Buy Now: Creative Marketing that Gets Customers to Respond to You and Your Product

Chapter 7. Sonicare®: The $150 Toothbrush

After the sale of the Trillium Company in 1993, I slowed down for a bit. I developed a shell company called Cesari Direct and just let it sit while I learned to breathe again. Over the past five years I had built two products under the banner of a single brand that were successful enough to be scooped up by Salton, Inc. I ran a business that had up to 180 employees at one time. After the sale I was simply enjoying life in Seattle and didn't have any concrete plans.

Then a former business partner by the name of Bob Lamson gave me a ring at home. He told me there was a start-up company in Bellevue that was looking to do the same type of marketing we had done for the Juiceman. The company was called Optiva Corporation, and was a one-product business at the time. The challenge was that Optiva was having tremendous difficulty getting its product into retail distribution. The big roadblock that was making retailers resistant to its product was the price.

Optiva's product was a $150 toothbrush called Sonicare. Consumers in those days were used to paying between $5 and $7 for the most expensive toothbrushes on the market. There were a few electric toothbrushes on the market that were a bit more expensive, but even top-of-the-line models rarely crossed the $75 price mark, and Optiva's product was selling for twice that. What was different about this product that made it worth $150?

Although David Guliani, the CEO, and Eric Meyer, the director of marketing ...