “the product I’ve been working on for years with the mission of providing superior oral wellness and smiles for everyone.” Which is great—but wouldn’t Twice sell a lot more product if Kravitz slapped his name and face all over everything? “Perhaps,” Kravitz said, “but if the product wasn’t good, then it would stop there.” He's clearly conscious that the strength of his personality and fame might overshadow the mission of the brand. Therefore, Kravitz, while taking a hand in the major decisions, keeps himself backstage. “This is not about me,” he insisted. “It's about the people that we serve. It's about bringing oral wellness to the to the masses.” As Cody Levine described it, Kravitz keeps his eye on what the brand is doing. That's it, for the most part. But he will step in publicly where and when he thinks it’s necessary and warranted. “We’ll layer in Lenny, you know, as we keep going,” Levine said. Yellow means go Another matter still to be ironed out is what role Twice’s revenues or profits may play in furthering its pledge to bring oral health to everyone. While the Glo Good Foundation (which served as inspiration for Twice) is a nonprofit, Twice is a privately held, for-profit company. Julian Levine said that, going forward, the hope is to use some of Twice’s revenue stream to further its community-minded mission, but it’s not yet at the point where it can pledge a determined percentage of profits. “We perform mission work and help provide capital, people and product on the missions,” he said. “As we’re evolving the business, we’re also evolving the physical giveback.” Zachary Weinberg, vp of ecommerce at Reprise Digital and an expert on direct-to-consumer marketing, responded positively to Twice’s website (“The branding is super strong,” he said.) He especially approved of its choice of yellow. It's not only unusual for the segment, he noted, but that hue likely to prompt consumers to “react very positively from a behavioral standpoint, a psychological standpoint.” Less clear to Weinberg is Twice’s humanitarian bent. “I can scroll through the entire homepage, and I didn't see as much of that giveback story as I would have expected to see,” he said. (In fact, one has to click on the “About” tab and then “Mission” before scrolling down to the pledge that “every purchase of a Twice product helps provide free dentistry to people in need.”) Weinberg also observed that Twice is “not the first toothpaste company to introduce something that really focuses on better ingredients.” He pointed out that the Hello brand of oral care products (which Colgate-Palmolive snapped up in 2020) are also all-natural, vegan, cruelty-free, and so on. But Hello products don’t claim to rebalance your mouth’s microbiome. And, obviously, that brand doesn’t have a personality powerhouse like Kravitz on board. Sure, he doesn’t have a D.D.S. after his name, but he’s as close as any rock star is likely to get. “We say that our dad is a dentist who wants to be a rock star,” Julian Levine quipped, “and Lenny's a rock star who wants to be a dentist.” Women’s Health Brands Are Baring All and Unapologetically Fighting Censorship