Road to Challenger Brands: Hello Products’ Craig Dubitsky on Saving Marriages With Toothpaste

In 2009, Craig Dubitsky had a radical idea: Personal care products should be friendly to consumers, animals and the environment. Thus Hello Products—a line of natural personal care products including a charcoal toothpaste Dubitsky says you can eat—was born. And it is in delighting customers with affordable, cruelty-free, natural products that are made in America that Hello Products is disrupting the $45-billion oral care industry. Ahead of his appearance at Brandweek’s Challenger Brands event, Dubitsky sat down to talk about how he’s using aesthetics and ethics to shake up the CPG industry. Adweek: How did you come up with the idea for Hello products? Dubitsky: I was walking through a large national drugstore with no intent of trying to find something to go reinvent and out of a corner of my eye, I noticed all these pictures of extracted teeth on the packaging [of oral care products]. And then I thought everything in this category is designed to scare you. Everything is about killing and fighting and eliminating and destroying. And if you're not whitening, you're frightening. And if you don't use this stuff, the dentist is going to drill, fill and bill. And I thought this is the most unfriendly category I've ever seen. I feel like personal care was impersonal.Craig Dubitsky I decided I was going to start a company to make friendly oral care products. And I thought, “What's the friendliest word I can think of? And it was, ‘Hello.’” What need were you trying to fill? I feel like personal care was impersonal. There was nothing very human about it and everything was kind of threatening. So the need I was trying to fill was on a couple levels. One is anything that goes in your mouth should taste awesome. And anything that goes in your mouth is ultimately going in your body, so it should be as natural as possible. You take that and then layer in this humanity, this personality. That was what I thought was the opportunity. What innovation has Hello Products brought to the space? Our products are amazing. If you use charcoal toothpaste, ours might be better than most of the quote-unquote premium super whitening products out there. Except ours is vegan, cruelty-free, made in America, no BPA in the tube, no peroxide in the formulation. I could eat our fluoride-free product. And it's affordable. So it works great and it's for everybody. The thing that was important to me was that we make stuff that was for the 100%, not for the 1%. Literally it’s for the 100% because it's a wellness product. Why shouldn't everybody have access to this stuff? Can you describe the typical Hello Products customer? I'd say it's anybody with teeth. But more importantly it's green leaning. Do we talk about millennials and millennial families? Sure. But literally that's a psychographic now not a demographic, so anybody that really cares about what they're putting in and on their person and cares about joining a brand versus just buying a brand, then we're a good fit for them. How has your brand been impacted by the pandemic? And how has this influenced your roadmap for 2021? We've been fortunate because you can't disintermediate the need to brush your teeth or take care of your personal care needs. You can't say, “There's a pandemic—I'm not brushing this month." And our business hasn't faltered—we keep growing. We launched in Canada last month. There'll be more launches coming up. And we've gone into other areas, so now we have deodorant. We have other things that are launching, too, we just launched hand soap, lip balm and CBD products. We have so much more coming because every category could use something a little bit more fun and natural. How else does Hello Products stand apart from other brands in this space? It's the marriage of aesthetics and ethics. We're very careful about where and how we source things. Our entire supply chain is cruelty free. So not only do we not test finished products on animals, but every ingredient supplier we work with has to verify to a third party that there's no animal testing. When we have products in boxes, we only use FSC-certified paper, which means we're not killing any more trees. We print with soy-based inks. And then we care about how things look and how they make us feel when we interact with them. I like to say we're saving marriages because the tubes keep coming back to their original shape as we use it. So you don't have a crinkly, fugly tube. We have these new toothbrushes that we just announced that are really beautiful and have replaceable heads, so they use 85% less plastic. It's not about making something that's just sustainable. It's about making something that's so beautiful that you want to keep it. So if we can actually make products that go from sustainable to eternal not just because they're going to last a long time, but because you are in love with them and they're beautiful and you want to keep them? I’m going for it. That's what we're trying to do. What advice do you have for anyone who has an idea for a product that challenges an entrenched incumbent? People use the word challenge and use the word disruption. I don't care for either of those words. No one's ever said, “Hey, honey, next time you're at the store, can you pick me some of that Hello charcoal toothpaste? It is so disruptive! Wow—they really challenged the category norms.” The only people that ever called us a disrupter were the people being disrupted. And those usually were the big companies. So what I would say is if you can delight people more with whatever it is you're working on, they'll end up being disruptive to the people who are not delighting them as much as they realized they could be delighted. Is there anything else we should know about Hello Products? Please floss and change your toothbrush every 90 days.

Challenger Brands

Road to Challenger Brands: Hello Products’ Craig Dubitsky on Saving Marriages With Toothpaste

The brand is disrupting by delighting

Adweek: How did you come up with the idea for Hello products?

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